Romans 13 and verse number 1. Romans chapter 13 and verse number 1. God is on the throne. We're going to talk about James Monroe and what he did, good and bad, during his time. And by the way, I'm named after him. My name is James Monroe Phillips III. Indians had a funny way of naming their children after presidents sometime. Romans 13 says, Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore he who resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God, and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. For rulers are are not a cause to fear for good behavior, if you have good rulers that is, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority like an anarchist like we've had here in America for the last year? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same. For it is a minister of God to you for good, but if you do what is evil, Be afraid, for it does not bear the sword for nothing, in other words, capital punishment. It is a minister of God, an avenger, who brings wrath upon the one who opposes and practices evil. For it is necessary to be subject not only because of wrath, but also for a conscious sake. For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God. devoting themselves to this very thing. Render to all what is due to them, taxes for whom taxes due, custom to whom custom is due, and fear to whom fear is due, and honor to whom honor is due. That is the absolute purpose of government. And the purpose of government was started right here, human government. In this chart behind me, this is what we call a dispensational chart. And human government was established after the flood by Noah. God established human government by him. And government is supposed to protect the criminals from the actions of the criminals upon the citizens, the honest citizens. It's supposed to protect the good from the evil, not the evil from the good. Sometimes in an upside down world we see this and we're living in it today. The government is supposed to protect the people from the government also. Now we're going to go back into the history of America There was a man by the name James Monroe. He was born April the 28th, 1758. And you're going to find out that some leaders in America died on July the 4th, and this is one of them. He died on the Independence Day, July the 4th, 1831. Thomas Jefferson. So did John Adams. His presidency was from March the 4th, 1817 to March the 4th, 1825. And he was a Democratic Republican. In other words, he believed in small government and rights of states. He was the last Virginian, what we would call, lawmaker. Martin Van Buren said of him, although not possessed of remarkable talents, he passed through an almost unequaled number of responsible public employments without leaving a stain, not a single stain, upon his character. He was the last president of the founding fathers, those that wore the britches like the founding fathers like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, all of them did. He's the last one of our founding fathers. He was the last Virginian. He was the last great statesman. He fought as a young man in the Continental Army, and there is one picture of him where he's standing in the canoe, the boat with George Washington, and he was a great valiant warrior. He put his money and his life where his mouth is. Monroe, as they crossed, was holding the American flag behind the resolute, unstoppable George Washington. His bravery was unquestionable. That's a warrior. His bravery was unquestionable as he stood and represented the nation, the United States of America, and he thought about the United States of America. He gave in to where he thought needed to be given, because he wanted all sides to have a part in it. He was the Secretary of War under Madison. He was the Secretary of War when the British burned down the Capitol and the White House. In 1816, the whole nation looked upon him as Madison's heir, and the outcome was never really in any doubt at all. The nation accepted this man as president. The Federalists or the Democrats at that time had lost four straight elections. Yet, he listened to their voices. Madison just rode a wave of popularity in his time. It was a time of a nation of good feeling. He tried to eliminate partyism. Boy, I know that Rand Paul has said up there in the Senate over and over again, he said, let's lay politics aside and partyism and let's do something for the people of this nation. Let's forget where you're from, what party you are. Your party is not the only one that needs to stand up and make great resolutions and bills. We need to do it as one, as a nation. He tried to put an end to partisan politics. He tried to make America as one. Now one thing that he did that I don't agree with is that he supported the Bank of the United States. That's putting the funds of America in individuals' hands that are not elected. That's not good. And now we have the Federal Reserve, the absolute offspring of this horrible mess. He appointed Federalists or Democrats to some key positions. James Monroe tried to make the Federalist Party unnecessary. He wanted to give them a voice. One of the things that he did was the Missouri Compromise. You know, slavery was an issue always in America. The Missouri Compromise, there was tension over Missouri becoming a state and it being a slave state. Nobody wanted that, but he allowed that. That's what we call the Missouri Compromise. In the Missouri Compromise also was the, an unwritten little law, what we might call expedient action. He, The United States government gave free ammunition to every man that wanted to kill a buffalo. Powder, shot, or bullets. Because in this Missouri Compromise, there was that provision. This position that manifest destiny. That it was God's will to take this continent from the American to the indigenous people and to make them to assimilate into their culture. And part of that was to kill off every bit of their livelihood and make them wards of the state. Welfare was invented for Indians, but now is given to every illegal alien that gets in this country as a political gratuity. Maine had been part of Massachusetts and Maine and Massachusetts were divided and Maine was admitted as a free state. it was rendered illegal throughout the United States from the north, then anything north of the 36-30 parallel, with the exception of Missouri, there's the Missouri Compromise, which was north of that line, remained a slave state. This made the nation's official division into free and slave states And the idea was that slavery was actually wrong, but we're not going to tell the other states that you have to follow what we believe. The Missouri Compromise was basically a near unanimous re-election for him. This union and the Civil War had been staved off and postponed for a while. And the era of good feelings would continue on through his next finish of his presidency. When I took political science in college, they talked about the Monroe Doctrine. In his annual message to Congress on December 2nd, 1823, Monroe stated the words of his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, and John Quincy Adams was his Secretary of State, by the way, which would become, and this was the son of John Adams, he would become future President of the United States. He said, the occasion has been judged proper for asserting a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, and that the American continents, by the free independence condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization of any European powers. The Monroe Doctrine simply stated that any nation close to or in the Americas was not to be colonized by any European party. But in doing this, he ceded Texas to Spain. He ceded Texas to Spain. He said Central and South America will be considered an act of war and aggression if any state, any foreign state or nation comes in and tries to settle it as a colony. Now Devil's Island, you know, was a French colony where they took French prisoners. And we heard the stories about Devil's Island. That was down off the coast of South America. During his time, he would make a treaty with Britain. Now, today, the U.S. and Britain have been such allies for over 100 years, we can't imagine that when Britain would be angry with America and America angry with Britain. But all the time, America looked at the Canadian border And they realized that any time Great Britain or the British might come down wanting to reclaim the American colonies. In all of this, we would have the acquisition of Florida. And the part of the Louisiana Purchase, by the way. And the Treaty of 1819 brought Florida into the Union and solidified the peace and the security of the United States by eliminating Spain as a rival of the young nation of North America. And as part of this, the United States ceded the Louisiana Purchase to Spain comprising the modern-day state of Texas. But this spelled trouble for the future. James Monroe believed that we need to build roads and canals, irrigation supplies, rivers, and an infrastructure, in other words. In the history of the world, It has always, how you judge a nation is by several little things. One, it's schools, it's roads, it's libraries, and it's postal service. This is what you call infrastructure. Now just look at America today. We're closing all of the libraries. The new administration has said we're going to cut way back on the postal service. And it started with George Bush, Jr. Just think back for a little while. When did all the ads on TV come from the pharmacies, pharmaceuticals? George Bush. When did you lose all of your local little mailboxes that you could go down without driving 10 miles or 15 or 20 miles to a post office? And they all disappeared during George Bush's administration. The roads got in a horrible condition. And we fought unnecessary wars. And we fought the wrong people. Think about it in your own lifetime about these little infrastructures. We've gone through the Wuhan China plague for the last whole year. You can hardly go to a library, and Sharon works at a library in Tashby, California. And you can go pick up a book and think, but you can't go to the library. And maybe soon, maybe the libraries will be back open, et cetera. A nation, it's judged by its infrastructure, and James Monroe, even though he didn't believe in big government, he believed that a nation ought to have an infrastructure. That's common sense, isn't it? The Republicans, the Democratic Republicans, maintaining that such use of federal money was unconstitutional and represented a dangerous expansion of federal power. but that part we concede is necessary. The Supreme Court ruled in Gibbons v. Ogden in 1824 that the Commerce and Clause of the Constitution which gave the federal government the authority to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among several states and with the Indian tribes allowed for the federal government to make these improvements. And now James Monroe set out to make treaties with Indians, for the time being anyway. Some of James Monroe's incentives did not turn out so well. The Compromise of 1850, all of it would fall upon Abraham Lincoln's shoulders in his time. The Missouri Compromise staved off a possible civil war in 1820, but it happened in 1860 through 1865. Slavery was still a problem. It was still a problem. James Monroe could not heal the nation's deep division over slavery. but he tried to make political parties unnecessary because he compromised. Monroe was a slave-owning Virginian. Monroe was a slave-owning Virginian and had little, if any, interest in doing but he was a member of the American Colonization Society which advocated freeing all the slaves. Now a lot of the slave owners treated their slaves like family. I want you to know that. Or like the common worker would be treated today. They had social security. Even when they got old, they were fed. The slaves were allowed to procreate. Now we know that a lot of the slave owners procreated with the slaves, like John Hales, Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law, and Thomas Jefferson. Now the slaves that Thomas Jefferson inherited were three-quarters white. Sally Hemings was three-quarters white. Her children by Thomas Jefferson was seven-eighths white, and most of them, you couldn't tell they were part black at all. Sally Hemings could have gone, could have passed for a white person, by the way. I know in the movies they have her dark, but she wasn't. Now, James Monroe advocated freeing the slaves of America. But he did not believe that the black slaves could coexist with the American people. In Liberia, there's a place called Monrovia. And that is a colony where James Monroe believed that he could send the black slaves to where they could become American colonies. And they could be free. He did not advocate freeing slaves and sending them among the American people. He said they will abuse the American people and the American people will abuse them. And guess what happened? President Lincoln, freeing the slaves, he wanted to send the slaves to Cuba and to Monrovia. Because he thought they'd have a better chance there, but the slaves didn't want to go. And then we had the carpetbaggers of the South, and that's another story, by the way. Most of the freed back slaves refused to go. They went back to their slave owners. What does that tell you? We know the story of William Key and his master John Key, that he joined the Confederate Army, William Key did. He's black man, by the way. He's part white. Almost all the blacks are part white. He went back to his slave owner after the Civil War and bought his home, his plantation back and gave it to him. Many of the black people loved their slaves. Study the history of the President of the Confederate States. I listened to a recording of a black man that worked for him, Jefferson Davis. When the war was coming to an end, when the South was beginning to surrender, he started signing over some of his farms, his plantations, over to his slaves. They weren't mistreated at all, by the way. They went to school. He built schools for them and they had an education. They could read and write. His slaves could read and write. Jefferson Davis' slaves did not want to be free. They loved their master. But he signed the land over to them. Many of our leaders, like Thomas Jefferson, said, he said, we have a wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go with this slavery situation. Thomas Jefferson was against slavery, even though he owned hundreds of slaves. And he was married to one, Sally Hemings, basically. He couldn't openly say that. He cannot openly act that way. The first black First Lady was Sally Hemings Jefferson. What he believed, he practiced in turning his slaves loose. When James Monroe had this Monroe Doctrine, It really was without teeth. America couldn't stop France or England from colonizing places, not with war. It was just words, just words. What happened in Cuba? Here we have one of our closest enemies right there. We were gonna buy Cuba one time and colonize it. If Spain had reasserted power over different places, even like Florida or whatever, we'd have been in trouble. Because we could not have backed up that Monroe Doctrine. We could not have justified it at war for interventions in Latin America at all. But the Monroe Doctrine is still in place in many ways to this day. the Monroe Doctrine. Well, the man brought peace to America in many ways, didn't he? He did. He gave us the gift of an infrastructure. One of the greatest presidents that we ever had, or two of the greatest presidents we ever had with infrastructure is Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. They built America. And John James Monroe started that process of building an infrastructure in America and building and making the American people comfortable with roads and canals, irrigation, the beginning of schools. And yet Jefferson Davis was educating his black slaves before even the whites had public schools in all reality. You go back and you look at the people on different sides of the issues. Many times they were right on both sides and they were wrong on both sides. As we study history, the reason why we study history is so we won't be fooled and repeat it again. In so many ways, America has repeated it over and over and over again, haven't we? We ought to know better. Our Father, we send this message out that they'll see that you're on the throne and that you've used men down to the history of our country to bring justice and righteousness in many ways to this land. And Father, let us look to it as examples and look at the good things that were done and to the evil things also. Father, thank you for this evening and thank you for your word. And thank you for these men that have lived their lives for us in many ways. These men did not grow rich being politicians. They risked their lives for their country. And Father, thank you for all these things. Help us to understand in Jesus'