II Corinthians 6:14 – 7:1

Well, good morning, everyone.

Uh, thank you for for joining us.

Great to see uh new people involved.

Thank you, Rachel, for reading.

Uh, good to see you leading, Cameron.

Thank you for doing uh such a good job there.

Um, my name's Mark, I'm one of the the leaders here at City Church, and you're very welcome to this uh live stream as we continue our series in 2 Corinthians.

And uh we we have a very interesting passage this morning, don't we?

So why don't we pray and I'll ask for God's help as we dive into it together?

Uh Father, we thank you for uh your word.

We thank you for the word made flesh.

Uh today is Palm Sunday, and we remember his uh his entry as the promised king into Jerusalem.

As as many uh wave their Pam fronds and cried Hosanna, which means save us.

Thank you that Jesus came to save us, help us to trust him and to uh to live out the implications of his death uh for us in every area of our life.

Uh we ask these things in his name.

Amen.

Amen.

Over the uh the first 300 years uh of Christianity, uh, Christianity was persecuted more than any other religion in the Roman Empire at the time.

They were persecuted in small ways, in uh in local ways.

Christians found it hard to get a job uh because of their uh belief and their uh refusal to offer uh sacrifices to to idols, and uh also more seriously, there was kind of empire-wide uh persecutions where Christians were rounded up and uh and tossed to wild animals in the arena uh and things like that.

They were seen as a threat, they were seen as a threat to uh the rule of Rome.

They were perceived by the surrounding culture as uh too narrow, too exclusive, too undermining of the culture.

Uh I wonder does that sound at all familiar?

They were subversive of the social order, and people perceived that as a as a threat.

In that context, uh it must have been, and I imagine in various ways still is, a huge temptation to blur the lines a little bit, to blur the lines between Christian belief and practice and the beliefs and practice of the society that you find yourself in.

Christian beliefs, pagan beliefs.

You just blur the line slightly.

Maybe not get rid of Jesus altogether, maybe not reject him, but just add something else in.

Just to ingratiate yourself a little bit more, just to soften the edges a little bit.

Over those 300 years, what's fascinating is that Christianity didn't lessen, it grew.

It exploded, in fact, all over the empire.

And by the early 300s, was the dominant religion in the Empire.

I wonder why that is.

I think in part it might be because of passages like this one.

Because Christians understood that being reconciled to God through Jesus, that's what we saw in chapter five, meant that they were a new creation, and that had implications for how they lived in the world.

They lived distinctively.

But notice this call, and it is ultimately a call towards distinctive living, this call towards distinctive living comes after Paul has talked about our reconciliation to God through Jesus.

That is how the gospel works.

God acts in love by his undeserved, unmerited grace and kindness, and he saves us from the world, and then we live a life in obedience to him.

That is how Christianity works, it is how it has always worked.

Christianity, I don't know if you've ever thought about this or realized it, but Christianity is not a moral religion.

It's a moral, it's a religion that contains morals and morality, but morality isn't at the center of it.

It is not a religion that is about achieving the divine or achieving heaven or however you want to describe it.

No, Christianity is better understood as a mystical religion, not in the sense that you can't understand it, but because it is God acting towards humanity in that incomprehensible love and grace, and that has moral implications for how we live today.

That is how the gospel works.

And so Paul has already described how Jesus has acted, and then he's saying, and so, in response to that, as these new creation people live like this.

Now, these verses this morning uh are the favorite of the legalist who will tell you that the true Christian needs to remove themselves from society.

Needs to remove themselves because of the uh the pollution and uh and defiling nature of the surrounding culture, that we need to kind of pull up the drawbridge and retreat into our holy huddles.

But rather than encouraging us to escape the world, Paul is talking about something else.

What he's talking about is actually far more akin to Jesus' language in the Sermon on the Mount that we saw just a few months ago when he talked about Christians being salt and light.

Paul here is not trying to create religious moralists.

He is calling us, you and I, to be distinct, salty, to use Jesus' language, a counterculture in the world, a beacon of light, a city on a hill shining in the darkness, verse 14, particularly the first phrase of verse 14, look at it with me, do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.

That governs the whole passage.

That's really the big idea, and then Paul goes on to kind of explain it in different ways and give something of a uh of a rationale for it, but that's the governing idea.

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers, and so that is what we need to kind of focus our attention on.

We need to look at what it means, and then I guess why it's good, why we should live that way.

First of all, let us try to nail down with as much clarity and specificity as we can exactly what this phrase means, because it's been used by by some to mean lots of different things.

What does it mean when Paul says, do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers?

Now it's nothing to do with eggs, let's just be clear about that, as you uh perhaps tuck into to your eggs, Benedict, as you're watching me on a on a Sunday morning.

Uh, no, it's uh a yoke as in a an agricultural yoke, a uh a wooden structure that would have fit across two animals, uh, that they that they go and ply the field together and saying, Don't uh don't put two different animals in that structure, um, because it will uh it will not be good for for either animal.

That is uh the the the metaphor, as it were.

But what is he uh saying?

Well, we've already noted just a moment ago that he's not simply talking about religious separatism, you know, like the Amish who like to withdraw completely from the world.

There's the the world and advancing technology is seen as uh somehow corrupting.

God has always wanted his people to be in the world.

It is good that you are in the world, present in communities, cultures, and societies.

Even back in the in the Old Testament, the first two-thirds of your your Bible, uh, the the people of God there, the nation of Israel, uh, even they weren't cut off from the world.

They were supposed to be like that, that beacon.

They were supposed to be like a lighthouse that would draw the nations.

The nations would would look in and see what it is, how it is that they're living, and think, gosh, if they're living with with such with such justice and such uh generosity as well as holiness and moral uprightness of living, what must the God that they worship be like?

And they're supposed to look in, see how they were living, see the goodness of God's rule, and the nations would in turn turn to Israel's God, uh to Yahweh.

Instead, what happened time and time and time again in the Old Testament is that rather than the nations becoming more like Israel, what happened was that Israel became more like the nations.

They took on the religious practices of everyone else.

They adopted their idols and worshiped them.

It's not that they'd forgotten Yahweh, it's not that they'd forgotten the one true God, the God of the Bible, but they just made him one of a pantheon of deities.

Just another god in the variety pack.

And so as a result, their distinctiveness was lost.

They became just like everyone else.

This helps us, I think, to understand what Paul means here.

He's not saying cut yourself off from interacting with non-Christians.

You know, burn all of your non-Christian music, uh, as I was told to.

I had to burn all of my non-Christian CDs, my Manick Street Preacher CDs, my Britney Spears single, um, and and just listen to Third Day and Michael W.

Smith.

That's what uh I was told as a as a teenager, but I don't think that that's what Paul means here.

No, he's saying don't take on the values and the idols of the surrounding culture, of the culture that you're in.

Every community, every society has those values.

It has those idols, those things that our world prizes above everything else.

Our idols today aren't made of wood and stone.

They're ideas, they're ideological.

In the West today, it might be described something like the chief idol is the supremacy of the self.

You as an individual.

You as an individual having the right to determine your own destiny, your own identity, your own morality, your own truth, uh, to uh to quote Oprah there.

Paul would be saying here, don't attach yourself, don't swallow, don't identify with that those idols, those values.

They are contrary to the values of the gospel.

Do you see?

He's saying, don't yoke yourself, don't attach yourself to this idol.

It might not make you overtly reject Jesus, and that's the thing, that's the insidious nature of this.

Is that you can do this and still and still think that you are and call yourself a Christian.

Because you're saying, Well, I'm not rejecting Jesus, I just have these these priorities, these priorities for for my life, this level of culture uh comfort that I need, these priorities for my children.

I'm not rejecting Jesus, but my child needs to be able to do this.

Do you see?

It's not an outward rejection, it's just a sidelining, a minor demotion.

You say, Well, I love Jesus, but actually by your actions, you say, Well, I quite like this other thing too.

I love Jesus, but I'm not willing to lose this thing over here, or this person.

Jesus isn't jettisoned, he's just not supreme.

If you wanted me to try and define it, here's what I think it means.

Here's what I think Paul means when he says, don't be unequally yoked with unbelievers.

I think he's saying something like, don't form a partnership that would cause you to change your values, compromise your integrity, or replace Jesus as supreme.

Let me read that again.

Don't form a partnership that would cause you to change your values, compromise your integrity, or replace Jesus as supreme.

When Christians do that, they lose their distinctiveness, they lose their saltiness.

Why does Paul encourage us in this way?

Well, he draws a bunch of contrasts.

What accord has Christ with Balial?

What portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?

What agreement has the temple of God with idols?

For we are the temple of the living God.

Without getting lost in the details and kind of parsing every uh every single contrast, one of the things that you can see more generally is that the contrasts are stark, light, darkness, Christ, Balial.

Balial comes from the Hebrew word meaning worthless.

It's actually another name for Satan.

What are we to make of these contrasts?

Well, I think there's a few things that are at least implied.

First, there's a clear incompatibility, there's an oil and water nature to these two things.

Light and darkness don't coexist.

Nor do Christ and Balial.

There is an incompatibility here.

And for the Christian, therefore, to take on these values, to forge a partnership that compromises their witness and their integrity, that is to live a contradictory life.

There is also, I think, a sense in which there is a contrast in terms of goals.

The Christian, surely we can recognize, has a different endpoint, different uh value system, different ultimate aim than the non-Christian.

Our ultimate aim is the making known of Jesus and the magnifying of Him in our lives.

But that is not the goal of the unbeliever.

That is not the goal of Balial.

The ultimate goal of the world is not to magnify Jesus, but to magnify ourselves.

Moreover, there is a contrast, I am sure, in terms of means.

Paul last week in our passage was talking about how he conducted his ministry with purity and kindness and the Holy Spirit and righteousness in the right hand and in the left.

But he's been per persistently and consistently contrasting that against the so-called superapostles, those who came after Paul with their smooth talk, with their manipulative uh language and ways of acting.

Darkness, Balial.

They have different goals, but they also have different means.

So Paul is saying, don't don't take those things to yourself.

Don't don't aim at a different endpoint.

Don't take those different means into your hands and use them.

When we do those things, we lose our distinctiveness.

Let's examine and apply this principle to three areas of life.

Uh, because I'm sure that there are kind of questions about how some of this works out.

Let's apply it first of all to the church and then to the workplace, and then finally to relationships, and then we'll move on and conclude.

How does this apply in the church?

To be yoked together, as we've seen, is to be bound, like these animals, uh, towards the same objective.

You know, two oxen were yoked together and sent off to plough a field, and they're both traveling in parallel to one another towards that objective, which is the you know the end of the field, right?

In the church, that objective that we are resolutely moving towards is the proclamation of Jesus.

Seeing people come to know him, having people uh grow in spiritual maturity, having unbelievers meet Jesus by faith.

It would be silly, therefore, to conclude, wouldn't it, that um that what this verse means in the context of the church is that we cannot interact with non-Christians.

We can't welcome them, love them, serve them.

No, that's exactly what we should be doing.

That is part of the goal, or it is the means, rather, I should say, that we under God, by his grace, achieve that goal.

And so we want In City Church to be a place where people, wherever they are in their faith journey, but people who aren't yet calling themselves Christians feel welcomed, feel wanted and uh pursued and encouraged.

That's the kind of community that we want to be.

That is the kind of community that we should be.

Our distinctiveness manifests not in our refusal to welcome, but in our refusal to use manipulative means.

For example, it manifests in our humble insistence on the truths of the gospel, on the uniqueness of Jesus, in our commitment to Him above all, in our love for image bearers, regardless of their ethnicity, background, or sexuality.

But it would be a mistake for the church to simply affirm and to celebrate everything that the surrounding culture affirms and celebrates.

And so there is a distinction there.

We welcome you and love you because you are an image-bearer of the living God.

You have inherent and unassailable dignity, value, and worth.

And yet we all come into the church as broken people, as sinners in need of a savior, as those in need of grace.

And so we want to acknowledge that too.

And so we don't celebrate everything in anyone's life.

There are things in my life that should not be affirmed and celebrated that need to be turned from and forgiven.

If the church was simply to affirm everything in the culture, celebrate everything that the culture celebrates, what would actually happen to the church, and this is the great misstep that some people make, is to think, and then the church would grow.

Loads of people would they would like the church more.

That is simply not the case.

That is not what the evidence bears out.

That when Christians or people who call themselves Christians turn away from the claims of the gospel, the uniqueness of Christ, his death on the cross for us, language of sin and of judgment.

When people turn away from that and simply want to affirm everything that the culture is, do you know what happens?

It's not that those churches are suddenly full.

Why would you go there?

It doesn't actually offer you anything new.

It doesn't offer you anything that you can't get elsewhere in the culture.

There is no distinctiveness.

No, it is the churches in the world today that are holding fast to the unique aspects of Christianity that people find intriguing, compelling, beautiful.

Sometimes as a result, that may mean not associating with or endorsing those within the church, those who have taken positions uh in the hierarchy of the institution that is the church, who've long since walked away from the gospel.

Those leaders, bishops and archbishops, who, by their actions, suggest that they are not personally acquainted with the Lord Jesus.

There we must show our distinctiveness humbly, perhaps even with tears, but resolutely.

What about our work?

Some have used this verse to suggest that uh Christians should only use other Christian uh uh business people.

You can only get a Christian plumber.

Well, good luck with that in Dublin.

Uh, or you can only get go into business with other Christians.

I don't think that that's what this verse means.

Uh, to quote the Princess Bride.

I don't think that that's what's going on here, but there are some helpful implications.

Can a Christian go into business with a non-Christian?

Yes, I think that they probably can, if that's something that you want to do.

That could very well be a good thing.

However, there are some conversations that you want to have.

You want to have a conversation around business practices, about the kind of culture that you want to create in your company, about the ethics of the uh of the business that you are forming, how you are going to conduct it.

So, you know, uh when we are meeting in uh in normal time, we get our coffee from a coffee company in in Wales that uh that has explicitly ethical business practices.

They roast coffee and the profits go to help to free people from human trafficking.

They uh they only work with slavery free plantations across the world.

If you want to order a bag for them, you can go to manumit.co.uk.

M-A-N-U-M-I-T.

It means to free.

If you've watched Hamilton, he talks about being part of the Manumission Society.

You need to have a conversation about those hypothetical situations where your integrity is being forced to compromise, and you may even need a conscience clause that's worth thinking through.

Now, not everybody here is going to start an start a business, but uh we will all be at various points, probably under the employee of those who don't call upon the name of Jesus.

In that regard, it is worth considering what aspects of company culture or office dynamics can you affirm and celebrate and get alongside enthusiastically?

And what aspects would you not want to align yourself with because of your commitment to Jesus?

Are you known as a follower of Jesus in your workplace?

Is that something that can be seen by your use of time, your honest business practices, your commitment to excellence, your commitment to neighbor love in terms of your boss, your line manager, your co-workers?

It's worth thinking through how can I live as somebody who is distinct in this arena?

How can I not just imbibe the cultural priorities in an unthinking way?

Those cultural priorities that might not be compatible with Christian living.

Third, there is the whole arena of relationships.

Verse 14.

It's the proof text, isn't it?

It's the one that gets trotted out.

Christians shouldn't date non-Christians, you shouldn't marry a non-Christian.

Now, let's acknowledge something right at the start.

I don't think that Paul is primarily concerned about your love life in verse 14.

I don't think that that's what the verse is primarily about.

He hasn't taken some left turn about you're talking about him enduring beatings and shipwrecks, and he goes, oh, by the way, uh, don't uh you know, don't go to the cinema with a non-Christian.

I don't think that that's primarily what's going on.

However, however, there are implications because of what is already being said for this area of our life.

Because if Paul's what Paul is saying is it is a kind of in general terms, don't be unequally yoked with unbelievers.

Well, we're looking at the arenas where that might be true in the church, in workplace, and in your romantic life.

So there are implications.

To unequally yoke two animals was normally to bind an ox with a donkey.

When you put two different animals together, the differing sizes, strengths means that what happens is that the yoke moves and rubs and it actually injures both animals.

It injures both animals.

Becoming romantically involved with someone who isn't a believer will inevitably put a strain on your faith or on the relationship, or on both.

What might happen is that in order to grow in your relationship, in order to help the relationship with the person to flourish and to thrive, what the believer will do is very subtly and maybe even unthinkingly, just begin to push Jesus to the margin.

To push Jesus to the margin of his life or her life.

I believe in Jesus and uh and my my partner knows that and respects that.

I'd encourage you to think a little bit further down the line.

Because being a Christian means that you will prioritize your money differently, prioritize the direction of your life differently.

It will mean that you raise your children differently.

It will affect your service, how you do hospitality, how you witness your fellowship with other believers.

Non-Christian has differing ideas about all of these things, and they won't understand why you want to be so committed to church.

They won't understand why you want to give so much money to the church.

They won't understand why you want to go on that mission trip and leave them behind.

And that's the second thing that could happen.

That if you don't push Jesus to the margin and you seek to grow in love for him, what will happen is that your partner, your spouse, will be pushed to the margin, and they will perceive it.

You know, if an unbelieving spice cannot see the point of your commitment to a midweek Bible study, regular church attendance, service, giving, they would inevitably feel like people who are observing your life rather than partners in it.

So either the marriage experiences stress and breaks up, or it experiences stress and stays together.

Either way, there's stress.

And when the marriage stays together, let's be frank about what normally, not always, but by what normally happens.

It's that the Christian moves.

It is that the Christian changes.

It's like Old Testament Israel.

It's not that the nations receive Yahweh.

It's that it's that the people of God take on the idols.

They don't outright reject God, but they just take on some of those cultural priorities.

Either way, intimacy will be lost.

Either intimacy with Jesus or intimacy with your spouse.

This is not a situation that you voluntarily want to place yourself in.

I say that out of love.

I say that knowing people who, having married as a non-Christian, to a non-Christian, fine, fill your boots, go ahead and go ahead and do that.

But they have one of the parties has become a follower of Jesus.

And what has happened is that it has brought difficulty and strain into their marriage, and those marriages need to stay together.

Paul has very explicit teaching on that in 1 Corinthians 7, where they where they can.

But there's never a sense in the in the New Testament that that is something that you would want to voluntarily opt for.

The Bible makes provision for when you're in it through kind of no fault of your own, but never says, Yeah, sign up for that.

Sign up for the the stress, the rubbing together, that chafing on your soul and on the soul of the person that you love.

That lessening of intimacy between you and Jesus, or between you and your spouse, when actually those are the bonds that should be strongest above all.

Do you see?

It is worth really stepping back and considering.

Does the person that I am in love with share my commitments and values with the with either the same degree of fervency or with a desire to have the same degree of fervency and maturity that I do it is interesting and we need to stop soon, but it's interesting that when Paul goes on to I'm just gonna knock that off because that's a probably loads of people are gonna reply to that now.

When Paul quotes different Old Testament passages, that's the the little bits that are kind of offset in your Bible as you're looking at it from verse uh 16 down to 18, he's quoting different promises.

Different promises that that fuel our obedience and help us to live these distinctive lives.

And what those promises circle around is the idea of increased intimacy with God.

That's what he wants for us.

He wants those bonds of love between us and our Heavenly Father to be as strong as they can possibly be.

Look at those promises.

I will be their God and they shall be my people.

This is an oft-repeated uh uh promise that comes all the way through the the prophet from the prophets, it's it starts right the way back in in Exodus.

It's the promise that that God will gather for himself a people and that he will be in the midst of them.

Connected with that promise is uh is the one in verse 17.

He says, Therefore, go out from the midst, separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing, then I will welcome you.

There is the promise of of welcome, like the Father standing, looking out into the distance to see the prodigals coming home and then running to meet them and then and then embracing them, throwing his arms around them.

God has reconciled us through Jesus, and now he calls us to this obedience, and the promise is that he will establish his presence with us.

And see how warm and and familial it is in verse 18.

And I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.

What's interesting about this verse is that uh this is an allusion uh to 2 Samuel 7, and in 2 Samuel 7, verse 14, there's no mention of the word daughter.

2 Samuel 7:14

Paul broadens it wonderfully and shows how these promises for everyone, male and female, welcomed into the family of God, that God would look at you and call you daughter, look at you and call you son.

This is the inclusive nature of our distinct community.

Taken together, he's saying, don't settle for for a second rate fusion of competing beliefs and ideologies.

Be single-minded in your pursuit of Jesus.

Be single-minded in your pursuit of Jesus in your church life, your work life, in your love life.

The promise for us is greater intimacy with our Heavenly Father.

This is what Jesus died for, to reconcile us back to our God and to bring us into his glorious presence.

We live out of that reality, so that we might find Him supremely satisfying and glorious.

So, in what ways, in what ways is the Holy Spirit now impressing upon you that you are yoking yourself, attaching yourself too closely with the priorities, values, idols of this world, or that person who doesn't share the values in the same way that you do?

God, in inviting you to repentance this morning, offers you a greater and all surpassing intimacy with him.

Let us all therefore run to him in repentance and faith and feel the enveloping embrace of his fatherly care.

Let's pray.

To cleanse ourselves from every defilement, to live as distinct people in how we speak and act and think and love.

To magnify Jesus above all else, he who pursued us to death, even death on a cross.

Help us to take up our cross and to follow him, whatever the implications.

May we know the intimacy of your love through him by the power of your Holy Spirit.

We pray these things in your precious name.

Amen.

Amen, everyone.

See you soon.