Reconnecting with God and Country: Rediscovering America's Christian Principles

Have you ever wondered how deeply your daily distractions are impacting your spiritual and personal connections? Join me, Jesse Cope, in a transformative episode of the American Soul Podcast as we explore the profound importance of reconnecting with God and our nation. Learn the art of prioritizing spiritual practices such as prayer and Bible reading amidst the modern barrage of screens and digital diversions. Discover the immense benefits of dedicating quality time to your loved ones and realigning your daily priorities to nurture your faith and relationships. This engaging discussion includes a heartfelt prayer for guidance, protection, and forgiveness, serving as a poignant reminder to return to our spiritual roots.

In the latter part of our conversation, we delve into the critical role Christian principles have played in shaping American society and governance. By examining historical examples and legal cases, we highlight the integral influence of Christian values on American law and societal norms, contrasting this with the dire consequences of secular rule as seen in totalitarian regimes. We reflect on the erosion of these foundational values in modern times, stressing the importance of moral integrity in societal function, marriage, and community well-being. Concluding with a passionate plea for a return to the Christian principles that our nation was founded upon, we express hope for America's future and offer blessings for families and marriages. Tune in for a thought-provoking and heartfelt discussion on the necessity of turning back to God and the principles that have guided our great nation.

Chapters

• 0:02 Reconnecting With God and Country
• 11:40 Principles of Christ in American Society
• 20:19 Returning to Christian Principles in America

Transcript

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, whatever part of the day you're in. Sure do appreciate y'all joining me, giving me a little bit of your time and energy, a little piece of your day, of your day. I'm glad y'all are here. Hopefully y'all can listen to it with somebody a spouse or child, relative, friend, co-worker, parent. Hopefully it gives y'all some tools in your toolbox that you didn't have before. Hopefully it helps our country, even if just a little bit, turn back to God and Jesus Christ. For those of y'all that continue to share the podcast and tell others about it, thank you so much. I'm incredibly grateful for y'all. Thank you, not a lot on the homestead it's hot dry. We knew those. Not a lot on the homestead it's hot dry. We knew those days were coming. Managed to get a pretty good cutting of hay, really actually a phenomenal cutting of hay. I think most of it had to do with the rain, at least if I listen to people that are more experienced than I am.

Speaker 1: 1:34

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 and your Holy Spirit. Thank you for your love, mercy, grace, forgiveness. Thank you for the time to record this podcast and the people that listen to it. Be with them and their families. Guide us, lord. Bless us, surround us with your angels. Protect us from evil of any kind. Help us to see with your angels. Protect us from evil of any kind. Help us to see with your eyes. Help us to open our ears and hear. Soften our hearts. Turn us back to you and your Son, jesus Christ, both as a nation and as individuals, both as a nation and as individuals. Help us to trust you, no matter what comes or is coming, to lean on you. Forgive us our selfishness, our pride, our arrogance. Forgive us our selfishness, our pride, our arrogance. Forgive us all our sins. Lord, be with our military, our law enforcement and their families. Keep them safe. And God, my words here Father, please, in your Son's name, we pray Amen.

Speaker 1: 3:13

Have you made time to read your Bible today, to spend a little bit of time with God, to pray a little bit? Have you set aside a few minutes and planned your day around that, instead of cramming in time for God around the edges of your day? I find that when I do the second, when I try and cram God in A, I often get through most of the day and then realize that I haven't spent time with God through most of the day and then realize that I haven't spent time with God and B, I also notice that I'm pretty discombobulated. I feel even if I've gotten a lot done, I don't feel like I've gotten very much done. I feel kind of off kilter. I think a lot of that for myself, I know, but I think for a huge chunk of our society today.

Speaker 1: 4:34

Our screens are enabling this. We get caught up scrolling our phone or watching something on TV, and it not only takes away the free time that we have to kind of sit and be, we get sucked in and we don't get done the things that we really ought to be doing. You know, if you're married, on the podcast we say each day have you made time for your spouse? Have you made sure that they know that they are your second priority each day after only God? And that ties in with the screens too. We sit there and we play on our phones or we watch the Olympics or sports or whatever else Just throwing the Olympics under, since they have been recently going on, and then we look up at the end of the day and we claim well, we don't really have time. We didn't have time today. I was just too busy, I had too much to do. If that's really true for that very, very small, less than 1% of the population, if that's really true for you need to make some really hard efforts to change your current situation. To make some really hard efforts to change your current situation.

Speaker 1: 6:05

For most of us, the reality is that we just gave time to other things. We have our priorities out of whack, and it may be just little things, like we just spent too much time, or I shouldn't say little things, but simple things to change, like we just spent too much time on our phone or on TV. Or it might be something bigger like we've gone chasing after career and money instead of focusing on people. My mother used to say that you can't throw people away, and what she meant is that a lot of times, sadly, even in the church, if people don't meet our expectations, if they don't dress the right way, talk the right way, look the right way, act the right way, and what I mean by acting is just basically how they talk or appear, then a lot of times we don't want anything to do with them. They're weird, they're strange. You know, we'll let somebody else deal with them. When things get hard we don't want to deal with, or uncomfortable, often we don't want to deal with those, and that's fine. That's a human reaction.

Speaker 1: 7:30

The problem is when we actually kind of toss those people aside and don't pay attention to them. And that's really what we're doing with our spouse and, even worse, with God. When we go chasing after the things of the world and even our kids, if you have kids, folks, when we go chasing after the things of the world instead of the things of God, right, what we're really doing is we're throwing those people aside, saying you know what? My TV is more important than you, my phone is more important than you, my phone is more important than you, my career and whatever you know my own selfish ambitions are are more important for you. And yeah, it's different for men and women, folks, because we have different roles and responsibilities and I know that a lot of people that makes you kind of gnash your teeth out there. And the problem is that we've become a society over the last century or so, that has decided that only one of those roles is valuable and that in order for men and women to be equally valuable, we have to be the same. That's just simply not true. We're equally valuable already. The way that God made us designed us, in fact, when we don't fulfill those roles and responsibilities that God gave us, we become less valuable to ourselves, to our spouse, to our families, communities, churches, nation, when we reject those roles that God gave us. And if you're interested, if you don't know whether you're a Christian of many years or a new believer or not a Christian, and you want to see what those roles are, you can go in the Bible. 1 Peter 3 is a good place to look. Titus 2 is a good place to look. 1 Corinthians 7 is a good place to look. Ephesians 5 is a good place to look. Ephesians 5 is a good place to look. There's a number of others Proverbs 31. A lot of the different Proverbs actually are good places to look.

Speaker 1: 9:47

We're going to see if we can finish up Justice Brewer today and this court case that we've been talking about for several days now, which is really kind of the essence of this podcast. It's Holy Trinity Church versus the United States, february of 1892, and Justice Brewer is delivering the opinion of the court. And we've been going through talking about the pieces of evidence showing that we're a Christian nation, since from Columbus to the original charters, to some of the different orders, to the Declaration of Independence, to even the Constitution, the state constitutions, a couple of other court cases, and so just again and again and he's going to, as we close this, he's going to say that this is just a little bit that just adds to the just mound of overwhelming evidence that this is a Christian nation. And why is this so important? Overwhelming evidence that this is a Christian nation. And why is this so important? Because we can't function correctly as a republic with liberty for all, without those principles of God and Jesus Christ. And God tells us that right. He said, wherever the spirit of God is, wherever the spirit of the Lord is, there's liberty. So the farther we get away from God and Jesus Christ and those principles of Christ, the farther we get away from liberty. And you see that today it's very clear If you're honest at all and you look around and you see the less and less freedom, the less and less liberty that we have. It's directly correlated to the farther away from those principles, ten Commandments, the teachings of Christ the farther we get from that.

Speaker 1: 11:40

And there's a great quote I can't remember, maybe Winthrop, but it talked about. You know, people are going to either be ruled by something inside ourselves or outside ourselves. We're either going to be ruled by the Bible or the bayonet, and you see that throughout history. You see it in the UK, sadly, right now. If you don't choose God and Jesus Christ, then you're going to end up with a totalitarian government. That, as John Adams said, you're going to end up with something that doesn't care about the rights of anybody but the rights of the state. That's all they're going to end up with something that doesn't care about the rights of anybody but the rights of the state. That's all they're going to care about. You end up with Nazi Germany, stalinist Russia, maoist China. That's what you end up with. And you can see that in the recent weeks where in Britain they've started arresting people for posts on social media. If you didn't know that, you ought to go look at it. It's super, super scary stuff, folks. If you've got a clue about history, very scary. And in the famous case of Vidal versus Gerard's executors, how 127, 198, this court, while sustaining the will of Mr Gerard, with its provision for the creation of a college into which no minister should be permitted to enter, observed.

Speaker 1: 13:13

It is also said and truly that the Christian religion is a part of the common law of Pennsylvania. So this idea of separation of church and state, which I need to clear this up again, had somebody say something online. Separation of church and state and its original intent is a good thing, but that's not what we have today. We have separation of church and state in the 1947 Supreme Court meaning, and that's pretty much exactly the opposite of the First Amendment and the original intent of separation of church and state Right and the original intent of separation of church and state Right. And so this idea that the principles of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, are not supposed to be part of our law here in America, our justice system, our courts, is just completely foreign to the beginning of our nation and the goal of liberty.

Speaker 1: 14:18

If we pass beyond these matters to a view of American life as expressed by its laws, its business, its customs and its society, we find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth. Among other matters, note the following the form of oath universally prevailing, concluding with an appeal to the Almighty. The custom of opening sessions of all deliberative bodies and most conventions with prayer, the prefatory words of all wills in the name of God, amen. The laws respecting the observance of the Sabbath, with the general cessation of all secular business and the closing of courts, legislatures and other similar public assemblies on that day. The churches and church organizations which abound in every city, town and hamlet. The multitude of charitable organizations existing everywhere under Christian auspices. The gigantic missionary associations with general support and aiming to establish Christian missions in every quarter of the globe. These and many other matters which might be noticed at a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.

Speaker 1: 16:01

We are a Christian nation, folks. We were born, at least, a Christian nation, and the farther we get away from God and Jesus Christ, the more dysfunctional we become. I've got a couple quotes from Churchill that I want to get to if we have time. But wherever you are in life, folks, whatever your station is, whatever your sphere of influence, as Patrick Henry talked about, you need to encourage people to follow those principles of Christ, and probably the very best way to do that is, by exemplifying them in your own life, because when I've had the opportunity, the privilege of interacting with kids over the years, one of the things that I've told them is somebody's always watching, and of course this is true. God is always watching. He keeps his eye on the good and the evil alike. But in a much more human sense, in your little community, in your little area, someone is almost always watching, whether we realize it or not, and so the way we act has a pretty big impact on what others view our character as, and if we're in a position of authority whether that's being a parent or just being an adult in a community or in some position of power or authority it impacts the view of the people that see us acting as to what's acceptable and what's not.

Speaker 1: 18:05

It's just so simple, folks. Every time we run into problems, almost every single time, there's some kind of break in either our actions or someone's around us, between the actions and the principles of Christ. We're not fulfilling our roles and our responsibilities. My own kids were asking about a marriage that they saw recently and we know a little bit about these people and the marriage is super dysfunctional you can tell it from the outside even, and we got to talking about that and about the fact that at least one for sure, and maybe both husband and wife aren't following those roles and responsibilities that God laid out, and so it makes the marriage dysfunctional. And that's really what we've done as a society.

Speaker 1: 19:26

You know, you go back to this quote here by Brewer, his opinion, and he's talking about American life, its laws, its business, its customs, its society. Right, it's talking about how we used to observe the Sabbath, how secular businesses used to shut down on the Sabbath, and the importance of church and church organizations and missionary organizations. But really just his comment about society, in our marriages, in our communities, in our schools, the farther away from God we've gotten, the less our country has functioned well, and the reason is clear. Brewer states it here in the Supreme Court decision from the end of the 19th century, and he's saying look, we're a Christian nation, we have all these evidences of this.

Speaker 1: 20:19

Well, what have we done today? We've rejected all of these clear evidences that we were born a Christian nation. And so it's like a ship without an anchor. We're unmoored, we have no direction anymore because we've taken the anchor and we've thrown it out into the ocean and we're just kind of drifting along and it's like we removed the rudder too. The only way to get us back on track, folks, is to turn back to God and Jesus Christ and those principles that founded our nation, that so many of our founders and great leaders acknowledged for so long. God bless y'all. God bless your families, your marriages. God bless America. We'll talk to y'all again real soon. Folks Looking forward to it.