Speaker 1: 0:03

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. True to appreciate y'all joining me, giving me a little bit of your time and energy, effort, a little piece of your day. Hopefully y'all get something out of it. Gives you some tools for your day. Hopefully you all get something out of it. Gives you some tools for your toolbox. Hopefully it helps our country, even just a little bit, turn back to God and Jesus Christ. For those of you all that continue to share the podcast, tell others about it, thank you so much. I'm very, very grateful for that. Y'all help the podcast to grow. And for those of y'all that give me words of encouragement, either in person or online, thank you so much for that kindness. And for those of y'all that pray that I will use the right words here, I'm extremely grateful for you. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1: 1:17

Homestead not a lot. It's hot. I need to get back into the garden, but I'm kind of actually just letting things die. Hopefully we can fill it all up and start over again for the fall or winter. I guess at this point almost you forget how far in advance you have to plan or at least I do with a garden.

Speaker 1: 1:50

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 and share the podcast. Be with them and their families, guide them, bless them, surround them with your angels. Protect us from evil, father. Help us to seek you first, to love you with our whole heart, mind, soul and strength, to love our neighbors as ourselves. Guide our steps. Be with our nation. Be with our leaders. Help us to elect men who rule in fear of you. Draw us close to you, father, please, and guide my words here, your son's name. We pray amen. Have you read your bible today? Have you made time for god? Carved out a little piece of your day for Him? Made time to pray For those of us that choose to put our faith in God and Jesus Christ, choose to put our faith in God and Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1: 3:33

I'm afraid an awful lot of us do a really poor job of aligning our actions with what we claim our priorities are. We talk about God. We claim he's the creator of the entire universe and that he wants a relationship with each and every single one of us, individual, a being that was powerful enough to create the entire universe. And he wants a relationship with each one of us. And yet so often I find myself pushing him to the end of the day or trying to cram him in at some other part. And why do we do that? I won't throw you all under the bus. You can answer that question yourself If you're willing to look in the mirror long enough. I do it.

Speaker 1: 4:38

Chasing the things of the world Hopes and dreams, cars and houses and money and a better life for my wife or my kids or whatever it is entertainment To be entertained. None of them are good excuses Makes me wonder how often I have fallen short and don't even know it. A lot of times I realize when I've fallen short, but I wonder how often I've fallen short. But I wonder how often I've fallen short because I've chosen to give my time to things of the world instead of to God, and I don't even realize what I've missed out on, not even just for serving God, but for myself.

Speaker 1: 5:52

My wife made one of those little comments the other day that kind of stopped me. It was a great line. I thought We'll see what y'all think we were talking about something in the business world. She made the comment everybody wants first class service, but they want it at discount prices. They want it at the price of a coach ticket or economy. And I immediately thought that's exactly what we do with our relationship with God and our relationship with our spouse. Most people, if you ask them, they would tell you that they want a first-class faith and a first-class marriage. But when you look at our actions, it's obvious that we want it at a discount price. We want a strong faith, but we don't want to take the time to build that relationship with God and Jesus Christ by reading the Word and praying each day. To build that relationship with God and Jesus Christ by reading the Word and praying each day. We want that great marriage but we don't want to take the time to actually put our spouse before our own personal dreams or hobbies or desires Doesn't make much sense, I guess. Maybe as humans we don't make much sense. At any rate, samuel Adams, we're going to try and get through a couple things today. I doubt seriously we're going to get to both of them. This is from 4 November 1775 and this is a letter from Samuel Adams to James Warren.

Speaker 1: 7:47

Let me talk with you a little about the affairs of our own colony. I persuade myself, my dear friend, that the greatest care and circumspection will be used to conduct its internal police with wisdom and integrity. The eyes of mankind will be upon you to see whether the government, which is now more popular than it has been for many years past, will be productive of more virtue, moral and political. We may look up to armies for our defense, but virtue is our best security. Lost my place, sorry. There we go. It is not possible that any state should long remain free where virtue is not supremely honored. This is as seasonably as it is justly said by one of the most celebrated writers of the present time. Perhaps the form of government now adopted and set up in the colony may be permanent. Should it be only temporary? The golden opportunity of recovering the virtue and reforming the manners of our country should be industriously improved.

Speaker 1: 9:07

Our ancestors in the most early times laid an excellent foundation for the security of liberty by setting up, in a few years after their arrival, a public seminary of learning, and by their laws they obliged every town consisting of a certain number of families to keep and maintain a grammar school. I shall be very sorry if it be true, as I have been informed that some of our towns have dismissed their schoolmasters, alleging that the extraordinary expense of defending the country renders them unable to support them. I hope this inattention to the principles of our forefathers does not prevail. If there should be any danger of it, would not leading gentlemen do eminent service to the public by impressing upon the minds of the people the necessity and importance of encouraging that system of education which, in my opinion, is so well calculated, to diffuse among the individuals of the community the principles of morality so essentially necessary to the preservation of public liberty? That's the first paragraph, or section. A couple things One, we probably won't get to it today, but if we don't today we will tomorrow.

Speaker 1: 10:52

Another letter of Samuel Adams that explicitly states his comments on having Christianity be the core of education. And so when he's talking about, when you hear him talking about virtue and morality, what people would used to know, what people would understand a lot closer to this time frame, is that he was talking about the virtues, the principles taught by Jesus Christ. We don't do a very good job of educating today and we're going to talk about that quite a bit the next few days. But we used to know these things. They used to just be understood, implied, and now today, you have enough people, through either gross ignorance or malevolence, that don't want the principles of Christ taught, and so we've got to go back and relearn all this stuff.

Speaker 1: 11:43

I think this first paragraph is really aimed at a lot of people. My thoughts are really aimed at a lot of people. My thoughts are really aimed at a lot of people that consider themselves patriots, even Christians, and who hold the idea that we don't need public education, public education was never a part of our founding or country and that we can do away with it. That's just not true. You can see from Samuel Adams' writings here and we've talked about Benjamin Rush a lot, and he's not even remotely alone in these thoughts and you can see from, like you talked about here, the legislature setting up laws that every town, once it got to a certain number of families, had to maintain a school to teach writing and reading.

Speaker 1: 12:39

And why did they want this? They wanted this so that people could read the Bible, because they were close enough in time to a place where the Catholic Church, predominantly in a number of states, had killed, enslaved, imprisoned and tortured anybody that dared try to make the Bible readable to the average man and woman readable to the average man and woman. And so they clung to that freedom, that ability to read the Bible. That was extremely important to them. And I'm sorry to say today that I hear quite a few comments in different corners about the fact that the only place you ought to be able to read your Bible is in a church, and that's extremely dangerous and our founders would be extremely discouraged and upset by that as well.

Speaker 1: 13:49

But this idea, folks, that we don't need public education, it's not based on our founding. And so if you hear somebody say, well, our founders didn't want education, that's just not true. They wanted public education, they wanted education for the masses. They knew it was necessary for a republican form of government to have an educated citizenry. The problem is, they also knew that in order for that education to be useful, it had to be centered around the Bible, it had to be centered around the principles of Christ in order to teach virtue and morality. The problem today and there's a myriad of problems when you really start to break it down with our public education system isn't that there's a system period, it's that the system isn't centered on God and Jesus Christ and the Bible. And if you don't have that, then in a republic, particularly a Christian republic, as America was founded, then it's worse than neutral. It's destructive to have an education system without Jesus Christ at the center of it. And so you know, you hear a lot about school choice today and I think that's probably one of the only real short-term solutions. But it is short-term. You're not going to have, even if we went back folks which we need to to single-income families where the mother's at home with the children and the father is the one out working. At some point you're going to need education at some level. Public institutions Now we can change the age that those start. Certainly they start too young today, but that goes back to the dual income and the daycare and the fact that we drop our kids off to be raised by somebody else for the remainder of their childhood, starting at six weeks. But we've got to have education and it's got to be supported by the public and it's got to be centered on God and Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1: 16:33

We'll read this next part. There are virtues and vices which are properly called political Corruption, dishonesty to one's country. Luxury and extravagance tend to the ruin of states. That's in quotations. I assume he's quoting somebody else. The opposite virtues tend to their establishment. But there is a connection between vices as well as virtues, and one opens the door for the entrance of another. Therefore, wise and able politicians will guard against other vices and be attentive to promote every virtue. He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life is, or very soon will be, void of all regard for his country. There is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his country who had not before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connections. Before Dr Benjamin Church Jr was detected of holding a criminal correspondence with the enemies of his country, his infidelity to his wife had been notorious.

Speaker 1: 18:07

Since private and public vices are in reality, though not always apparently so nearly connected, of how much importance, how necessary is it that the utmost pains be taken by the public to have the principles of virtue early inculcated on the minds even of children, and the moral sense kept alive, and that the wise institutions of our ancestors for these great purposes be encouraged by the government, for no people will tamely surrender their liberties, nor can any be easily subdued when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the contrary, when people are universally ignorant and debauched in their manners, they will sink under their own weight without the aid of foreign invaders. Sounds like what's going on today, although we do have a flood of criminals coming into the country and terrorists, but we've gotten to this point by seeking under the weight of our own debauchery. You could say a lot about this. We could spend quite a bit of time on this, but I think at least the first thing that jumps out in my mind at this second section is the idea this false idea that you can be fiscally conservative and socially liberal If you're liberal in your or left-leaning, however you want to say it in your private life, meaning that you support those godless evil values of the left abortion, feminism, rejection of God, lgbtq lifestyles, sexual deviancy of any kind.

Speaker 1: 20:09

If you support those really evil social vices, eventually that's going to bleed over into your financial and political life. And you see the example Adams gave here of the man who committed treason, but long before he committed treason he was cheating on his wife. If you can't control yourself in your private life, if you refuse and none of us are perfect. But the point is that there's a difference between trying, striving toward perfection and not obtaining it, and pretending that you can do whatever you want, that you don't even have to try and do what's right, and the latter, when we do that is when we get into real trouble. The great pillars there that prevents those vices taking hold is to teach our children very early on those principles of the Bible, those principles of Jesus Christ, and in order to do that, you need an education system that educates the masses at some level, at some level.

Speaker 1: 21:26

I went over. I apologize. We'll get into Sam Adams again next time. 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.