The American Soul
Are you tired of hearing the myth about separation of church and state? Are you tired of being told that America is not and never was a Christian nation? Do you want to have the information to stand up for the truth and fight back against this fundamental lie that’s invading our culture and education? Each week, host Jesse Cope will dive into quotes and excerpts from our great leaders and documents throughout our history showing how in President Woodrow Wilson’s words “America was born a Christian nation.” We have the truth on our side and together we can absolutely turn our nation around. Follow Jesse @jtcope4 on Twitter and @jtcopeiv on Instagram for daily doses of the truth to help fight back. Subscribe to The American Soul and share the show with someone who needs to hear it. We're on a mission to spread the truth and get our nation back on the right track — and you can help us make this possible.
The American Soul
Reflections on David and Bathsheba: Prioritizing God's Will and the Transformative Power of Prayer
Are you prioritizing personal desires over God's will? Let's reflect on the story of David and Bathsheba to understand the profound consequences of such choices. Join me, Jesse Cope, as I share a personal experience from my homestead that illuminates the importance of dedicating time to God and our loved ones. We’ll confront the troubling issue of biblical illiteracy and its ripple effects on our society and individual lives. By exploring Samuel Adams' belief that no perfect law can guarantee liberty and happiness in a morally corrupt society, we’ll understand the pressing need for spiritual and relational integrity.
In the second part of this episode, we turn our hearts and minds to the ultimate hope for humanity—Jesus Christ. We'll discuss the transformative power of prayer and its role in achieving peace and stability among nations. Drawing from Samuel Adams' unwavering faith, we’ll underscore the necessity of relying on Jesus for salvation. This episode is filled with heartfelt blessings for you and your families, encouraging us all to return to the foundational principles of faith and love, as true salvation can only be found in Jesus Christ. Join me for an inspiring journey that aims to guide us back to the core values that sustain and elevate our souls.
The American Soul Podcast
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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. I sure do appreciate you joining me and giving me a little bit of your time and energy, a little piece of your day. I will try and use it wisely. Hopefully we all get something out of it. Hopefully it gives you something to listen to with somebody else Spouse, children, parents, friends. 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, tell others about it, thank you so much. For those of y'all that leave kind and encouraging notes, thank you. And for those of y'all that pray for the podcast and for me, thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Not a lot on the homestead. I managed to run over something yesterday with the lawnmower, so I had to work on that for a little bit with my father, thankfully, and we got the chicks moved from their little pen to the bigger pen. The guineas are not impressed about that because they got kicked out, but they'll be alright. I think that's about it, 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, mercy, grace, forgiveness. Thank you for all the blessings you bestow upon us, father, the ones we admit, the ones we don't. Thank you for the promise of eternal life and that one day we will be with you in heaven forever, with no more tears and no more sadness, no more sickness, no more hurt, no more pain, all because of the merit of your son, jesus Christ, who was willing to come and die for our sins so that we wouldn't have to Draw us close to you. Father, be with those who are alone and sick, hurting, dying. Help us to care for the widow and the orphan. Be with our brothers and sisters around the world. God, my words here, father, in your son's name we pray, amen. Have you made time to read your Bible today? Have you made time for God? Just a few minutes at least. You can come back and join us on the podcast in the evenings. We read through some scripture each day. Try to If nothing else, it'd be entertaining for you to listen to me struggle through some of the names, but make a little time for God.
Speaker 1:One of the preeminent problems that we have in our nation today is that we have become a Bible illiterate society and it has caused untold numbers of heartaches and pain for individuals and for our nation. And if you're married right behind God, have you made time for your spouse? Are you loving them in the way that makes them feel loved, folks, or are you trying to convince them to feel loved in the way that you feel loved? Or are you just completely lukewarm and indifferent to them and don't really care? A lot of us, when we complain, we want our spouse to put everything into the relationship, but we don't want to put everything in ourselves. We don't want and really at the core, folks, what it is is we don't want to follow God's commands. We don't want to do what God told us to do. In life often, and in marriage in particular, we want to do what we want to do. What makes us quote unquote feel good or happy or fulfilled or whatever it is. Quote unquote feel good or happy or fulfilled or whatever it is. And then we get to the point where we everything's kind of falling apart and we can't figure out what's going wrong or why it's going wrong. It's not hard to figure out. We're going to go back in to Samuel Adams. I think we'll get through everything else today, but you never know. We're just going to read some quotes here and there.
Speaker 1:Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. A lot of people are counting on this election in November to fix things. A lot of other people think if we just had this one more law or if we just amended the Constitution in the right way, everything would work out, and that's just not true. If you look around, you can see that Certainly there are laws on the books that need to be changed, laws on the books that need to be removed. Justice needs to be applied much more equally across the board than it is today. There's a number of things we can do better. There's no doubt about that, but Mr Adams was right here. As long as we continue to be a people who celebrate and condone evil, we could have the perfect constitution and the perfect laws given to us. In fact, we already have in the Bible and it just won't do. The problem is that we want just like we were talking about earlier on the podcast each day, about whether we love our spouse or not, or whether we've spent time with God. We want to do what we want to do.
Speaker 1:You know, I was reading through Samuel just today. Actually he was talking about David and the episode with Bathsheba, and if you're not familiar with the story, david was king, had pretty much everything he'd ever wanted, and he saw this real pretty woman and decided that he wanted her too. The problem was that she was married, and she was married to one of the men in his army, but that didn't stop him. So he slept with her and got her pregnant and then tried to get the husband to come home from the army, which is where he should have been in the first place. David should have been to come home Ostensibly ostensibly to carry a message from the commander. He came home, gave the message to David and David's trying to get him to go home and sleep with his wife so that he can cover up the pregnancy. Uriah won't do it, says. You know, all of the men are out there in the field. They're fighting and they're sleeping in these tents and the conditions are really bad. How could I go home to my wife and make love to her and eat and drink while they're all out in the field. Obviously I'm much better man than David. They're all out in the field. Obviously a much better man than David. And so David sends him back to the army with his own death warrant in his hand Uriah doesn't know it, and the commander ends up putting him in the battle and getting him killed, just like David told him to. So the wife mourns for her husband for a little while, and then David takes her in as his wife. But God saw this and it ended up being an absolute debacle. The kid died. It just was not good.
Speaker 1:The encouraging thing is that David, with all his mistakes, was still a man after God's own heart and that he knew he wasn't perfect. But he immediately repented, at least when somebody caught him in the act. Right. But so often today we want to do all the same bad things, but then we want to pretend like they're not bad. We don't have David's heart, we're not immediately repentant, we're not immediately sorry, we don't immediately turn to God and seek his forgiveness. We don't understand that there's consequences for our actions and trust God. And so you see Samuel Adams comment here it doesn't matter how good the constitution or the laws, if we don't have a heart after God, it won't matter, and it doesn't. We can see that today. You. All you have to do is look around. He, therefore, is the truest friend to the liberty of his country, who tries most to promote its virtue and and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man. The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of heaven, let us become a virtuous people.
Speaker 1:I really wish I had that whole quote in front of me right now, but I don't. Our founders talk about virtue again and again, about virtue again and again. And make no mistake if somebody tries to tell you that it's just some kind of generic, random universal virtue out there. They're talking about the principles of Christ, virtues laid out by God and his son, jesus Christ. You go back to that quote from FDR. The more true we have been to those principles, the better off we've been as a nation. And you know it's interesting here.
Speaker 1:I had somebody talking to me the other day about who we were going to vote for in the fall. And you really don't have a choice. Neither candidate is perfect. Both of them have quite a few issues, but it gets down to virtue, it gets down to values. You don't have a perfect candidate, so you have to vote for the one that's closest or striving toward perfection in the sense that they stand closest to those values and how they act politically. So, for example, neither candidate seems to be completely pro-life, which is really sad, considering that's the first inalienable right listed in the declaration. And so for a Christian, you have a couple choices. You can either vote for nobody or write somebody else in which is valid, or, if you feel like one of those people is for sure going to win, then you vote for the one that's closest to standing for life, that stands for life the most, and so you get as close as you can to perfection, to Jesus Christ, to those values.
Speaker 1:I think that's what Sam Adams was talking about here. So far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man. We've chosen a lot of people over the last several decades that are not very virtuous and that are definitely not wise, and we're suffering for it, and you can make all sorts of comments about the importance of primaries and the choices that we've got are just so horrible, and there's a lot of validity in all of those kind of comments. But the bottom line is, folks, every chance we get as Christians we ought to be voting in whatever way we can that moves the needle a little bit closer toward Jesus Christ. It's like CS Lewis said every single decision we make, every action we take, every single day moves us a little bit closer to God and Jesus Christ and good, or a little bit closer to the devil and evil. And so when you go into that voting booth, each time whether it's local election, a state election, a federal election you ought to be doing whatever you can with your vote to move that needle toward God and Jesus Christ and those perfect principles. And then you walk out, folks. It's like I had so many coaches tell me over the years you put everything on the field and you leave it there. You give everything you've got while you're playing, and then you walk away and you let God sort it out.
Speaker 1:John Quincy Adams, duty is ours, results are God's, and we may already have gone too far, folks. I've said that a lot on this podcast. We may have already gone so far away from God that the nation is going to fail. Maybe we have a civil war coming. Maybe we choose to willingly submit to the evil of the left, maybe there's a miracle by God, who knows? Our job is to keep striving toward God and Jesus Christ and that was the job of our nation. That was the job you know. We read through that, all those comments a few weeks ago in that series about Justice Brewer's opinion where he went through all of the, from Columbus to the charters and colonies, to just before the states, to the charters and colonies, to just before the states, to the states. That used to be. The job of our nation Was to strive toward those principles of Christ and to help spread Christianity to the world To save as many people as possible. Obviously, we've fallen a long way.
Speaker 1:I read this quote a couple days ago, samuel Adams writing to John Adams, and basically it's talking about the fact that we need to instruct our children. Well, I'll read it real quick. Let diviners and philosophers, statesmen and patriots unite their endeavors to renovate the age by impressing the minds of men with the importance of educating their little boys and girls, of inculcating in minds of youth, the fear and love of the deity and universal philanthropy and, in subordination to these great principles, the love of their country, of instructing them in the art of self-government, without which they never can act, a wise part in the government of societies, great or small, in short, leading them in the study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system. And the response by John Adams, on October the 18th of 1790, was you, and I agree. Excuse me. Excuse me One more and we'll end.
Speaker 1:I conceive we cannot better express ourselves than by humbly supplicating the supreme ruler of the world that the confusions that are and have been among the nations may be overruled by the promoting and speedily bringing in the holy and happy period when the kingdoms of our Lord and Savior, jesus Christ, may be everywhere established and the people willingly bow to the scepter of Him who is the Prince of Peace. One last I know we're going to go over with this, but it's really important. This was in his will, samuel Adams, in his will. Principally and first of all, I resign my soul to the almighty being who gave it, and my body I commit to the dust, relying on the merits of Jesus Christ for the part of my sins. The only hope we have, folks, is Jesus Christ. There is no other hope, no other name on this planet that can save us besides Jesus Christ. 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.