By Reverend David Whitney
October 4, 2015
NewsWithViews.com
It began as a normal day for Chris Routson as he prepared to go to work, until he received a phone call instructing him to come in a few hours later than normal. Chris worked at the Middletown, Ohio Precision Strip metal processing plant for 13 years with a good employment standing.
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Four years ago he came to faith in Jesus Christ and began eagerly sharing his new found faith with everyone, including his co-workers. One way he did that was through face book, so he had a wide circle, many of them co-workers as face book friends. One fellow employee he shared with was what Romans 1 calls, a woman of “vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.”
What he shared with her was Ray Comfort’s latest film Audacity, which shows that many Christians love homosexual individuals despite not agreeing with their life choices. When Chris arrived at work that day, he was directed to go to the manager’s office. On August 27 Routson was told that his employment was being terminated because he made co-workers feel uncomfortable. He was given no severance pay and denied unemployment.
"They said, 'Someone said you didn't make them feel comfortable.' I said, 'I sent out a video to share the Gospel just because it talks about homosexuality.' They said, 'You can't do that. You can't do that,'" explained Routson. "So, I said 'I was just trying to share my faith with her and it doesn't matter that I didn't have a chance to work with her, I can share a link on Facebook on my own time right?' They are like, 'No, no, you can't do that. You can't be sharing with people on Facebook because they work here.'" "They were saying that I can't do that, but I have never seen anything that says I couldn't," Routson asserted.”
"If you are put in a situation where you are going to be fired or you are going to be persecuted for your faith, never give into the fear of man, always fear the Lord," Routson said. "No matter what happens, trust the outcome to God rather than trying to think about how we can stop it from happening."[1]
This is all about persecution of Christians, punishing Christians who truly live out their faith in Christ, Christians who take the commands of Christ seriously. We live in a day when the contrast between liberty and tyranny is exploding in our faces. But many are confused about these issues and what we as followers of Jesus Christ are to do in the midst of this destruction of true liberty.
Blessings found in the ‘Perfect Law of Liberty’ - James 1:22-25 “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.”
Looking into God’s Word to develop a Biblical Worldview - this word translated looking into conveys the literal idea of 1. to stoop to a thing in order to look at it 2. to look at with head bowed forward 3. to look into with the body bent 4. to stoop and look into 5. metaphorically to look carefully into, inspect curiously, of one who would become acquainted with something.
We find it used three of the five times it occurs in the New Testament at resurrection morning, where the witnesses literally bent over or stooped down to look into the empty tomb of Our Lord Jesus. It calls for an intensive investigation, a passion to know and understand, and a diligence to pursue an accurate knowledge of the Word of God.
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James exhorts us to here in these verses is a passion for the Word of God, to study it in every detail, to examine and uncover and take note of everything in this precious book. Then note how he describes the Bible in verse 25 - “the perfect law of liberty.” Now our day rejects this doctrine outright. The propagandists of our day claim that law is somehow the opposite of liberty, and that you can’t have a perfect law of liberty. In other words they define liberty as a license to do what ever it is you want to do. That is actually not liberty but anarchy.
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