Audit Your Last 24 Hours

Marriage Proverb And Priorities

Testing Spirits In 1 John 4

Perfect Love And Fear

Psalms And Proverbs On Mercy And Rule

Core Claim: Jesus Is The Son Of God

Medal Of Honor: Robert Blake

Lincoln’s 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation

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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 to appreciate y'all joining me, giving me a little bit of your time. A little piece of your day, I will try and use it wisely. Hopefully, y'all are getting to listen to it with someone else. For those of y'all who continue to share the podcast with others and tell others about it, thank you. Very, very grateful for that. For those of y'all who continue to pray for me and for the podcast, thank you. 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 and your mercy, your grace and your forgiveness of sins through the merit of your son, Jesus Christ. Thank you for this day you've made, Father. Thank you for all the blessings that we forget to be grateful for on a daily basis. Thank you for the people that listen to the podcast, Father. Please be with them, be with their families. Guide them and bless them, surround them with your angels, protect them from evil of any kind. Help us to do your will above all else, Father, to follow the commands of your Son Jesus Christ, to love you with our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Help us to care for the widow and the orphan, the poor and the needy. Be with those who are sick, who are injured. Comfort them, ease their pain, ease their discomfort. Be with the brokenhearted. Father, please draw close to them. Help us to feel your presence. Be with those who are injured. Feel their bodies. Be with those who have lost loved ones. Parents, children, siblings, friends, relatives. Help us to guide our nation back to you, Father. Help us to put you and your son back at the center of our public councils, our education, seminaries, schools, courts, constitutions. Help us to put you and your son Jesus Christ back at the center of our marriages, our family. Your son's name we pray. Amen. Well, folks, how'd you spend your last 24 hours? Are you pleased with it? And more importantly, did you spend it the way that God wanted you to spend it? If you look in the mirror at yourself, are you pleased with how much time you gave to social media? How much time you gave to TV, how much time you gave to sports, how much time you gave to reading, how much time you gave to your parents, to your children, to your spouse, to God. And as we have started to say pretty regularly, if somebody accused you at the end of the day of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you? If somebody accused you at the end of the day of being a good husband or a good wife? Or maybe better, a great husband or a great wife, a great father, a great mother, a great son, a great daughter, would there be enough evidence to convict you? A great citizen of the United States or citizen of your country, wherever you are around the world listening, would there be enough evidence to convict you? It's so often, folks, it has very little to do with actual time and energy and effort. It has to do with priorities. What are we really giving our time and energy and effort to? Marriage verse for today, Proverbs 5, 18 through 19. Let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth. As a loving kind and a graceful doe, let her breasts satisfy you at all times. Be exhilarated always with her love. Or it doesn't. Bible verses for today, we're going to start with 1 John chapter 4, verses 1 through 21. Dear friends, do not believe everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit. You must test them to see if the Spirit they have comes from God. For there are many false prophets in the world. This is how we know if they have the Spirit of God. If a person claiming to be a prophet acknowledges that Jesus Christ came in a real body, that person has the Spirit of God. But if someone claims to be a prophet and does not acknowledge the truth about Jesus, that person is not from God. Such a person has the spirit of the Antichrist, which you heard is coming into the world and indeed is already here. But you belong to God, my dear children. You have already won a victory over those people, because the spirit who lives in you is greater than the spirit who lives in the world. Those people belong to this world. So they speak from the world's viewpoint, and the world listens to them. But we belong to God, and those who know God listen to us. If they do not belong to God, they do not listen to us. That is how we know if someone has the spirit of truth or the spirit of deception. Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love. God showed how much he loved us by spend by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and set his son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us. And God has given us his spirit as proof that we live in him and he in us. Furthermore, we have seen with our own eyes and now testified that the Father sent his son to be the Savior of the world. All who declare that Jesus is the Son of God have God living in them, and they live in God. I can't help but stop there, folks. I don't do this often, but Jesus Christ is the Son of God. I I declare that, I claim that. That means that I have God living in me, and I live in God. There is Jesus Christ. We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in His love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we live like Jesus here in this world. Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love. We love each other because he loved us first. If someone says, I love God but hates a fellow believer, that person is a liar. For if we don't love people, how if we don't love people we can see, how can we love God whom we cannot see? And he has given us this command those who love God must also love their fellow believers. Psalm 123, verses 1 through 4. I lift my eyes to you, O God enthroned in heaven. We keep looking to the Lord our God for his mercy. Just as servants keep their eyes on their master, as a slave girl watches her mistress for the slightest signal. Have mercy on us, Lord, have mercy, for we have had our fill of contempt. We have had more than our fill of the scoffing of the proud and the contempt of the arrogant. Proverbs twenty nine verses two through four. When the godly are in authority, the people rejoice, but when the wicked are in power they groan. The man who loves wisdom brings joy to his father, but if he hangs around with prostitutes, his wealth is wasted. A just king gives stability to his nation, but one who demands bribes destroys it. I think probably again just the biggest is Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Tell somebody that help them to see that. That He died for our sins, that God loves us so much. And if you're a parent, this ought to hit home. God loves us so much that He was willing to sacrifice His Son to save us, even though we don't deserve it. Think about that from the point of view of your own child if somebody asks you to do that. It's a pretty strong love that God has for us. I need to remind myself of that more often, folks, when doubts and fears assail me. Medal of Honor for today, Robert Blake. Rank contraband, U.S. Civil War, U.S. Steam Gunboat, Marblehead, U.S. Navy, December twenty fifth, eighteen sixty-three, off Lagerville, Stone O River, Johns Island, South Carolina. On board the U.S. Steam gunboat Marblehead off Leaguerville, Stone, Stone O River, twenty five December, eighteen sixty three, in an engagement with the enemy on Johns Island, serving the rifle gun. Blake, an escaped slave, carried out his duties bravely through the engagement, which resulted in the enemy's abandonment of positions, leaving a quisson and one gun behind. Accredited to Port Royal, Buffert, Beaufort County, South Carolina, not awarded posthumously. Presented april sixteenth, eighteen sixty four, GO number thirty two, born South Carolina, United States. Robert Blake. Thanksgiving proclamation for today. Also actually out of eighteen sixty three. This is Thanksgiving Day, 1863, for victory in battle by Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, a proclamation. It has pleased Almighty God to hearken to the supplications and prayers of an afflicted people, and to vouchsafe to the Army and the Navy of the United States victories on land and on the sea so signal and so effective as to furnish reasonable grounds for augmented confidence that the Union of these states will be maintained, their constitution preserved, and their peace and prosperity permanently restored. But these victories have been accorded not without sacrifices of life, limb, health, and liberty, incurred by brave, loyal, and patriotic citizens. Domestic affliction in every part of the country follows in the train of these fearful bereavements. It is meet and right to recognize and confess the presence of the Almighty Father and the power of his hand equally in these triumphs and in these sorrows. Now therefore, be it known that I do set apart Thursday, the sixth day of August next, to be observed as a day for national thanksgiving, praise, and prayer, and I invite the people of the United States to assemble on that occasion in their customary places of worship, and in the forms approved by their own consciences, render the homage due to the divine majesty for the wonderful things he has done in the nation's behalf and invoke the influence of his Holy Spirit to subdue the anger which has produced and so long sustained a needless and cruel rebellion, to change the hearts of the insurgents, to guide the counsels of the government with wisdom adequate to so great a national emergency, and to visit with tender care and consolation throughout the length and breadth of our land all those who, through the victitudes of marches, voyages, battles, and sieges, have been brought to suffering mind, body, or a state, and finally to lead the whole nation through the paths of repentance and submission to the divine will back to the perfect enjoyment of a union and fraternal peace. In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed, done at the city of Washington this fifteenth day of July in the year of our Lord 1863, and in the independence of the United States the 88th. Abraham Lincoln. Pretty relevant, folks, to today. We seem to be headed again for the same situation. Because they're just simply there cannot be peaceful coexistence between people that stand for the values the foundation of our nation, the principles of Christ, and those who stand against them. It's impossible. We can have liberty apart from followers of leftism, socialism, communism, Nazism, fascism, and Islam. Or we can have slavery under them. But this idea from the last several decades that we can just keep on stumbling down this path and that there can be peace and concord. It's not logical, it's not possible. There's a couple quotes from Churchill. I may have gone over them recently. But I think they're worth going over again, especially based on those comments. They're from his first book, The Gathering Storm, in a series that he wrote on the Second World War. Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism. As fascism sprang from communism, so Nazism developed from fascism. There's this idea today really propagandized and pushed by the last over the last century by the left that that those systems are all unique. Not to mention the fact that there some of them are good. None of them are good. And they're really not that unique. They're just different paths to the same end. Chaos, slaughter, starvation, torture. And throughout the 20th century, we see again and again and again and again that Islam goes hand in glove with each of those different ideologies. You can't look at the twentieth century, look at history, and think that suddenly today, somehow, we can just peacefully coexist with any of those ideologies. The only reason they claim to want peace and tolerance is just until they can get to the point of control. And just like you go back to the Thanksgiving proclamation we read from Lincoln, we should pray for their changed hearts. We should pray for reconciliation, but that reconciliation has to take place after repentance. All right. If you're looking for a family-friendly, a little bit happier note, right? Family friendly middle grade read. If you would give countryside a try, I would appreciate it. And if you enjoy it, if you would leave a review somewhere, there's two books in the series right now, and I'm working on a third one. And also, if you feel like you have three or four or five dollars a month that you can donate to support the podcast, there's a webpage on the Buzz Sprout website for the podcast where you can do that, and I would be very grateful for that as well. 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 you 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, folks. We'll talk to you all again real soon. Looking forward to it.