salm 65 And A Tragic Headline

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Psalm 65, verses 3 through 5. Though we are overwhelmed by our sins, you forgive them all. What joy for those who choose, you choose to bring near. Those who live in your holy courts, what festivities await us inside your holy temple. You faithfully answer our prayers with awesome deeds. O God our Savior, you are the hope of everyone on earth, even those who sail on distant seas. Dabrina Kalam, December 22nd, 2024, Brooklyn, New York. 57-year-old woman was set on fire and burned to death while sleeping on an F train at the Coney Island Stillwell Avenue station by Sebastian Zapeta Khalil, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who had been previously deported. 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. Sure to appreciate you joining me and giving me a little piece of your day, a little bit of your attention. I know you have other things vying for that attention. So work, kids, schedule, et cetera, et cetera. I appreciate you being here. And for those of y'all who continue to share the podcast and those of y'all who continue to pray for me, thank you very much. Very grateful. 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.

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Forgive us, Father, when we focus on ourselves.

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Forgive us when we throw other people away. When we judge people, when we gossip, when we slander. Forgive us too when we're more afraid of men and women than we are of you. Their opinion. What they think matters.

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Instead of focusing on what you and your son and the Holy Spirit tell us. Help us to care for those who are hard to care for.

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Help us to love those who don't seem very lovable. Be with those listening to the podcast wherever they are. Be with their families. Bless the marriages of those who are married. Heal whatever hurts they have.

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Bind whatever wounds. Help them to cleave to one another. To draw close to one another.

enesis And The Blessing Of Children

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And please be with our military overseas fighting for our nation. And those at home and law enforcement firefighters in us who defend us against evil. And be with their families. Give them peace and joy and comfort and patience. Help us to support them and encourage them. Help us to do the same inside the church, Father. Help us to encourage each other, not divide. And God, my words here, Father, please, in your son's name we pray. Amen. Marriage verse. I don't use this one very often. I should use it more often. Genesis 9, verses 1 and 7. God repeats it a few times in Scripture, but twice here. God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, Be fertile, multiply, and fill the earth. As for you, this is verse 7, as for you, be fertile and multiply, populate the earth and multiply in it. I wish I had listened better as a young man to people that said, have a lot of kids. I wish I had understood the truth of a woman that came up once years and years ago and told me, you know, I've heard a lot of people wish that they had more kids. I've never heard a family disappointed, a couple, husband and wife, that were disappointed in having that last kid. We don't make enough of this in the church, folks. We don't teach our young people enough how important it is, what a blessing it is to have children. Yeah, it's hard. Yeah, you want to pull your hair out. Yeah, there's days where you feel like you're in the trenches.

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But what a blessing. An overwhelming blessing.

esus Heals And Withdraws To Pray

raise, Provision, And Judgment

ooks, Reviews, And Supporting The Show

estgate Attack And Ideological Warnings

hy People Are Leaving Social Media

iscipline, Reading Aloud, And Family Culture

inal Charge And Closing Prayer

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And it doesn't mean it's gonna all work out great, but I can encourage you, especially if you're young and you still have this in front of you. Find a spouse that wants a lot of kids. Have however many God blesses you with. But but there's a reason that God tells us this multiple times in Scripture. Luke 5, 12 through 28. In one of the villages, Jesus met a man with an advanced case of leprosy. When the man saw Jesus, he bowed with his face to the ground, begging to be healed. Lord, he said, if you are willing, you can heal me and make me clean. Jesus reached out and touched him. I am willing, he said, Be healed. And instantly the leprosy disappeared. Then Jesus instructed him not to tell anyone what had happened. He said, Go to the priest and let him examine you. Take along the offering required in the law of Moses for those who have been healed of leprosy. This will be a public testimony that you have been cleansed. But despite Jesus' instruction, instructions, the report of his power spread even faster. And vast crowds came to hear him preach and to be healed of their diseases. But Jesus often withdrew to the wilderness for prayer. How often do we withdraw to our own version of the wilderness for prayer? You know, you go back, we read that marriage verse so often. Corinthians talks about the fact that the only reason to stop being intimate, having sex with your spouse is for brief periods of fasting and prayer. And I would argue that you can stretch that to so many other areas of your life, these busy areas, this chaos. We're going to talk about a couple articles today. How often do we stop to be silent before God to pray? I guarantee you I don't do it enough, folks. I don't do it enough. One day while Jesus was teaching, some Pharisees and teachers of religious law were sitting nearby. It seemed that these men showed up from every village in all Galilee and Judea as well as from Jerusalem. And the Lord's healing power was strongly with Jesus. Some men came carrying a paralyzed man on a sleeping mat. They tried to take him inside to Jesus, but they couldn't reach him because of the crowd. So they went up to the roof and took off some tiles. Then they lowered the sick man on his mat down into the crowd right in front of Jesus. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the man, Young man, your sins are forgiven. But the Pharisees and the teachers of religious law said to themselves, Who does he think he is? That's blasphemy. Only God can forgive sins. Jesus knew what they were thinking, so he asked them, Why do you question this in your hearts? Is it easier to say, Your sins are forgiven, or stand up and walk? So I will prove to you that the Son of Man has the authority on earth to forgive sins. Then Jesus turned to the paralyzed man and said, Stand up, pick up your mat, and go home. And immediately as everyone watched, the man jumped up, picked up his mat, and went home praising God. Everyone was gripped with great wonder and awe, and they praised God, exclaiming, We have seen amazing things today. Later, as Jesus left the town, he saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at his tax collector's booth. Follow me and be my disciple, Jesus said to him. So Levi got up, left everything, and followed him. Do we do the same? Psalm sixty five, verses one through thirteen. What mighty praise, O God, belongs to you in Zion? We will fulfill our vows to you, for you answer our prayers. All of us must come to you. Though we are overwhelmed by our sins, you forgive them all. What joy for those you choose to bring near? Those who live in your holy courts, what festivities await us inside your holy temple? You faithfully answer our prayers with awesome deeds, O God our Savior. You are the hope of everyone on earth, even those who sail on distant seas. You formed the mountains by your power and armed yourself with mighty strength. You quieted the raging oceans with their pounding waves and silenced the shouting of the nations. Those who live at the ends of the earth stand in awe of your wonders. From where the sun rises to where it sets, you inspire shouts of joy. You take care of the earth and water it, making it rich and fertile. The river of God has plenty of water. It provides a bountiful harvest of grain, for you have ordered it so. You drench the ploughed ground with rain, melting the clods and leveling the ridges. You soften the earth with showers and bless its abundant crops. You harvest, you crown the year with a bountiful harvest, even the hard pathways overflow with abundance. The grasslands of the wilderness become a lush pasture, and the hillsides blossom with joy. The meadows are clothed with flocks of sheep, and the valleys are carpeted with grain, they all shout and sing for joy. Proverbs 11 23. The godly can look forward to a reward, while the wicked can expect only judgment. Amen to that. Countryside. If you are looking for a family-friendly middle grade read, if you would check out the countryside series, I would appreciate it. These are the first couple books. This is the first one in the series. You can find them a lot of different places. I, of course, am partial to the hardback, paperback copies. And if you enjoyed, if you'd leave a review, those help a great deal. Same thing with the podcast. If you feel like you're getting something out of it, if you can leave a review, those help immensely, especially the five-star ones. And if you have five or ten dollars a cup of coffee once a month, you can donate to the podcast. There's some links in the show notes where you can set up that monthly donation. And I would be very grateful for any or all of those. So thank you. September 21st, 2013, Nairobi, Kenya Muslim gunmen stormed the Westgate shopping mall at the beginning of a four-day siege. They executed shoppers at point-blank range, threw grenades, fired indiscriminately, ultimately killed 67 people, including many women and children, various nationalities, injuring more than 175 others. And again, it's important to note that various nationalities, right? Islam doesn't care whether you're from America, England, Germany, Nairobi, Kenya, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Australia, Siberia, Canada, it doesn't matter. Islam, just like leftism, socialism, communism, Nazism, fascism, is the problem. The ethnicity doesn't matter, the nationality doesn't matter. The problem is those bucket of isms that fall under leftism and Islam. And they do not change. They will not change. They're not going to change, folks. We are fulfilling the definition of insanity to expect suddenly, somewhere along the way, despite decades in the case of the leftism, socialism, communism, et cetera, and centuries in Islam to suddenly expect the outcome to be different. All right. Two things. A quick quote from, and then I want to talk about an article. You know what? We're going to come back to that quote. I just want to talk about this article because I don't think I'm going to have enough time to get through it. There's two articles. You get a chance, Epic Times. This is the first one. It's a Silent Revolution, Why Millions Now Look to Leave Social Media by Rocco Nugent. It's a great article, pretty interesting, talking about these younger generations uh moving to smaller towns and getting away from all the screens, etc. But I really wanted to hit this article about education out of the Epic Times again. This is by uh Jeff Minick. He's interviewing novelist Mark Hulprin, talking about education. And there's just a few quotes I wanted to read out here. If a school can't remove disruptive students, it will fail. You're sacrificing the many for the one. This is true discipline-wise, it's true academically. We are catering to the lowest common denominator, and it has destroyed schools, right? Uh talking about how to improve the education, improve that relationship with your own children. And one of the quotes that really stuck, if you spend hours with them that way, right? Reading to them, talking to them, answering questions with your toddlers, with your children, not putting them in front of a screen, not watching TV together. Folks, watching TV in the same room is not remotely the same as having face-to-face communication, talking. And that includes your spouse. Read aloud to them every day. He did an hour before bed. They would sit in between him and his wife and they would read to him. Read aloud. Read the Bible every day. Pray together every day. Even if it's just a few minutes, folks. And if you don't feel comfortable, that's okay. Your kids just want to spend time with you, especially when you're young. And if you develop that, when they're young, if you develop that routine, it makes so much difference, folks. I cannot emphasize that enough. Get away from the screams. Read, pray, talk, interact. The tragedy, according to Helprin, modern families are fractured. They watch separate television programs in separate rooms. How many does that, how many of us does that strike? I know that hits me. I know people that I that I'm good friends with, relatives, I know that's got to hit them. Return to traditional family structure, eating together, talking, teaching, right? That not only is the key to education with the Bible at the center, with God and Jesus Christ at the center, it's the key to our family relationships, to restoring that. Uh Helper noted that 19th and early 20th century English public schools taught teens Greek, Latin, advanced mathematics, and histories at levels matching or even surpassing those of today's college undergraduates. I'm going to go a little over today, folks. I'm sorry. We discovered my wife and I when we were restoring an old family farmhouse, my grandmother's eighth grade history and literature, I think, English exam books that they had to write in. Folks, guarantee you uh probably less than 5%, maybe 10%, but probably less than 5% of the modern American high school graduates could survive that eighth grade exam. It was brutal. And we read through it. It was just page after page in this little book. Kids can do way more than we give them credit for, folks. Way more. They have so much more ability than we are pushing them for today. And again, it goes back because we're we're catering to the lowest common denominator. And more importantly, we've taken God and Jesus Christ out. There's just so much here. I wish I could get through more of it, folks. But just we have got to put God and Jesus Christ back in the center of education. And the single two best things that we can do, regardless of if it's public education, private, private education, homeschool, or just parents with young children or just children of any age at home, is put God in the center and cut out screens. Put God in the center and cut out screens. Great article out of the Epic Times. Highly recommend that newspaper. If you get a chance, check it out. We'll get back to our normal heritage quotes. We've got a pretty good one coming up from President McKinley. 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 and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen. Sorry we went over. God bless y'all. God bless your families, your marriages, your nation. God bless America. We'll talk to you all again real soon, folks. Looking forward to it.