Eddie is full of despair. He wants to give up and take the welfare checks forever. He said the best time of his life was COVID, because he got to watch TV and got $600 a week for doing nothing. What would you say to Eddie?

Hey, welcome to Politics by Faith, brought to you by the Patriot Gold Corp. We have a really interesting moment in the show today. Eddie, from Massachusetts, called in. It all built to this, so let me give a quick review. We started off talking about Alexis de Tocqueville and how when he came to America in 1831 and wrote, in 1835, Democracy in America, he talked about what tyranny will look like

in this free country we call America. Now here we are 200 years later and he was spot on. That turned into a conversation about personal responsibility. We've talked a lot about making America healthy again lately on the show and it's great.

You talk about RFK getting rid of food dyes and all these other things, okay? But that has its limits. That's, let's just say, half of the equation. We can debate over what percent it is, but let's say half. There's another half, if we really want to make the difference that needs to be made.

So, sure, we can take the red dye 40 out of Froot Loops. But also, maybe we shouldn't eat Froot Loops. You with me? We'll take the red dye out of it, but also we shouldn't eat it at all. So what could happen is we take the red dye

out of Froot Loops and then we just eat a bunch of Froot Loops still. Are we gonna be healthier? No, maybe, I guess, but not really.

We're not gonna be healthy.

Maybe we'll be healthier, but we're not gonna be healthy. So that got into a conversation about hillbillyology and some tough love that J.D. Vance, our next vice president, gave us in that book. He wrote, we read a bunch, but let's do this. J.D. said, psychologists call it learned helplessness.

When a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes of my life. Whenever people ask me what I'd like to most change about the white working class, I say the feeling that our choices don't matter. The message of the right is increasingly, it's not your fault that you're a loser, it's the government's fault.

I don't know what the answer is precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better. People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown, Ohio. You can walk through a town where 30% of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness. A lot of students just don't understand what's out there. A teacher told me, shaking her

head, you have these kids who plan on being baseball players who don't even play on the high school team because the coaches mean to them. There's a cultural moment in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government and that movement gains adherence by the day. So we talked about learned helplessness, we had some people call in who work in welfare offices

and what they've seen, some people work as therapists, some addiction counselors. And then we had someone call in who's like in the exercise world and he's like, just go get him, like get to work, bootstraps, workout, that whole thing, like let's go.

And it was great. And then Eddie called in. Eddie is 56, works at a printing press and Eddie is tired he's tired he said I got my bachelor's degree didn't help I make $23 an hour he's got a wife and two kids and he wants to give up and so we just did all the show about you know let's go let's get going, motivational talk, be better, all the rest.

And he's like, I just want to give up. And I just want to take the welfare check. So does that make me a bad person? He said the best time of his life was COVID. Got 600 bucks a week, check in the mail, didn't do nothing. Watch TV all day.

I've never talked to this person. I've never talked to someone like this.

And then we had to take a break.

And I'm like, all right, well, let's, what do we do for Eddie? What do we say? What do you say to someone who's tired? Let's meet him where he is first.

I feel for him.

He's been working his whole life, making $23 an hour. He got his bachelor's degree because everyone told him to. So he got scammed.

Let's just be real about it. It's a scam.

hour. He got his bachelor's degree because everyone told him to. So he got scammed. Let's just be real about it. It's a scam. Oh you're gonna make this much more. He won't and he didn't. So that was a waste of time and money and I'd feel really bitter about that too. First thing that comes to mind is sloth. Sloth is bad. Sloth is a sin. If you read Dante's Inferno, which you should, layer five is sloth. And the punishment for people who lived in this sin

is you are drowning in the river Styx for all of eternity. And so you're in perpetual drowning forever. And you're stuck underneath the water and you can't climb your way to the top because you lived a life of such sloth that you can't even be bothered to try to get up

and breathe inside Dante's Inferno here. So you're just stuck underneath drowning constantly forever. So Eddie has that sloth in him. We all do. It's all part of our sinful nature, some more than others. And I think someone has called, he said the word spark.

That word stuck out to me, whether maybe he didn't say it, maybe the Holy Spirit did, but I heard the word spark and I think what I would say to Eddie is you're never going to get the money you want. That was part of it.

All right.

23 bucks an hour.

It's not going to happen, man. It's not. You're never going to live that life of wealth. And that's hard in today's world because I've talked to many World War II veterans who are like, I grew up in poverty. I didn't even know it.

So now if you grow up not making a lot of money, you know it. So that's hard. And it's never going to happen. You're never going to get ahead. So you just got to put that aside. And you got to be content with 23 an hour.

But the good news is, that's not the point of life. When you go to heaven, it's not based off of, or when you die, and God's deciding whether or not you go to heaven or not, it's not based off how much money you make per hour. Not even close. And while we're here on earth, it's all about your daily bread. So we got to focus, be grateful for that

and then focus on the things that are in our control. That is serving the Lord and loving people. It doesn't matter how much money you make. You can make a million a year. Loving God and your neighbor and serving your wife and kids is the most important thing right now. When you die, Eddie, no one is going to be at your funeral and say, Here lieth a man who made $23 an hour.

Well, it's possible that your kids could say, here's my dad who loved me and played with me and helped me when I needed him and listened to me and worked so hard, got up every day and worked hard at the printing press and was able to scrape together what he could

and bought this thing for me for Christmas one year and I'll never forget it and all that whatever right but those stories are still within your reach even if you're only making $23 an hour so if that's getting you down you gotta refocus your life on something else because you're never going to find fulfillment in your job and maybe you shouldn't either but there are other parts of your life where you can definitely still find that fulfillment. Now I know that's easy for me to say.

I'm not on my feet nine hours a day like he is. That was the best I could offer something like that. We had a bunch of other calls after that saying, hey man, there's no freedom in that life that you think you want. And this is what Alexis de Tocqueville talked about. You think sitting on the couch watching TV all day is freedom, but it's not. Someone called

in and said, sitting and watching TV all day, that is the life of someone in jail. Someone in jail sits around and watches TV all day. And so does Eddie. So he's incarcerating himself. I always go back to the Bible, this may not speak, I bet it speaks to everyone listening to this podcast, but not to everyone on SiriusXM radio, but I mean it's all in the Bible, Colossians 3, 23, it says, whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men.

That's so incredibly insightful. You're not working for you or money or this business or the man. You're working for God and your work glorifies Him. Our pilgrims knew this profoundly. Sloth is running away from your responsibilities. It's running away from heartily working.

It's running away from your potential. And you're choosing to remain spiritually and morally stagnant. I read someone said you're running away from God and the fullness of life He's offering you. You're not cultivating the gifts and the talents that God gave you or the people that he put you around, put around you.

You're not participating in God's continual work of creation and redemption. You're just giving up on it all. And that's sinful. The Greek word is akidia. It means absence of care.

I read this, spiritual listlessness. This is how the fourth century Egyptian monk, Avargrius Ponticus, describes Aikidia, the spiritual malaise whose name has no equivalent in a modern language and whose nuances include disgust with life, boredom, discouragement. This is Eddie Tuati, if you heard his voice. Laziness, sleepiness, melancholy, sadness, lack of enthusiasm and motivation. Aikidia is a sort of asphyxiation or suffocation of the spirit that condemns those

who suffer from it to unhappiness by causing them to reject what they have or the situation in which they live, whether it's work, emotional, social, and to dream about another situation that's unattainable. That's it. That's perfect. That's the old, that's the biblical word, the Greek word, I'm rejecting, I'm unhappy because I'm rejecting where I am, and I'm going to dream about another situation and just become bitter about it, and then not care and give up and be discouraged and all the rest.

I bought a couple of books on Puritan prayers. That's all this, just prayers that the Puritans gave, said. And a common theme of all of them is our own wretchedness, which is not very fashionable today, but also how weary life is in our fallen world. It is a weary world. Weary is a great word, isn't it?

Weary.

Here's one of these prayers. I confess my sin, my frequent sin, my sinful, my willful sin. All my powers of body and soul are defiled. A fountain of pollution is deep within my nature. There are chambers of foul images within my being. I have gone from one odious room to another, walk in a no-man's land of dangerous imaginations, pried into the secrets of my fallen nature. I am utterly ashamed that I am what I am in myself.

I have no green shoot in me nor fruit but thorn and thistles. I am a fading leaf that the wind drives away. I live bare and barren as a winter tree, unprofitable, fit to be honed down and burnt. Lord, you have mercy on me. To just live in that state is no good. And that's where Eddie is. He's just there.

But then we have God. Oh, what blessedness accompanies devotion, when under all the trials that weary me, the cares that corrode me, the fears that disturb me, the infirmities that oppress me, I can come to you in my need and feel peace beyond understanding." That's what Eddie doesn't have, the peace beyond understanding. The Puritan said,

Let me willingly accept misery, sorrow, temptations, if I can thereby feel sin is the greatest evil and be delivered from it with gratitude to you acknowledging this as the highest testimony of your love once you know how depraved you are that just makes you all the more grateful for your salvation and I know it's maybe is it a sin to be discouraged in the moment I don't know. Elijah, my favorite story in the Bible.

I usually in my brain like stop the story after the triumph of it all. But when he's done, he gives up. He's like, I can't go on. The Bible says, but he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. This is actually the most triumphant, amazing man that's ever happened. And he asked that he might die, saying, It is enough now, O Lord.

Take away my life, for I am no better than my father's. This weariness is real. But God didn't let Elijah die, and God calls for us to go on, and to be content, to love God and love others. That's all we're called for in this life. So I don't know, I can ramble on forever.

I don't have any advice for Eddie. Other than to simplify to the most basic things ever. This is what happens whenever you're in trouble. Go to the basics. Okay, what's the purpose of life? To glorify God and enjoy him forever.

Do that and that's a really good start.

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Russel Moore wrote a piece in Christianity Today "HOW TO GET THROUGH THE NEXT FOUR YEARS". We can do better than that. We're commanded to do more than that. One of the fruits of the spirit is Joy. This is true no matter who the president is.

Welcome to Politics by Faith, brought to you by the Patriot Gold Group. Came across an article the other day, How to Get Through the Next Four Years. It was an article in Christianity Today. How to get through the next four years. I said, that's interesting. I'll click.

Kind of a downer because I don't want anyone just getting through life I'm reading a book right now on the pilgrims Where is it here? It is the Mayflower the families the voyage and the founding of America by Rebecca Frazier. It's great Even on their two-month journey across the ocean, which is more miserable than anything we could ever imagine cold a hundred foot swells You know constantly rocking rotting food,

rotting moldy clothes, you're always wet, chamber pots, women giving birth. Can you believe all of this? And when you're under the deck, the ceilings are five feet tall, stinks, just horrific, for two months.

And as difficult as that was, they never lost hope. They prayed, they sang, they weren't getting through. As miserable and awful as it was, they still weren't getting through. Whether it was the two months of the boat ride

or even the five more months that they had to wait on shore where half of them died, they were singing songs and praying and full of hope, as miserable as it was. And here's Russell Moore, like how are we gonna get through? Now we should be people of joy. We're called to be. Romans 14 17 says, for the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and

peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. And then of course the fruits of the Spirit. What are the fruits of the Spirit? Love, joy. It's the second one. I don't know if they're in ranked order, but the second one is joy. Joy is not getting through this. If you're just getting through, you're not joyful.

I don't know anything about Russell Moore. Maybe you do, I don't, I don't really care. One of the comments to this article was, oh please, you wouldn't have written this if Kamala won. That's probably right. This guy's pretty depressed.

He tells a story of at the airport, and, you know, what do you think of the election? He's like, what do you think of the election? He says, the last thing I wanted to talk about after ten years of talking about him was Donald Trump.

But the news cycle will be the Donald Trump show all day every day for four more years. But it turns out most people liked the drama just fine. Meaning they voted for him. Can you believe it? So here we go.

He said, there's very little any of us can do to control the next four years, with a new cycle that will be like the last near decade, all Trump all the time. Maybe, let me get back to that. Let me quote a little more here.

What we call politics these days, offers people a sense of meaning and purpose, an interruption to the dead everydayness of life. A jolt of adrenaline can feel almost like life for a little while. This kind of political drama is related to actual political life, the way that pornography is to intimacy.

Porn gives the same physical sensation as a sexual union. The nervous system responds the way it's meant to respond in the union of a husband and a wife. It just does so by getting rid of the love, the connection, the other person. In other words, he gives the physical sense without what actually brings about the joy. I actually, I should like that.

I mean, that's true. He says, you don't need to be part of some make-believe drama. You don't need to adopt some politician as a father figure. No one is. You have an actual father who's making plans for you. And when you realize how temporary, how fleeting, and how pitiful much of what is counted as

glory is in this moment, you can learn how to love it without placing on it the burden of making you happy or driving you crazy. You always come to hate our idols, whatever they are, because they never give us what we want. The news cycle will be crazy for the next 40 years. You don't have to be.

Okay, some of that I agree with. He's in a lot of despair over Trump winning. That's fine, I get it. I'd be upset if Kamala won too, so we'll give him some grace, give him some more time to get over I guess but this idea that like Trump's gonna be so much trouble like what are you talking about we have no trouble you think Trump's gonna be

trouble give me a break talk about privilege you know we live in the freest country in the world and when the left is in charge who was it who persecuted Christians like with the FACE Act putting pro-life Christians in prison, grandmas in prison. Listen, you're going to have a government that won't do that anymore. That's good, right?

Should we at least celebrate that? There's plenty of trouble in life, yes, but it has nothing to do with Trump. Someone called in on my radio show the other day on Sirius XM Patriot, and they said that a friend on Facebook said that when Trump won,

this woman, she said she felt the same she did after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. And this guy was like, oh, oh no, no, that's not healthy. That's not it at all. And this caller had such a good heart, he didn't want to rub it in her face, he didn't want to gloat.

He wanted, like I do, just to prove her wrong in our actions over the next couple years. And I think that's the right approach, to prove someone wrong and then graciously, hopefully it's apparent on their own, but if not, to communicate what is true.

I just like that heart a lot, but we can't, we can't become resentful. Let me quote John MacArthur, we can't become resentful and then full of hate and then this like grumpy, oh, how are we going to get through the next one? No, no, no, no.

This is John MacArthur. He said, we don't like the way the world is, do we? And we don't like the way things are going in our world today. We don't like it. We don't like the attack on truth. We don't like the attack on honesty, dignity, morality.

We don't like the attack on the family. We don't like it. We don't like the elevation of moral perversion. We don't like the escalating crime. We don't like the horrors of terrorism. We don't like any of that.

We resent it. We resent it with a holy resentment. But we can't cross a line where all of a sudden our resentment of that becomes the resentment of the people who are captive to the kingdom of darkness. That's so good. Our goal is not to just survive and get through it.

And our job isn't to fight the enemy. Really, our job is to win the enemy. MacArthur says we have to be the light of the gospel to the very ones that persecute us. So how do we fight back to win the enemy, you have to have a passion for goodness. How about that answer?

Is that satisfying? I don't know. That may not be satisfying. It's true, though. How do you win the enemy? You have to have a passion for goodness.

Peter said, who is there to harm you if you prove zealous for what is good? Notice, right there in the Bible. Who's there to harm you if you prove zealous for what is good? So Russell Moore, like, wants to get through the next four years. I just want to focus on what's good. I want to be zealous for it.

And that woman who's in such despair, like when she got diagnosed with cancer, I just want to be zealous for good. And even if throughout this process of being zealous for good, there's suffering because of your zealousness, so be it. The Bible says, even if you should suffer for the sake of righteousness, you are blessed. We need Christians who are courageous, bold, righteous, holy, and zealous for good.

I came across this prayer, Augustine of Hippo, a long time ago. Lord, my God, Lord, our God, make us happy in you. gold, silver, or land, not from earthly veins and transitory goods of this perishable life. Do not let us speak with pride. Instead, make us happy in you, since we will never lose you. We are not lost with you.

Happy are those whose God is the Lord. You will not be angry if we say that you alone are my portion, Psalm 16, 5. I'm excited for the next four years. I think it's gonna be great politically. It's gonna be a lot of fun, and it's gonna be really exciting.

Things are gonna happen that have never happened before, and I didn't even think would ever happen in our country, in a good way. But no matter who the president is, and no matter how many departments of bureaucracy bureaucracy, Vivek and Elon cut. We can't keep our focus off of Jesus. This is a

prayer from the Archbishop of Constantinople in the year 400. He said, Lord, help us leave behind our worries about what everyone around us thinks of us. Instead, let's be diligent about one thing only, that we harbor no evil thing and nothing that displeases you. And if I could add to that, God, help us not to get through the next four years, or even just to get through the day. But I pray, God, that we can use every day as a day to glorify You in whatever way we

can and to do it with joy, to do it all with joy and a zealousness for good. And I think, I hope that I would say the same thing no matter who was the president. Mike Slater dot locals dot com. Transcript and commercial free.

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We need to know how last week happened. Without this first point, we'll never get any of the next important things done.

Welcome to Politics by Faith, brought to you by the Patriot Gold Group. Got an email from John yesterday. He said, I want to echo a lot of what people are saying about being thankful for the election results. I liked the comment this morning about how God gave us our president back. We had a wonderful woman from Virginia call in and talked about how we need to pray for

our president. And she said this, I've never heard it like this is so good God gave us our president back that's a really nice way of thinking about but I hear a lot of explaining and analyzing going on that tends to pave over God's role in the whole process if you stopped and asked any conservative three years ago if Trump was gonna win reelection in a landslide the best answer you would have gotten was unlikely three years ago

we weren't even sure if he was gonna run let alone will he win? And who was the person who was like, oh yeah, landslide. Many would have said it would have been a miracle. Well now here we are. But since it's happened, it all seems perfectly reasonable and even expected. Looking back though, God's fingerprints are all over this. I think we need to be aware of our tendency to steal the glory that is due to God and attribute it elsewhere. I've been encouraged by the conservative

commentators who put Thanksgiving and glory to God at the forefront of their responses to this election. We do that all the time with everything. I think about this all the time with history. It's like, oh yeah, well of course we won World War II. And you just think that just because, well, that's what happened, but there was no of course. It's like we barely won it. Like miracles throughout the whole process that resulted in victory.

But you look back, you're like, oh yeah, of course the Founding Fathers won the Revolutionary War. Duh. Well, no, not duh. It's impossible for them to have won it. And there's so many stories like that in our history where you look back, you're like, well yeah, of course Trump won.

What do you mean of course Trump won? There was no... I got that email and then I read, got that email I think on Monday night and this morning I read Psalm 108 and they line up perfectly. The end of Psalm 108 says, who will bring me into the strong city? Who will lead me to Edom?

This is David writing. He's talking about attacking a city. Is it not you, O God, who cast us off? And you, O God, who did not go out with our armies? Give us help from trouble, for the help of man is useless. Through God we will do valiantly, for it is he who shall tread down our enemies.

So what's going on here? So Edom, super strong people, David was attacking them, and he was asking for God's hand in this battle. Petra was that strong city in particular. This is a commentary that says, David prayed this prayer in light of recent defeats,

recognizing that those defeats came because God's favor did not shine upon Israel's army. Is it not you, O God, who cast us off, and you, O God, who did not go out with our armies Right, so God did not shine upon Israel's armies That's why they lost their previous battles and if God did not go out with our armies again this time

Then there's no hope for victory Because the help of man is useless When people go into battle and win we pat ourselves on the back we did such a great job Yeah, you forgot about God's blessing that resulted in your victory same thing with anything that good that happens in our life or in our country we sit back and say oh man I did a great

job there I am really something special no you can't do anything you can't walk beat without God. You did nothing. And we can be brave, we can do impressive things, but without God, it's nothing. He's in total control and in charge and has all the power. David used to look for military solutions to military problems, but that's nothing compared to God's will. So we got to make sure we give God all the credit for everything always. The classic story of this, of course, is Gideon started out with his army of 32,000,

because we've got to go defeat the bad guys, and we need as many people as possible, because we want to win on our own. And then God told him it was too big, too many people, make it smaller. So he whittled it down to 10,000. And God's like, nope, still too big, whittled it down to 300. Why?

Judges 7-2, the Lord said to Gideon, you have too many men for me to deliver Midian into your hands, in order that Israel may not boast against me, that her own strength has saved her." I'm going to whittle down your army even more and more and more. Down to 300. Then they won.

And then it's like, wait, what? There's no way 300 men could have defeated that army. There were 135,000 of the enemy. So 300 versus 135,000, is it because the 300 were so strong? No. So great reminder from John and then just happened to have read Psalm 108 this morning to give glory to God in all things. I'll leave you with one more. Also read Psalm 102 this morning. This idea of forever stood out to me.

This morning's show, we talked about how we need to make MAGA bigger than Trump and make the movement last longer than just the next four years. And there was a lot of hurrying going on right now with things. It just feels like we've got to hurry up, we've got to speed through, we've got stuff to do now. And it's true, we gotta do this

because the deep state's gonna swallow this whole thing whole if we don't act fast and get it done. And I've said a lot, a lot of the last two days, that we don't have four years to get stuff done because we got an election in two years. But those two years are really set up in the first 100 days.

And we don't even really have 100 days, it's really just now. It's the set up, the foundation, the people that Trump is putting in power now is what's gonna make the difference for the next 100 days. So it's really every day. And we don't even have the rest of the day. We really got this afternoon.

We got to go, go, go. Right. And it's like, ah, but Psalm 102 can put things into perspective nicely. The end of Psalm 102 says, your years are throughout all generations of old. You laid the foundation of the earth and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will endure. Yes, they will all grow old like a garment, like a cloak, you will change them. And they will be changed, but you are the same.

And your years will have no end. So while we're thinking politically about, you know, MAGA in four years, in eight years, and J.D. Vance setting up, you know, and then Ron DeSantis, right? We're thinking about like all these elections move forward

and, you know, we're talking about the 2026 Senate election and what the map looks like. We're so focused on time. That can lead to anxiety.

Just know that God is forever. Know that God is good and God is forever. And he has no end. Mike Slater dot locals dot com. Transcript and commercial free. Mike Slater dot locals dot com. Transcript and commercial free. Mike Slater dot locals dot com.