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, whatever part of the day you're in. I know you have other things buying for your attention, so I appreciate you giving me a little bit of it. I will try and use it wisely. For those of y'all who continue to share the podcast with others, tell others about it. Thank you. Very grateful for that. For those of y'all who continue to pray for me after the podcast, thank you. Very, very grateful for your prayers, need them and want them. Father, thank you for today. Thank you for you, Father, and your son, Jesus Christ, and your Holy Spirit. Thank you for your love, your mercy, your grace, your forgiveness of sins through the merit of your son, Jesus Christ. Thank you for the time to record this podcast. Thank you for the people that listen to it and share it. Please be with us, Father, guide us. Surround us with your angels, protect us from evil of any kind. Bless the marriages of those who are married. Guide those who have children and raising them to know you and your son Jesus Christ. Help us to help those that have less than we do. Help us to help our country turn back to you, whether here in America or around the world where people are listening. Help us to truly love your son Jesus Christ. To follow his commands. To love you with our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength. To love our neighbors as ourselves. Father, thank you for those across the nation. Men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers who follow your roles and responsibilities so clearly laid out in Scripture. Thank you for their perseverance, their courage, their faithfulness. Bless them, Father. And be with our leaders, Father. Help them both in the pulpit and in the state. To rule in fear of you and to be more concerned about your opinion and what you want. As opposed to what men or mankind or woman want. And please guide my words here, Father. Your son's name we pray. Amen. How have you spent the last 24 hours, folks? Are you pleased with it? If you looked back on your last 24 hours and how you spent your time, did you give it to the right things? And what are the right things? What God tells us the right things are. Did you focus on God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit? Did you spend a little time reading the Bible, praying, listening? If you're married, did you focus on your spouse? And are these checks in the box right? Do you just do it for five minutes just so you can put a check in the box, or are you actually invested? I can't remember the old saying, folks. I wish I could, talking about the difference between the chicken and the pig, right? Because the chicken gives us eggs and the pig gives us bank bacon. But right, the chicken doesn't give up its life, but the pig does. And one was, I think, invested and one was dedicated. I can't remember which one, but obviously the pig was more, you know, it was sacrificing more. Are we really truly invested or dedicated, whichever one you want to use in God and our spouse each day, or are we just kind of a little interested? Or maybe not even interested. Do we are we as eager and affectionate and energetic in our pursual of God and our spouse each day as we are scrolling our phone or watching TV or sports or our workout or whatever else it is that is your particular poison? So the marriage verse for today comes from Ephesians 5, verses 22 through 33. Wives be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, he himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her, so that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless. So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of his body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great, but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church. Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband. Every single bit of marriage advice that you get, folks, and whether it doesn't matter whether you're listening to me right now and you're in junior high or high school or college or 30 years old or 80 years old, every single bit of marriage advice that you get in your entire life, you need to check against scripture. And that's both for you looking for a spouse, right? Whether you're looking for a husband or a wife and making sure that they're lining up with scripture, and it's also looking at yourself in the mirror. And if somebody's telling you, well, this is what you ought to be looking for in a husband or a wife, or somebody's telling you this is how you ought to act as a husband or a wife, you need to make sure that you're going back through these verses that we read through each day and going, okay, is this lining up with what God's telling me to do as a husband or a wife? And if it is, great. And if it's not, you need to burn it, trash it, and throw it away and never look back. And probably not listen to that person uh for marriage advice going forward. All right, Bible verses. For today, where did we leave all? I think we started Peter. Yeah. 1 Peter 113 through 10. So prepare your minds for action and exercise self-control. Put all your hope and the gracious salvation that will come to you when Jesus Christ is revealed to the world. So you must live as Christ's obedient children. Don't slip back into your old ways of living to satisfy your own desires. You didn't know any better then, but now you must be holy in everything you do, just as God who chose you is holy. For the scriptures say you must be holy because I am holy. And remember that the heavenly Father to whom you pray has no favorites. He will judge or reward you according to what you do. So you must live in reverent fear of him during your time here as temporary residence. For you know that God paid a ransom to save you from the empty life you inherited from your ancestors. And it was not paid with mere gold or silver, which lose their value. It was the precious blood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. God chose him as your ransom long before the world began. But now, in these last days, he has been revealed for your sake. Through Christ, you have come to trust in God, and you have placed your faith and hope in God because he raised Christ from the dead and gave him great glory. You were cleansed from your sins when you obeyed the truth. So now you must show sincere love to each other as brothers and sisters. Love each other deeply with all your heart. For you have been born again, but not to a life that will quickly end. Your new life will last forever because it comes from the eternal living word of God. As the scriptures say, people are like grass, their beauty is like a flower in the field. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of the Lord remains forever. And that word is the good news that was preached to you. So get rid of all evil behavior, be done with all deceit, hypocrisy, jealousy, and all unkind speech. Like newborn babies, you must crave pure spiritual milk so that you will grow into a full experience of salvation. Cry out for this nourishment, now that you have had a taste of the Lord's kindness. You are coming to Christ, who is the living cornerstone of God's temple. He was rejected by people, but he was chosen by God for great honor. And you are living stones that God is building into his spiritual temple. What's more, you are his holy priests. Through the mediation of Jesus Christ, you offer spiritual sacrifices that please God. As the scriptures say, I am placing a cornerstone in Jerusalem chosen for great honor, and anyone who trusts in him will never be disgraced. Yes, you who trust him recognize the honor God has given him. But for those who reject him, the stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone. And he is the stone that makes people stumble, the rock that makes them fall. They stumble because they do not obey God's word. And so they meet the fate that was planned for them. But you are not like that, for you are a chosen people. You are royal priests, a holy nation, God's very own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God, for he called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light. Once you had no identity as a people, now you are God's people. Once you received no mercy, now you have received God's mercy. Teach me your decrees, O Lord, I will keep them to the end. Give me understanding and I will obey your instructions. I will put them into practice with all my heart. Make me walk along the path of your commands, for that is where my happiness is found. Give me an eagerness for your laws rather than a love for money. Turn my eyes from worthless things and give me life through your word. Reassure me of your promise, made to those who fear you. Help me abandon my shameful ways, for your regulations are good. I long to obey your commandments, renew my life with your goodness. Lord, give me your unfailing love, the salvation that you promised. Then I can answer those who taunt me, for I trust in your word. Do not snatch your word of truth from me, for your regulations are my only hope. I will keep on obeying your instructions forever and ever. I will walk in freedom, for I have devoted myself to your commandments. I will speak to kings about your laws, and I will not be ashamed. How I delight in your commands, how I love them. I honor and love your commands, I meditate on your decrees. Proverbs twenty eight eleven. Rich people may think they are wise, but a poor person with discernment can see right through them. Money doesn't make us brilliant, folks. Going back to one Peter, put all your hope in the gracious salvation that will come to you when Jesus Christ is revealed to the world. And God has no favorites. He will judge you according to what you do, right? So live in reverent fear of him during the time you were here as temporary resident. That's the bottom line, folks. We choose to put our faith, right? Verse 21, right there, though Christ, you have come to trust in God through Christ, and you have placed your faith and hope in God because he raised Christ from the dead and gave him great glory. We choose to put our faith in Christ. And we ought to have all of our hope in Christ, but we also, folks, ought to live and serve God because at some point, right, he's going to judge us according to what we do in this life. And thank God for Christ's mercy and salvation and protection, if you will. Medal of honor for today is Francis A. Bishop, Private, Highest Ranked Corporal, U.S. Civil War, Charlie Company, 57th Pennsylvania Infantry, U.S. Army, May twelfth, eighteen sixty four, Spotsylvania, Virginia, USA. Capture of Flag. That's the whole citation, folks. Accredited to Harrisburg. Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, not awarded posthumously, presented december first, eighteen sixty four. Born december third, eighteen forty, Bradford County, Pennsylvania, died october eleventh, nineteen thirty seven. Retzel State Veterans Home, Washington. Buried Blanchard Cemetery, Blanchard, Michigan. Location of Metal, Congressional Medal of Honor Society, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Frances A. Bishop. Again, folks, just another name we ought to remember far more than the pop stars and professional and college athletes that we seem, actors and actresses, we seem to give so much time and attention to these days. So our history today is going to be a couple quotes that I stumbled across talking about immigration. And maybe I'll say a little bit at the end if we have time. This is George Washington. While the policy or advantage of its taking place in a body, I mean the settling of them in a body, may be much questioned. Talking about immigrants settling as a group kind of by themselves, right? For by so doing they retain the language, habits, and principles, good or bad, which they bring with them. Thomas Jefferson, this is from his notes on the state of Virginia. Yet from some absolute monarchies we are to expect the greatest number of immigrants. They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty in proportion to their number. They will share with us the legislation with the principles of the governments they left. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass. Let's see, I think we have time. Yeah, we'll do one more today. John J. This was in the Federalist Paper Number Two. Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the very same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs. And then, of course, the quote that we've read so often from John Jay it's the duty as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers. And I want to read one more real quick, just because it'll tie everything in. This is from Calvin Coolidge, and we may come back to this again. First annual message to Congress. They were created by people who had a background of self-government. New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship. America must be kept American. You look at all these quotes together, folks, and what's the concern? The concern is if immigrants come in and they refuse to assimilate, then they're not a strength to America, they're a weakness. So if you come in and you refuse to learn English, if you come in and you refuse to honor the flag, if you come in most importantly and you refuse to adhere to the principles of Jesus Christ, because as John Jay, who was our first Supreme Court Chief Justice and one of the three most important founding fathers, according to John Adams, I believe, I think that's right. May have to double check that. But we are a Christian nation. And that's great, but it only works, folks, if people adhere and assimilate to our founding faith and principles based on the teachings of Christ. It's like a recipe if you're making a stew or something. If you throw too much of one ingredient in, it ruins the whole stew. It has to have a chance to mix with all the other ingredients, right? In order for it to turn out well. In America, if we throw in too many immigrants and we don't, you end up with what you've got in Michigan right now, right? Which is this whole little Islamic caliphate starting to create inside America. You can't have immigrants come in and refuse to follow our founding faith and principles and hope that we're going to succeed. If you're looking for a family-friendly middle-grade fantasy, I would humbly recommend Countryside, kind of along the lines of Narnia, Harry Potter, The Hobbit, that kind of stuff. And if you enjoy it, if you would leave a review online, I would greatly appreciate it. They help a lot. And if you're enjoying the podcast, if you're getting something out of it, if you can spare three or four or five dollars a month, you can go to the Buzz Sprout website, and there's a donation page there on the podcast website, and I would greatly appreciate that. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not to temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever.

Amen.

God bless y'all. God bless your families. God bless your marriages if you're married. God bless America. God bless your nation, wherever you are around the world. Listen to folks. We'll talk to you all again real soon. Looking forward to it.