If you were the only person alive, Christ would still go to the cross

We ask hard questions about time, distraction, and purpose, then turn to Scripture to find wisdom, gratitude, and courage for daily life. We read from James 1, Psalm 116, and Proverbs 27, revisit original Columbus journal entries, and invite you to thank God and tend what matters.

• examining how we spend the last 24 hours
• weighing social media, sports, and entertainment against prayer and family
• James 1 on trials, wisdom, and divided loyalties
• Psalm 116 on gratitude, vows, and God’s rescue
• Proverbs 27 on stewardship of flocks and provision
• Thanksgiving as thanking God, not mere festivity
• you are God’s prized possession and dearly loved
• Horace Greeley on Scripture and freedom
• reading Columbus’s journals and evaluating primary sources
• closing prayer and blessing

If you get a chance and you can read Countryside, if you enjoy it, if you believe a review online, uh Middle Grade Fantasy book, you can find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. There's two books published, and I'm working on the third. And if you find that you can give three or five dollars to the podcast each month, there's a donation page on the Buzz Sprout website, and I would be grateful for both of those things.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome, Prayer, Intent
• 2:48 How Did You Spend Your Time
• 4:10 Weighing Habits: God, Family, Distractions
• 4:54 Reading James 1: Trials and Wisdom
• 7:21 Reading Psalm 116: Gratitude and Rescue
• 9:00 Reading Proverbs 27: Stewardship and Provision
• 9:45 Thanksgiving’s Purpose: Thank God
• 11:10 You Are God’s Prized Possession
• 11:49 Columbus Journals: Purpose and Crosses
• 12:10 Greeley’s Quote: Freedom and Scripture
• 15:15 Encounters with Arawak: Gentleness and Conversion
• 18:30 Motives, Trade, and Prohibitions
• 20:25 Book Plug and Support
• 20:40 Providence and Christian Celebration

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Hey folks, this is Jesse Coeff, back with another episode of the American Soul Podcast. Hope y'all are doing well. Wherever y'all are in whatever part of the day you're in. Sure do 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 it will give us all some extra tools or a toolbox. For those of y'all that continue to share the podcast with others and tell others about it, thank you. For those of y'all who continue to pray for me and for the podcast, thank you. I'm very grateful for your prayers. Need 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 sin. Through the merit of your sin, Jesus Christ. Help us, Father, to help those that have less than we do. Help us to help our country. Here in America, around the world, wherever people are listening, turn back to you. Guide our steps, be with our leaders, be with our military and our law enforcement. Be with our ICE agents, in particular here in America, and their families. Keep them safe. Protect them from the evil men and women who come against them. Help us to defeat those evils. Push back against that evil. Bless their marriages. If they're married. Help us to trust in you. Father in all things. Whether we can figure it out or not. To know that you have what's best in mind for us. Eternally. Help us to lead them to you. To teach them your statutes. Forgive us our sins, Father. Forgive us when we turn away from you and we go our own way. Forgive us our cowardice and our unbelief. Help us to overcome them. Amen. How have you spent your last 24 hours? And then when you stretch that your last week, month, year, five years, ten years. But just focus on the last 24 hours. How have you spent it? Are you pleased with how you spent it? What did you give your time to? And the list of people and things that you could give your time to, are you pleased with how you spent it? And if you're not, try and change a little bit today, tomorrow. Five minutes, ten minutes. And and really stop and think about what are you getting out of whatever it is that you're giving your time to. You know, when it's it's a God, it's it's pretty obvious. You're developing a relationship with God and Jesus Christ, right? The God of the entire universe. That's pretty positive benefit. When it's your spouse, it's pretty obvious. When you're giving time for your spouse, you're strengthening your marriage, which makes life better for you and your spouse, for your children, for your community, your nation, right? So again, again, pretty positive. And a lot of times the negatives are pretty simple to see too. We just kind of make excuses so they don't look like negatives, right? Like, like what are we really getting out of social media? What are we really getting out of sports, TV, entertainment? And there may be there are some positives, folks. You know, you learn a little history. Or uh there's a few other things, but a lot of the time, how much are we really getting out of what we're giving? And I think the scale too often is tipped in the negative direction and not the positive. Scripture for today, we're going to start with James chapter 1, verses 1 through 18. This letter is from James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. I am writing to the twelve tribes, Jewish believers scattered abroad. Greetings. Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow. For when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing. If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking. But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver. For a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind. Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. Their loyalty is divided between God and the world. They are unstable in everything they do. Believers who are poor have something to boast about, for God has honored them. And those who are rich should boast that God has humbled them. They will fade away like a little flower in the field. The hot sun rises and the grass withers. The little flower droops and falls, and its beauty fades away. In the same way, the rich will fade away with all of their achievements. God blesses those who patiently endure testing and temptation. Afterward, they will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him. And remember, when you are being tempted, do not say, God is tempting me. God is never tempted to do wrong, and he never tempts anyone else. Temptation comes from our own desires, which entice us and drag us away. These desires give birth to sinful actions. And when sin is allowed to grow, it gives birth to death. So don't be misled, my dear brothers and sisters. Whatever is good and perfect is a gift coming down to us from God our Father, who created all the lights in the heavens. He never changes or casts a shifting shadow. He chose to give birth to us by giving us his true word, and we, out of all creation, became his prized possession. Psalm 116, verses 1 through 19. I love the Lord because he hears my voice and my prayer for mercy. Because he bends down to listen, I will pray as long as I have breath. Death wrapped its ropes around me, the terrors of the grave overtook me. I saw only trouble and sorrow. Then I called on the name of the Lord, please, Lord, save me. How kind the Lord is, how good he is, so merciful, this God of ours. The Lord protects those of child childlike faith. I was facing death and he saved me. Let my soul be at rest again. For the Lord has been good to me. He has saved me from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling, and so I walk in the Lord's presence as I live here on earth. I believed in you, so I said, I am deeply troubled, Lord. In my anxiety I cried out to you. These people are all liars. What can I offer the Lord for all he has done for me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and praise the Lord's name for saving me. I will keep my promises to the Lord in the presence of all his people. The Lord cares deeply when his loved ones die. O Lord, I am your servant, yes, I am your servant, born into your household. You have freed me from my chains. I will offer you a sacrifice of thanksgiving and call on the name of the Lord. I will fulfill my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people. In the house of the Lord, in the heart of Jerusalem, praise the Lord. Proverbs 27, verses 23 through 27. Know the state of your flocks and put your heart into caring for your herds, for riches don't last forever, and the crown might not be passed to the next generation. After the hay is harvested and the new crop appears, and the mountain grasses are gathered in, your sheep will provide wool for clothing, and your goats will provide the price of the field. And you will have enough goat's milk for yourself, your family, and your servants. You go back up to Psalm 116, verse 17. I will offer you a sacrifice of Thanksgiving. We in November each year on the podcast, we go through the Thanksgiving proclamations, which I'm always excited about, and I'm pretty excited about now. And we're getting really close. We need to remember that as Christians in a Christian nation, that the point of thanksgiving is to tell God thank you for the blessings he's bestowed. That it's not just football games and Macy Day parades and whatever else, and really just in general throughout the year, do we remember to tell God thank you for the blessings in our own lives and the life of our nation? I'm afraid that I do not too often. And then if you go back to 1 James or James 1, verse 18, and we out of all creation became his prized possession. Don't ever think that God doesn't cherish you. The best way I've heard this said, I think, is the comment that even if you, whoever you are, wherever you are, listening to the podcast today, even if you were the only human being in all of existence, Jesus Christ would have still gotten on that cross to die for you. That's how much God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit love you. Don't ever forget that, folks. I wanted to throw in one quote real quick before we get back into Christopher Columbus from Horace Greeley. So many of the problems today that we have, folks, are because we don't know God's word. We don't study it, we don't meditate on it, we don't make it part of our daily lives. And it's a quote we've used here on the podcast often. Says it is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a Bible-reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom. So much of the confusion that we have today, the problems, the manipulation that we have succumbed to is simply because we don't know the Bible. So again, we're going to read a little bit about Christopher Columbus, because that's what we do each year on the podcast. And it's important because there's the left has done such a phenomenal job of revising and editing history that it's important to actually go back and read history. And we are going to talk about indigenous people. I've been telling you that. I think maybe tomorrow we'll talk about some of the indigenous people that they ran into in particular. But it's not going to line up really well with the Indigenous People's Day group. So we'll get back into this. This is from the original journal of the first voyage that was copied by Bartolome de los Casas. November 27, 1492. But now, please our Lord, I shall see the most that I may, and little by little I shall come to understand and know. And I will have this language taught to people of my household, because I see that all so far have one language. And afterwards the benefits will be known, and it will be endeavored to have these folk Christians, for that will easily be done since they have no religion, nor are they idolaters. And I say that your Highness ought not to consent that any foreigner does business or sets foot here except Christian Catholics, since this was the end and the beginning of the enterprise, that it should be for the enhancement and glory of the Christian religion. Nor should anyone who is not a good Christian come to these parts. That's a pretty big deal right there, that that was, what did he say? Since this was the end and the beginning of the enterprise, right? It's for the glory and enhancement of Christianity. December twelfth, fourteen ninety two. Columbus raised a great cross at the entrance of the harbor of Montesquieu Bay on the northwest coast of the island of Hispaniola as a sign that your Highnesses hold the country for yours and principally for a sign of Jesus Christ our Lord and honor of Christianity. December sixteenth, fourteen ninety two, because they, the Arawak tribe, are the best people in the world, and above all the gentlest, I have much hope in our Lord that your Highness will make them all Christians, and they will be all yours as for yours I hold them. December twenty second, fourteen ninety-two. The Admiral ordered the Lord to be given some things, and he and his folk rested in great contentment, believing truly that they had come from the sky, and to see the Christians they held themselves very fortunate. December, that's one thing right there, folks. A lot of people made this comment when we were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan about how much the locals, the natives, the Iraqis and Afghanis didn't want us there. In my experience, the good ones, the ones that actually wanted peace for their country, they were extremely glad to see us there when we would come to different villages and places. December 24th, 1492. Your Highnesses may believe that in all the world there can be no better or gentler people. Your Highnesses should feel great joy because presently they will be Christians and instructed in the good manners of your realms. For a better people there cannot be on earth. And both people and land are in such quantity that I don't know how to write it. That doesn't make much sense coming from the hand of a man that merely came to rape, pillage, and plunder, folks, talking about how good these people are and how they will presently be Christians. On the first island that Columbus landed, San Salvador, meaning holy savior, they knelt and prayed, O Lord, Almighty and everlasting God, by thy holy word thou hast created the heaven and the earth and the sea. Blessed and glorified be thy name, and praised be thy majesty, which hath dined to use us, thy humble servants, that thy holy name may be proclaimed in this second part of the earth. They erected a cross on each island where they landed as a token of Jesus Christ our Lord and in honor of the Christian faith. Columbus's personal log, what was his purpose? To bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathens and bring the word of God to unknown coastlands. That's what he said his purpose was in seeking these undiscovered worlds. We'll read through one more. February 15th, 1493, on his return trip from having discovered America, he's riding to the king and queen from the caravel anchored at the Canary Islands. To the first island which I found, I gave the name San Salvador, holy savior, in recognition of his heavenly majesty, who marvelously hath given all this. The Indians call it Onahani. Probably murdered that folks, sorry. I forbade that they should be given things so worthless as pieces of broken crockery and broken glass and lace points, although when they were able to get them, they thought that they had the best jewel in the world. Thus it was learned that a sailor for a lace point received gold to the weight of two and a half castillions, and others much more for other things which were worth much less. Yea, for new Blancas, they would give them all that they had, although it might be two or three Castillians' weight of gold, or an aeroba or two of spun cotton. They even took pieces of the broken hoops of the wine casks, and like animals gave what they had so that it seemed to me wrong, and I forbade it. And I gave them a thousand good, pleasing things which I had brought in order that they might be fond of us, and furthermore might become Christians and be inclined to the love and service of their highnesses and of the whole Castilian nation, Spain, and try to help us and to give us the things which they have in abundance, which are necessary to us. And they know neither sect nor idolatry, with the exception that all believe that the source of all power and goodness is the sky, and they believe very firmly that I, with these ships and people, came from the sky, and in this belief they everywhere received me after they had overcome their fear. And this does not result from their being ignorant, for they are of a very keen intelligence in men who navigate all those seas, so that it is wonderful, wondrous the good account they give of everything, but because they have never seen people clothed or ships like ours. Praise be to our eternal God, our Lord, who gives to all those who walk in his ways victory over all things which seem impossible, of which this is signally one. For although others have spoken or written concerning these countries, it was all conjecture, as no one could say that he had seen them, it amounting only to this, that those who heard listened the more and regarded the matter rather as a fable than anything else. But our Redeemer has granted this victory to our illustrious king and queen and their kingdoms, which have acquired great fame by an event of such high importance, and which all Christendom ought to rejoice, and which it ought to celebrate with great festivals and the offering of solemn thanks to the Holy Trinity, with many sincere prayers, both for the great exaltation which may accrue to them in turning so many nations to our holy faith, and also for the temporal benefits which will bring great refreshment and gain not only to Spain but to all Christians. Done on board the caravel off the Canary Islands on the fifteenth day of February 1493, at your orders. The Admiral. 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 Lion is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen. God bless you all. God bless your families, God bless your marriages, God bless America, God bless your nation, wherever you are around the world. If you get a chance and you can read Countryside, if you enjoy it, if you believe a review online, uh Middle Grade Fantasy book, you can find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. There's two books published, and I'm working on the third. And if you find that you can give three or five dollars to the podcast each month, there's a donation page on the Buzz Sprout website, and I would be grateful for both of those things. We'll talk to y'all again real soon, folks. Looking forward to it.