Speaker 1: 0:02

Hey folks, this is Jesse Cope, back with another episode of the American Soul Podcast. Hope y'all are doing well, wherever y'all are and whatever part of the day you're in. Sure do appreciate you joining me, giving me a little bit of your day, a little bit of your time day, a little bit of your time. Very grateful that y'all are here. For those of y'all that continue to share the podcast with others, tell others about it, thank you so much, incredibly grateful for your efforts, energies, for those of y'all that continue to leave encouraging notes. Thank you so much For those of y'all that continue to leave encouraging notes. Thank you so much For those of y'all that pray for the podcast and pray for me. Thank you Very, very grateful. Hopefully we'll get something out of it today, add some tools to our toolbox and hopefully, even if just a little bit, move the needle back closer to God and his son, jesus Christ. Not a lot on the homestead Didn't get much done, so try, try again, right, father? Thank you for today. Thank you for you, father, and your Son, jesus Christ and your Holy Spirit. Thank you for your love, mercy, grace, forgiveness. Thank you for the people that listen to this podcast and share it. Be with them and their families. Guide us, lord. Bless us. Surround us with your angels. Help us to seek you first, to love you with our whole heart, mind, soul and strength To love our neighbors as ourselves. Help us to help those that have less than we do. Help us to help our country turn back to you. Be with our leaders. Help us to elect men who rule in fear of you. Be with our military and our law enforcement. Be with our educators. Strengthen our marriages across the nation. Strengthen our families. Help us to turn to your word in all situations, all circumstances, and God, my words here, father, your son's name, we pray Amen. Have you made time for God today? And have you made time for God today? And, if you're married, have you made time for your spouse today? Are you planning your day around God as your first priority and your spouse as your second priority, or are you planning God and your spouse around your day? Are you cramming them in at the edges wherever they can fit? After you get done at work, with the kids, watching sports, watching TV on your phone, after you get done with your workout done, talking to your parents, whatever else it is folks reading, are you doing all that stuff first and then, if you have any leftover time, trying to cram in real quickly God and your spouse. Or are you putting God and your spouse first and then doing whatever else you have time to do that day? And at the end of the day, if all that you have managed to do is spend time with God and love your spouse, folks, that's a great day, and the only reason we think it's not is because we bought into this idea of me time. I need some me time. I need to focus on myself. I need to focus on myself, and that's not the same at all.

Speaker 1: 5:00

Before I hear some people that actually know a little bit of the Bible saying well, jesus went off to pray by himself. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Is that what you're doing when you're spending me time? Do you go off to spend time with God? If you are great, I would argue that that's putting God first. But that's not what most of us do with the modern idea of quote unquote me time. We do things like scroll our phone, watch TV, watch sports, go to games, go to spas, go to whatever else it is, get away from our family, away from God. That's typically what quality quote unquote me time leads to quote-unquote me time leads to and that's the opposite of everything we see from Christ in the Bible that selfishness, that self-centeredness that focuses on us over everybody else. The amazing thing is CS Lewis talked about this I was actually reading the screw tape letters recently when you give God everything, he gives you back even more.

Speaker 1: 6:30

And some of you are saying well, I know that's not true, cope, because I've seen some pretty good people out here in the world. They've got some pretty bad lives. First of all, maybe what we think of as a bad life today, what we think of as a sad life, isn't really that sad at all. Maybe we've just got our priorities just a little bit out of whack. Second of all, if you're talking about the extremes, right, the goal is eternity. Right, the goal is to spend eternity with God and Jesus Christ, and I'm not suggesting that you offer this as comfort to a person that's grieving folks. I'm just talking right now in our little conversation. How many of those people that have suffered through cancer and died or a tragic car accident or whatever else are either now on a track to spend eternity with God or are already there with Him, and how many other people by their example. Did they lead closer to God and Jesus Christ? I'm not saying that's always the case, folks, we just we don't know what God's doing, but the Bible very clearly tells us that he works out all things for those who truly love him. So if we're striving to follow God and Jesus Christ and putting our faith in Jesus Christ, we have to trust that the outcome is going to be the ultimate good, which is eternity in heaven. Sometimes I think we forget that that's the ultimate good. I know I do and I struggle with trust I shouldn't, after all the blessings that he's given me in my life, but I do.

Speaker 1: 8:42

Alright, we're going to get back into the state constitutions. We're going to go to the Constitution of New Jersey. This is from 1776. And this is article or section 18 and 19. That no person shall ever, within this colony, be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience, nor, under any presence whatever, be compelled to attend any place of worship contrary to his own faith and judgment. Nor shall any person within this colony ever be obliged to pay tithes, taxes or any other rates for the purpose of building or repairing any other church or churches, place or places of worship or for the maintenance of any minister or ministry contrary to what he believes to be right or has deliberately or voluntarily engaged himself to perform.

Speaker 1: 9:51

So the left reads that and they're going to tell you see, our founders didn't want anything to do with God and Jesus Christ in public life. They explicitly wanted a complete separation of Christian values out of government. But when you read this and you have even the slightest clue about history, you know that that's absolutely not true. So when you look at this first off, what do they say? Worshiping Almighty God is, it's inestimable. It means you can't even put a price tag on the privilege of worshiping Almighty God in the manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience. They don't say don't worship God conscious. They don't say don't worship God. That goes back to that children's book from the turn of the 19th and the 20th centuries that we've read on this podcast a few times. Maybe you should go back and read again.

Speaker 1: 11:14

The founding. The opinion, the sentiment of the founding generation was worship God, the Father of Jesus Christ, in the way that best seems fit to you. Go to church in the denomination that your conscience dictates and that you think best leads to God. But make sure that you go and make sure that you worship. We've allowed the left over the past 80 years to tell us that what our founders wanted was to get God completely out of public life. That's not what they wanted at all. What they wanted is to make sure that the state couldn't tell you what church to go to to worship God. That they couldn't say you had to be Anglican or you had to be Catholic, or you had to be Methodist or Baptist or some other denomination, but they wanted you to worship.

Speaker 1: 12:36

So many proclamations that we read through year after year in November and December from governors and congresses saying whereas it's the duty of every man to acknowledge God, they wanted your faith, your principles of Christ in public life, but they didn't want the state telling you where you had to go to church or how you had to worship God. But they wanted you to worship Him and they didn't want you to worship false gods Allah, buddha, hindu gods, nature, the government, certainly communism. They couldn't have even fathomed where the left has gone today. Actually, they could have fathomed. They couldn't have imagined that Americans would so gladly go down that path of worshiping the state of worshiping creation instead of the Creator. That was the sentiment.

Speaker 1: 13:46

Folks Worship God in the way that you best see fit God, the Father of Jesus Christ, the only true God, but make sure that you worship Him of Jesus Christ, the only true God, but make sure that you worship Him. Go to church where you want to go to church and whatever denomination you want to go to church that honors God, the Father of Jesus Christ, the Son and the Holy Spirit, but make sure that you go. That's the attempt. That's what you see in these state constitutions at the beginning of our country and that's what you see as Justice Brewer laid out at the end of the 19th century. Mountains of evidence of our Christian heritage and our founding as a Christian nation. This is Article 19. This is Article 19. But that all persons professing a belief in the faith of any Protestant sect who shall demean themselves peaceably under the government, as hereby established, shall be capable of being elected into any office of profit or trust or being a member of either branch of the legislature, and shall fully and freely enjoy every privilege and immunity enjoyed by others, their fellow subjects. So here you see it laid out even more clearly Look.

Speaker 1: 15:27

There's an elephant in the room in the Christian community today that I see quite often and that is, whether we like to admit it or not, in the old world a number of the countries had state churches. Often they were Catholic of some denomination or Orthodoxy. Nothing wrong with those folks, those denominations, I'm not saying that at all. But they tended to align with state governments and they certainly historically punished anyone who didn't belong to their denomination. It didn't have anything to do with following God and Jesus Christ, they just didn't like the idea that you might actually belong to a different denomination and you might actually be able to read the Bible on your own.

Speaker 1: 16:23

And our founders understood that, and that's why you can see in some of these state constitutions this reference specifically to Protestant. You can see here that no Protestant inhabitant of this colony shall be denied the enjoyment of any civil right merely on account of his religious principles, but that all persons professing a belief in the faith of any Protestant sect who shall demean themselves peaceably under the government are hereby established, shall be capable of being elected into any office of profit or trust and being a member of either branch of the legislature. So it's not hard to read that at all that only Protestants would be allowed to serve in the colony. That was. The overwhelming majority of Americans were Christian and were particularly Protestant, and they were folks whether we like to acknowledge it or not.

Speaker 1: 17:25

They were because a number of them and their ancestors had fled persecution at the hands of Catholicism, orthodoxy, the Anglican Church, the state churches in Europe in different places, because they weren't allowed to read the Bible, they weren't allowed to worship God and Jesus Christ freely. If they didn't do it, the way that that man-made denomination said, they were going to be punished. They were going to be punished. They were going to be tortured. They were going to be imprisoned. They were going to have their property confiscated and sold off. Their families were going to be destitute. They were going to be chased and harassed. That's literally why the pilgrims came was to escape that kind of tyranny where there was a combination of state and church, not the principles of Christianity. That wasn't what they were afraid of. It was the man-made dogma that said you're either going to follow our rules or we're going to kick you out and we're going to make your lives miserable. Very, very similar to the Pharisees and their reaction to Jesus Christ. It's not hard to draw that correlation at all. And so you see this fear again. It's not at all what the left has sold us over the last 80 years, since the 1947 Supreme Court decision.

Speaker 1: 19:15

And just to reiterate, they completely twisted the meaning of Jefferson's comments in his letter to begin with. That's not the meaning at all. They didn't want to keep Christian principles out of government, they wanted to keep the government from demanding that citizens belong to a certain denomination and establishing that particular denomination as the only means of worshiping God and Jesus Christ. I don't know if I have enough time. Yeah, I think I do. There's a down here in Article 23,. I had to think about that for a minute.

Speaker 1: 19:58

There's the oath, or affirmation, and one of the interesting things is I'm not going to read the whole. You can go in there and look at it, but at the end it says shall not, that they have to take this oath, that they will not annul, repeal or alter any parts of the 18th or 19th sections of this Constitution of New Jersey in 1776. Well, that's what we just read through the 18th and the 19th sections. It was so important that the citizens not be forced into a particular denomination and this doesn't have anything to do with false religions, folks. They weren't talking about going into Islam or going into Judaism, or going into Hinduism or Buddhism.

Speaker 1: 20:44

They were talking about Christianity and particularly they didn't want Protestants being forced into the old world, man-made institutions, or being punished because they weren't part of that. And so this oath of office says that one of the things you agree to is to never change those two articles, to never require that Christians belong to a particular state mandated institution denomination of Christianity and that really, in particular, you had to profess a belief in one of the Protestant denominations and the Protestant faith to serve in one of the houses. It's very easy to read that 19th section that way. So God bless y'all, god bless your families, god bless your marriages, god bless America. We'll talk to y'all again real soon. Folks Looking forward to it.