The American Soul

Stop Praising Celebs And Start Thanking Your Spouse

• Jesse • Season 5 • Episode 126

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We press into James on faith that acts, daily priorities, and the gap between what we say and what we do. We challenge cultural favoritism, double standards on law and marriage, honor real courage, and rethink tidy myths about history.

• daily audit of time, prayer, and Scripture
• faith versus works and why deeds reveal belief
• warnings against favoritism and reckless speech
• marriage roles and the cost of neglect
• celebrity idolatry versus honoring quiet faithfulness
• consistent standards for law and immigration
• Medal of Honor profile of Dwight W. Birdwell
• historical notes on Columbus-era sources and nuance
• closing prayer and blessings

If you’re enjoying the podcast and feel like you can leave $3 a month or $5 a month, there’s a donation page on the Buzz Sprout website where you can do that for the podcast, and I would greatly appreciate that


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SPEAKER_00:

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 in whatever part of the day you're in. I'm sure to appreciate you joining me, giving me a little bit of your time, a little piece of your day. I will try and use it wisely. For those of y'all who continue to share the podcast with others, 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, 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 the time to record this podcast and the people that listen to it and share it. Please be with them, be with their families, guide them, bless them. Protect us from evil of any kind, Father. Surround us with your angels. Help us to do your will in all things each day. Help us to truly love your Son Jesus Christ and therefore to follow his command. To love you with our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Help us to trust you, Father, to trust that you have everything well in hand, that you know all of our tomorrows, and that we can take comfort in that, courage, and know that because of your promises, you're going to bring us home safe to you and to your son Jesus Christ. Help us to get our priorities in the right order, Father, to make sure that each day our priorities are lining up with your priorities. Be with those who are hurting, those who are alone, scared, injured, sick. Comfort them, heal their bodies. Be with their loved ones. Be with our leaders, president, vice president, admirals, generals, senators, representatives, judges, governors. Help them to rule in fear of you. Not in fear of man or woman. Be with our military and our law enforcement firefighters, EMS. Be with our ICE agents in particular right now, Father. Protect them, protect their families. Be with our pastors and our priests in the pulpit. Be with their wives and their children. Give them wisdom and courage and a strong faith. Help them to feel your presence. In the name of your son Jesus Christ, we ask and pray. Amen. How did you spend your last 24 hours, folks? Did you make time for God to read his word, to pray, talk to him, listen? And if you're married, did you make time for your spouse? Are you following your roles and responsibilities as very clearly laid out in Scripture? Or are you making excuses? Your spouse is only human, folks. And if you push them far enough away, there's always the possibility that they may not come back. Are you willing to gamble for one more day, even? What is supposed to be the most special, most unique, greatest blessing as far as relationships go here in this life? And if you're lucky enough to have a spouse that follows God's roles and responsibilities, do you make sure that they know that you know how blessed you are each day? And again, folks, it really just boils down to how did you spend the last 24 hours? What do you do with it? Are you pleased with how you spent it? If you look back on your time on social media, TV, sports, workouts, children, spouse, parents, God, Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, are you are you lining up with God's priorities? Are you pleased with how you spent the last 24 hours? You're never going to get that 24 hours back, folks. We're going to start with the scripture readings today. We're going to start with James chapter 1, verse 19 through chapter 2, verse 17. Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters. You must all be quick to learn, or quick quick to listen, maybe learn too, slow to speak and slow to get angry. Human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires. So get rid of all the filth and evil in your lives, and humbly accept the word God has planted in your hearts. For it has the power to save your souls. But don't just listen to God's word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves. For if you listen to the word and don't obey, it's like glancing at your face in a mirror. You see yourself, walk away, and forget what you look like. But if you look carefully into the perfect law that sets you free, and if you do what it says and don't forget what you heard, then God will bless you for doing it. If you claim to be religious but don't control your tongue, you are fooling yourself, and your religion is worthless. Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you. My dear brothers and sisters, how can you claim to have faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ if you favor some people over others? For example, suppose someone comes into your meeting dressed in fancy clothes and expensive jewelry, and another comes in who is poor and dressed in dirty clothes? If you give special attention and a good seat to the rich person, but you say to the poor one, you can stand over there or else sit on the floor. Well, doesn't this discrimination show that your judgments are guided by evil motives? Listen to me, dear brothers and sisters, hasn't God chosen the poor in this world to be rich in faith? Aren't they the ones who will inherit the kingdom he promised to those who love him? But you dishonor the poor. Isn't it the rich who oppress you and drag you into court? Aren't they the ones who slander Jesus Christ, whose noble name you bear? Yes, indeed, it is good when you obey the royal law as found in Scriptures. Love your neighbor as yourself. But if you favor some people over others, you are committing a sin. You are guilty of breaking the law. For the person who keeps all of the laws except one is as guilty as a person who has broken all of God's laws. For the same God who said you must not commit adultery also said you must not murder. So if you murder someone but do not commit adultery, you have still broken the law. So whatever you say or whatever you do, remember that you will be judged by the law that sets you free. There will be no mercy for those who have not shown mercy to others. But if you have been merciful, God will be merciful when he judges you. What good is it, dear brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but don't show it by your actions? Can that kind of faith save anyone? Suppose you see a brother or sister who has no food or clothing and you say goodbye, and have a good day. Stay warm and eat well. But then you don't give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do? So you see faith by itself isn't enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless. Praise him, all you people of the earth, for his unfailing love for us is powerful. The Lord's faithfulness endures forever. Praise the Lord. Proverbs 28:1. The wicked run away when no one is chasing them, but the godly are as bold as lions. Alright, there's a ton of good stuff here. I'm gonna try and remember four things out of James. One is just at the end, and I'm surprised this needs to be said, but apparently it does today, folks. You don't get into heaven by works. When James is talking about works here, needing works, it's to illustrate the faith. The faith is what gets you in. But if we have real faith, it has to produce works. I hope that's really clear, folks. It should be. It's not confusing or it shouldn't be confusing. The works are not, you can't earn your way in. But if you don't have works, then you don't really have faith. Faith is what opens the door to heaven, not the works. But if you have faith, you're going to have works. You're going to show people your faith by your works. The three things were really from the comments about being hypocritical here, treating people differently. And I thought of three examples while we were reading through this. I'll see if I can remember all three. The first one is feminism in marriage. And there's a lot of, and it goes back to this verse talking about if you if you come if you don't murder anybody, or if you if you don't commit adultery, but you murder somebody, you're still guilty under the law, right? And and so a lot of times you see women in the church who are married, who have the status of being married, point out the failings of immodesty, sleeping around, and yet they don't go home and satisfy their husbands, as scripture says. It's no better. Another way that we see this is he he talks here about you know, the poor are rich in faith. The rich are the ones who drag you into court, oppress you, slander Jesus Christ. How often do we give preeminence to movie stars and professional and college athletes, pop singers, right, public figures that are tearing our nation down, destroying America, slandering our faith, slandering Jesus Christ, and we give them all of this credit and praise and honor and time and energy, and yet the people that aren't rich, that don't have enough, the husbands and wives who actually follow Scripture, who mind their own business, who lead quiet lives, who work hard, who raise children properly, who exemplify the relationship between Christ and the church through their marriage as husband and wife, those are the ones that we treat with contempt. We've got it all backwards, folks. We give all this credit to people that are destroying our country, and we give so little credit to the men and women who are building our nation and making it stronger. And then the last one where the hypocrisy comes in, uh where he's he's talking about treating different people by different standards is illegal immigration. Anytime, and and this really applies to all of these folks. Anytime, like if you want to look at a marriage and you see uh a husband or a wife demanding that their spouse follows their roles and responsibilities, all you have to do to see if they're really genuine is say, okay, well, you you agree about your roles and responsibilities too, right? And if they start to make excuses, if they start to say, oh, well, it's out of context, then you know that they're not really genuine. Illegal immigration, especially people that try and throw the Old Testament verses in there from the Bible, just use the bank robbing analogy of an American citizen. How would we treat an American citizen who broke into a bank and robbed that bank? How would we treat them if they were married? How would we treat their spouse? How would we treat their children? Does it matter? So if they're married and they broke into a bank, do we suddenly not arrest them and send them to jail? What if they're the breadwinner? What if they're the provider? What if that wife and child are going to be destitute? Do we does that factor into the equation? No, of course not. So why would we have a different standard? Why would we undermine the law for non-citizens who also happen to automatically be criminals when we wouldn't do that for American citizens? All right. I forgot the other day, so I'm trying to remember today. Our medal of honor for today is Dwight W. Birdwell. Vietnam War, Specialist 5, Charlie Troop, 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 25th Infantry Division, U.S. Army. January 31st, 1968, Pan San Nutt Air Base, Vietnam. Specialist 5 Dwight W. Birdwell distinguished himself by acts of gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty while serving with Charlie Troop, 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 25th Infantry Division in the Republic of Vietnam on 31 January 1968. On this date, Charlie Troop was ordered to move south to help repel an enemy attack on Tanson Nutt Air Base. As the Charlie Troop column of tanks and armored personnel carriers approached the west gate of Tanson Nutt Air Base, it came under intense enemy fire from a building to its right. Unbeknownst to Charlie Troop, it had driven directly into an enemy force consisting of three battalions. The column tried to push through the initial attack, but their lead tank, crippled by a rocket propelled grenade explosion, was blocking the way forward. Charlie Troop immediately came under heavy enemy fire from both sides of the road. Specialist 5 Birdwell, upon seeing that his tank commander was wounded by enemy fire, immediately went to his aid. Under intense enemy fire, he lowered the injured tank commander to the ground and moved him to safety. Specialist 5 Birdwell then, with complete disregard for his own safety, mounted the tank and assumed the tank commander's position. Standing in the tank commander's hatch, with the upper half of his body exposed to heavy enemy fire, Specialist 5 Birdwell used the tank's 50 caliber machine gun and 90 millimeter main gun to suppress the enemy attack. With the ammunition for the 90 millimeter main gun exhausted, he continued to fire the 50 caliber machine gun until it overheated. At this point, Specialist 5 Birdwell, rather than abandoning his position, continued to engage the enemy with his M-16 rifle, sometimes exposing his entire body to enemy fire in order to engage the enemy from a better vantage point. When a U.S. helicopter crashed nearby, Specialist 5 Birdwell under withering enemy fire dismounted and moved to the helicopter, where he retrieved two M-60 machine guns and ammunition. After giving one M-60 and ammunition to a fellow soldier, he remounted his tank and used the other M-60 to again engage the enemy. Specialist 5 Birdwell continued to engage the enemy with complete disregard for his own safety until the M-60 he was firing was hit by enemy fire. Specialist 5 Birdwell, now wounded in the face, neck, chest, and arms, dismounted the tank, but refused to be medically evacuated. Instead, under enemy fire, he rallied fellow soldiers to advance toward the front of the armored column, where they set up a defensive perimeter by a large tree. From this position, he and other soldiers engaged the enemy with M-16 fire and grenades. As the enemy fire lessened, Specialist 5 Birdwell gathered ammunition from disabled vehicles and helped wounded soldiers move to safer positions. His leadership and tenacity under fire inspired the other Charlie troop soldiers to continue fighting against the superior enemy force and directly contributed to the enemy's ultimate defeat. Specialist 5 Birdwell's extraordinary heroism and selflessness above and beyond the call of duty were in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit, and the United States Army. Accredited to Bell Adair County, Oklahoma, not awarded posthumously, presented July 5th, 2022 at the White House by President Joseph Biden. Born January 19, 1948, Amarillo, Potter County, Texas. Dwight W. Birdwell. All right, so we're going to read some from Columbus today about the natives. I told you that for a couple days. We're not going to have enough time to read both of the excerpts that I wanted to today, so maybe we'll read the other one tomorrow. But think about the fact that the Indigenous People's Day narrative that we hear so often as we're going through this. So January 13th, 1943, Columbus writing in his journal about his first encounter with the Canabs or Caribs, which originates from Caribbean. The English word cannibal is derived from the Spanish word carob, which means piranha. Seeing them, the Caribs, running toward them, the Christians gave an enemy a great slash on the buttocks, and wounded another in the breast with an arrow, seeing that they could gain little, although the Christians were not more than seven, they, the Caribs, fifty and more, began to flee, until not one remained, one leaving his arrows here and another his bow there. The Christians would have killed many of them, it is said, if the pilot who went with them as their captain had not prevented it. The Christians returned to the caravel with the boat, and when the admiral knew of it, he said that on the one hand he was sorry, and on the other not, since they would have fear of the Christians, because without doubt, says he, the folk there are bad actors, as one says, and he believed that they were Caribs and ate men. Yeah, we'll read the other one. We're gonna go over for a minute or so, I'm sorry. In 1495, Michel de Cueno, Sueno, I don't know, a young Italian nobleman, uh recounted further evidence of the cannibalistic Caribs. The Caribs had attacked the fort and killed all of his men that he left behind at the settlement of La Navidad. That's just a little other piece. In that island, Saint Maria de Guadalupe, we took twelve very beautiful and very fat women for fifteen to sixteen years old, together with two boys of the same age. These had the genital organ cut to the belly, and this we thought had been done in order to prevent them from meddling with their wives or maybe to fatten them up and later eat them. The boys and girls had been taken by the above mentioned carobs, and we sent them to Spain to the king as a sample. The Caribs, whenever they catch these Indians, eat them as we would eat kids, goats, and they say that a boy's flesh tastes better than that of a woman. Of this human flesh they are very greedy, so that to eat the flesh they stay out of the country for six, eight, or even ten years before they repatriate, and they stay so long wherever they go that they depopulate the islands. We went to the temple of those carobs, in which we found two wooden statues arranged so that they looked like a pieta. We were told that whenever someone's father is sick, the son goes to the temple and tells the idol that his father is ill, and the idol says whether he should live or not, and he stays there until the idol answers yes or no. If he says no, the son goes home, cuts his feathers father's head off, and then cooks it. I don't believe they eat it, but truly, when it is white, they place it in the above mentioned temple, and this they do only to the Lord's. That idol is called Sith something. According to what we have seen in all the islands where we have been, both the Indians and the Caribs are largely sod sodomites, not knowing, I believe, whether they are acting right or wrong. We have judged that this accursed vice may have come to the Indians from those Caribs, because these, as I said before, are wilder men, and when conquering and eating those Indians for spite, they may also have committed that extreme offense, which preceding thence may have been transmitted from one to the other. Aaron Ross Powell That's a little bit of actual history of some of the natives, folks. Just it's not that the natives were all bad. It's not that the Europeans were all bad. The problem is the narrative today has been that the Europeans were horrible and that the natives lived this utopic lifestyle where everyone was perfect and wonderful and things were grand, and that's just simply not the case. If you're looking for a family fun, middle grade read and get a chance, I would humbly ask you to check out Countryside, two books in the series, working on the third. And if you enjoy it, if you would leave a review somewhere online, that helps so much. And if you're enjoying the podcast, getting something out of it, and you feel like you can leave$3 a month or$5 a month, uh there's a donation page on the Buzz Sprout website where you can do that for the for the podcast, and I would greatly appreciate that. 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, power, and the glory forever and ever. Amen. God bless y'all, God bless your marriages, God bless your families, God bless America, God bless your nation, wherever you are around the world. Listen, folks. We'll talk to y'all again real soon. Looking forward to it.