Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / November 19, 2023 | 2 Corinthians - The Most Hated Verse in the Bible

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November 19, 2023 | 2 Corinthians - The Most Hated Verse in the Bible · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: So this is weird.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't been up here.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's right.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: I teach a Wednesday night class here.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: I I can't play the victim.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um so um I am going to get closer to you.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, Larry.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: It means I'm gonna probably spit on you once or twice.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know how old us old people are.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um good morning uh to you in the Mulvane building, to you in the College Avenue building, and I am going to read to you this morning the most, yeah, the most hated verse in the entire Bible for single people who are anxious to get married.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that verse comes to us from 2 Corinthians chapter 6, verse 14.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's the first verse of the passage that Connor has asked me to preach from this morning, and I'm going to hate him forever for this.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: But it is the most hated sentence in the Bible, I think.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is that horrible verse in which, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Paul cuts down the field from hundreds of thousands of marriageable candidates to really only a handful.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Apparently that's what he does.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: I hate that verse, said Madison.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: She was in her college dorm room.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: What verse?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Her roommate asked.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, the one that Emily read to me tonight.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Emily was their Bible study leader, and she was the crew staff member there on campus.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I just told her afterwards that I was dating Ryan, and she asked me how serious it was, and I said, I think he's the one.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: And she asked me if Ryan had ever come to crew meeting.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I said I had asked him, but he had said no thanks.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Then she asked me if he was a Christian, and I said I didn't know.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: It was not the kind of thing we'd ever talked about.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And she opened her Bible and she showed me this verse that says, I shouldn't marry him if he isn't a Christian, because then we would be unequally yoked, or something like that.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: My heart just sank when I saw those words.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, where am I supposed to find a Christian guy that I want to marry?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And Ryan is perfect.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's not only Christian singles that hate that verse, it's non-Christian singles as well.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: The headline in a in an online atheist website, run by uh a young atheist whose website is entitled Why I Am an Atheist, reads, I'm an open atheist.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: I have no shame in who I am and in what I know, he says.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: For a few years now I've been in an online relationship with a Christian, and a few days ago they broke up with me because they got closer to God, and them being with me is a sin.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: We can't ever get married, according to them.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: But they broke up with me because I'm an atheist.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: It hasn't been an issue, not once in the past few years.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: The Bible has some messed up verses.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: People often ignore them.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: The slavery, the sacrificial murders, the homophobia, those can be ignored, according to them.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Religion means so little to me, so why does my atheism matter so much to them?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: They gave up, meaning she gave up the happiest relationship in their life for God.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Then he quotes the verse.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then concludes this verse disgusts me so much.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's an untrue representation of atheists and a stupid metaphor.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And to be honest, I feel uh I feel sympathy for both Madison, a Christian student on campus, and for this young atheist.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: He happens to be.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you follow his, if you read more on his uh online blog, you realize he's he's a young guy.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: He's only about 19 or 20.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: I feel for them because uh almost every single person that I know, upon first hearing this sentence, hates that verse as much as these two people do.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: But I plan to spend the next 30 minutes telling you why I think that your Heavenly Father would sit you down and would say these words to you.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And along the way, I plan to make all the rest of you squirm, not just singles, by showing you that this verse applies to you too.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because the first thing I'm going to tell you is that I don't think Paul even had dating or marriage in mind when he wrote this verse.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's no mention of marriage in this chapter at all, nothing in the context, though he is, of course, talking about relationships.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, the missionary to Corinth, Paul, this missionary has been getting emotional, as Connor's been telling you and Jeremy lately, getting emotional with this church in Corinth, with these people that he led to Christ, with these believers in this major Roman city, this metropolis, talking about the way that their relationship with him has grown cold, that it's grown distant, that it's become strained.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in the previous sentence to 6.14 here, he says, Open your hearts to me.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: He just begs them, he cries out.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, the reason their hearts have been closing to him and growing cold to him is that they've been closing to the Lord Jesus Christ and growing cold to the Lord Jesus Christ.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason their hearts have been closing to their Savior Jesus is in large part because they've been getting hooked into the pagan world around them.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: For Corinth is maybe the most cool, happening city in all of the Roman Empire, third largest city, 250,000 people, all kinds of parties, all kinds of things happening.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And they've gotten sort of drawn away into that, and they're embracing the two things that Paul keeps on harping on in this book.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: They're embracing its immorality, sexual immorality, and its idolatry.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: They're going to the lavish and lusty banquets held at these major pagan temples.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Come on, it's free.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: These lavish, lusty banquets, which include prayers to the gods of Rome and parties afterwards.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And when they're invited to become members of those temple clubs and associations, some of them are joining up.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Just harmless fun, they say.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: But it's changing them.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Paul can feel that their hearts are closing to him, their hearts are growing cold, because the last thing they feel like doing when they come out of those temples is going to hang with their church friends and sing worship songs to their Savior and listen to Paul.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's no wonder that they're drifting away from their first love and drifting away from their affections to their spiritual father, Paul, who led them to Christ, because they no longer control their friendships and partnerships.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Their friendships and partnerships now control them.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: And they have almost completely forgotten who they are in Christ, that they are new creatures now, new persons, old things have passed away.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: All things have become new, but that's now slipped their mind.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: No, Paul's not thinking when he writes, do not be unequally yoked.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: He's not thinking about dating and marriage.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: He's thinking about drifting away from God and into idols and immorality.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: When he says, don't be unequally yoked with unbelievers.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: And you and I know all of us, not just singles, know exactly what that's like.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: For we have allowed things that compete with God, therefore, idols.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: We've allowed them to draw us away and pull us into addictions and associations.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so Paul wants to shock them a little by giving them a metaphor that some of them will know from the Old Testament when he says, do not be unequally oaked with unbelievers.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because this is a metaphor that comes out of several places in the Old Testament where God, in the laws of purity and cleanness, had said to his people, in the law, you shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen it sometimes in third world countries.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: You're going, wow, this field is a mess.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Those furrows are not straight.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then you look and off in the distance, there's a donkey and a cow, or a donkey and an ox, and they're unequally yoked and they pull in different ways and so forth.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now the reason God says that is not that he's super concerned that the furrows in ancient Israel be straight, but he gives them all sorts of such commands because he wants every moment of their life to be lived in memory, that they are holy to him, and everything needs to be as pure as possible and ideal.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: So he says, don't mix two kinds of thread and the same clothing and don't mix two kinds of crops in the same field.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: And as much as you can in everything you do, show your children and your grandchildren in the world that you're just keeping, just visibly everything, you're keeping everything straight and ordered as it is in heaven.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, that word righteousness is also in Hebrew the word for straight and right and correct and unmixed and so forth.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so Paul pulls that metaphor out.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: He says, don't be unequally yoked together, don't mix things that aren't the same.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then he reinforces that prohibition.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: He reinforces the prohibition with five rhetorical questions for what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness, he says.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Or what fellowship has light with darkness?
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Or what accord has Christ with belial?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: What agreement has the temple of God with idols?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: These are five words notice that he uses for relationship, partnership, fellowship, accord, portion, agreement.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Whole things like five drum beats bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: He's all about relationships.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Paul cares about relationships.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: He cares about the relationship with him.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: He cares about the relationship with God.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: He cares, therefore, about the relationships with other people that might draw them away from their relationship with God.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so in these five rhetorical questions, he not only has five words for relationship, he has five contrasts here.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Righteousness and lawlessness are opposites, light and darkness.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: And immediately you know what he's talking about because the Bible's full of that metaphor about how God's chosen people are the light and the pagan world is the darkness.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Then you have Christ with Belial.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Belial in the Old Testament is a demon.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's a combination.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: You can hear the word Baal in there, can't you?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Baal and Belial and son of Belial in the Old Testament, combination of Baal and worthlessness.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: You're a worthless person.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: By the New Testament, the Jews use this as a synonym.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of Satan's names, Belial.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we realize, and Paul chooses it because we're not talking just about harmless fun here, are we?
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Paul said.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, we're talking about a cosmic war between the gods.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about the one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: His name is Yahweh, and we're talking about the fact that he's had a cosmic battle going against Satan.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: And they're both of them out to win you over.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: And what accord did they have with each other?
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: You can't mix the two.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then the fourth is what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that line, that rhetorical question, has gotten us in trouble for thousands of years.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you honestly read that question, maybe if you haven't been a Christian for very long, you say, whoa, I have a lot in common with unbelievers.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, my finances and my home and the troubles I have with my children, the school, and the job, and so forth.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: And actually you'd be exactly right.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: But some Christian parents and some Christian teachers have read those words.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: What portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: And they've ripped them out of context, and they've said to their children, now that you're a Christian, you need to stay far away from non-Christians.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: You have nothing in common with them.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Bible says so.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I'd like to stop for just a second and remind us of the clear teaching of the Bible and the Apostle Paul about this.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was back in 1 Corinthians that he answered the question, are we supposed to separate ourselves from unbelievers?
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: And his bold answer was, Are you kidding?
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: I've written you in my letter, he said then, not to associate with sexually immoral people.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't at all mean the people of this world who are immoral or greedy or swindlers or idolaters.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: In this case, you'd have to leave the world.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm writing that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother, but is sexually immoral, or greedy, or idolater, or slanderer, or drunkard, or swindler.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Such a man don't even eat.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: No, he says you're the salt of the earth.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus said it so clearly, didn't he, in the Sermon on the Mount.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: You're the light of the world.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: You have to go into the world to let your light shine before others.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And later on, Paul to another church in Greece, besides Corinth, takes that idea that Jesus dropped with the disciples and tells them that they want to, he wants them, that God wants them to prove themselves to be blameless and innocent.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Children of God above reproach, in the middle, in the middle, not out of, not separated from, not segregated from, but in the middle, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as he leaves out salt.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: But he says, lights in the world.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: And he has to be thinking of that famous prayer of Jesus the night before he died, his prayer for his disciples.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: My prayer, Father, is that not that you take them out of the world, but that you protect them from the evil one.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: No, we're not of the world, he says in this prayer.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not of the world, you're not of the world, but you're in the world.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I'm sending you into the world.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: And even to the Corinthians, Paul has said, if I withdraw from the world, I forsake the mission God has given me to represent him in the world, for we are ambassadors for Christ, he said in the sermon last week, as though God beseeched you by us.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: Do not abandon your calling or your mission with some misreading of a rhetorical question to think that you should withdraw from the world.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, he says to the same church, if an unbeliever invites you to a meal and you want to go, eat whatever's put before you without raising questions of conscience, we should feel free and more than free to hang out with unbelievers.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the point, here's the twist.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Paul is deeply concerned about partnerships that draw believers away from their Lord.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so he says to these same Corinthians, don't be deceived.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Bad company can corrupt good morals.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: He's paraphrasing a verse from Proverbs when he says that.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the problem here in Corinth.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: Social relationships have drawn believers away from the church and away from their relationship, not just with Paul, but with the Lord, and drawn them away to idols.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so he says, this is not harmless.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna have to choose not whether or not to be in the world.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: You better be in the world.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: God sent you into the world, but I'm saying, he says that when food is sacrificed to idols, he says to this church, it's an offering to demons, not to God.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't want you to share anything with demons.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: You can't drink the cup of the Lord and then go drink a cup that honors demons.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: You can't share a meal at the Lord's table and then go share a meal that honors demons.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what you're doing when you go to these banquet feasts in the temples where the priests are presiding over it and you are bowing your head, and you too are joining in the prayers to these demons.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: These idols actually represent real spiritual, supernatural figures who are in a cosmic battle with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and they are in a battle over you.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: You are so important in this battle that God and the demons are fighting over you, and you're forgetting whose side you're on.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: He says, actually, he says, What agreement, and this is the climax of these five questions, this is the one he's been building up to the whole time.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: What agreement has the temple of God with idols?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's the climax, the end of the drumbeat.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of partnership do you think the temple of God can have with idols?
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And we are meant to recall one of the darkest moments in the entire Old Testament.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: A time when right in 650 BC, when right in the middle of the temple, within a few feet of the Holy of Holies, where God Himself dwelt between the cherubim of the ark, right there.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: King Manasseh, who unfortunately ruled 52 years, King Manasseh in the middle of the temple erected altars, not to Yahweh Elohim, but to the heavenly host.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: And he actually set up a carved image of Asherah, Baal's lover and sister, the goddess of bloody violence and sex, set up an idol to her right there in the temple.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the writer of the book of 2 Kings comments that this is a worse sin than has ever been committed by any pagan nation, even the Canaanites that were kicked out of Israel 800 years before.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: This is the worst sin that has ever happened, and at this moment God makes a decision that even if the nation turns back to him, he's still going to send them into captivity to the nation of Babylon.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so he does 50 years later.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: The temple of God and idols, he says, are light and dark, they're opposites.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: God left his temple, the holy of holies, in Ezekiel chapter 10.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: God abandoned the temple completely back then.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he allowed the Babylonians to come in and destroy the temple and destroy his hometown of Jerusalem because they mixed, they mixed the temple of the living God with idols.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: And you can almost hear the Corinthians falling asleep as they hear this.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's really fine.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: The Jewish temple's gone.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've never seen the Jewish temple.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's thousands, thousands of miles away.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: Why should I care that the Jewish temple isn't in it isn't here anymore?
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they mixed it with idols.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, temple's gone.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when Paul says you don't understand.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: His next line is for we, for we, for we are the temple of the living God.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that he cares about this so much is why for the only time in the New Testament we hear those words living God.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now do you see it, Paul says?
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: You're the temple now.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: So no, it's not harmless fun when we, God's temple wherein he now lives, right there in the heart of us, like in the Holy of Holies, when we, his temple, go out and partner with unbelievers who worship other gods, gods of greed and gods of lust, and gods of power and gods of fame, and we drift away from him.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: And just to just kind of hammer this home, but in a nice way, he then moves to seven promises.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: He says, He says, Let me list for you seven privileges that come to us from being God's temple, seven promises that God gave us when for the first time we finally understood the Christmas story and the Good Friday and Easter stories, that they were not just holiday stories, but stories of God's amazing plan to reclaim the fallen world for himself.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: Along with promises that if we would just believe it, Jesus came for me, Jesus lived for me, Jesus died for me, Jesus rose for me.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: If we would believe it, that he would make us his temple, his home, his people, his family.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: Look at these seven promises.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: For we are the temple of the living God, as God said, I will make my dwelling among them.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: One temple.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: Two, I will walk among them.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Three, I will be their God.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: Four, they shall be my people.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: Then we jump down after the middle commands.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: Then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, number seven, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: I will make you my home, I will make you my people, I will make you my family, I your father, you my children.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: Do you realize who you are?
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: The moment you trust my son as your Savior, you become my temple, which is to say, my home, my people, my family.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it is these promises that demand that we do three things: that we go out from their midst, that we be separate from them, says the Lord, that we touch no unclean thing, that we leave any association or partnership that draws us away from God to idols and addictions.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: For it is not a stretch to say that every addiction is a representation of an idol behind whom is a demon who wants to lock us in and drag us away from God.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: And God says, separate them, go out from those things, touch no unclean thing.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then he puts a wrap on it in chapter 7, verse 1, after saying, Here are the seven promises and privileges, in light of whom, in light of which, how how can you how can you keep trying to mix yourself, a temple, with those idols over there?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then he says, Since we have these promises, beloved, and by the way, don't ever preach.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: Unless it's a person, the person you're talking to is someone you love.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: Paul genuinely loves these Corinthians and he tells them these hard truths because he deeply loves them.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of flesh and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: And there it is.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: Not just a message for singles, but a message for all of us.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: God's all about relationships, especially your relationship with Him, for you are His home, His people, His family, and anything that endangers that, God's gonna fight.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: And what endangers it more than anything else, oftentimes is our relationships and our partnerships with people and with things that draw us away from Him.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: And anything that draws you away from God into immorality or idolatry, he hates even the closest and dearest of human relationships, such as our own family, must not get between us and our vision of God.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: For as Jesus said, if anyone comes to me and doesn't hate his own father and mother and wife and children, brother and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he can't be my disciple.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: Following Christ, friends, following Christ takes priority even over our closest relationships.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: So that in contrast, or in comparison to our love for our Savior, even our deepest loves elsewhere must must be in comparison.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: No better than hate.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: So let me ask, uh let me ask and try to answer quickly in the last uh ten minutes or so, four key questions that I've been asked over the years many times.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: Is it good to have close relationships with unbelievers?
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: Should a Christian go into business with an unbeliever?
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: What should a Christian do who is married to an unbeliever and should a single Christian marry an unbeliever?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: Is it good to have close relationships with unbelievers?
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: And my answer would be it's absolutely essential.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: For if you sever your close friendships with unbelievers because of a misreading of 2 Corinthians 6, 14, we not only misread that verse, we fail at our mission in life, which is to draw people into the world, to go into the world and draw people away from their false gods, idols, and addictions to the one true God who has left us here as his soldiers in this cosmic battle to reconcile them to himself.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: And when you hear that word reconcile, you should remember that is the theme of these chapters.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: Second question: should a Christian go into business with an unbeliever?
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, now this is a really sticky question.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: I would say that the Bible does not tell us to do that.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: It never says don't, but it does say beware.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: And in this passage, it tells us to avoid business partnerships that might powerfully pull us away from God toward anything else.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you I know have felt that powerful undertow dragging you out to sea an important new job or important new clients.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: You start hanging with a different crowd, and that crowd has no use for what they call religion.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: You protested that what you have is not religion but a relationship, and they just smiled and said, whatever, but we're gonna have a fun after work tonight.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: Join us.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that partnership was not only fun, it was lucrative.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: And your standard of living rose, and you got a membership in the best club, and you got a nicer home and a nicer car.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: And one day you discovered that your partners were unethical.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: I am collapsing a dozen stories that I could tell, but you might recognize a number of them.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: And one day you discovered that your partners went unethical and refused to change, and so you had a choice.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: You could sever that partnership, that relationship, but that would require lowering your standard of living.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that seemed unthinkable.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: Your lifestyle now owned you.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: You could uh you could try it, but then you looked at your wife and she shook her head, perhaps, or your husband.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: You had become emotionally yoked, a yoke that had come upon you inch by inch, day by day, a yoke that now seemed impossible to break, and so you drifted away from God for a while for the sake of worldly idols.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: And still I say the Bible does not prohibit going into business with unbelievers.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: It never says it clearly, and in fact, what it does is it tells us stories, both of people like David and Solomon who entered into business partnerships with unbelievers that worked out just fine, but then it tells us the sad stories of people like Jehoshaphat and others who entered into business partnerships with anti-God unbelievers like Ahab and got badly hurt.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: And in so doing, the Bible says to us, beware, and it says to us, be ready and willing at any moment to pull out, even at great cost, to preserve your integrity and your relationship to me.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I must tell you of a friend that that I once had who lived in my neighborhood here in Topeka, a leader in his local church, had wife, had children.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: We did so much together, and then he found himself one day in financial trouble without a job at all, and he was desperate and he was looking around.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: It was in those days when jobs were a little more scarce here in Topeka.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: And he felt that, told me that he felt that he had no choice but to take a job with a with a publishing firm north of the river that that marketed especially pornographic paperbooks.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the result over the years, as he edited those and read those, is that he lost his fire for the Lord.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: He dropped out of church leadership, his marriage grew stale, and he ended up shockingly taking his own life in deep depression.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: He had yoked himself to a demon that had drawn him away from the Lord who lived inside him.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: And many of you know, as I do, friends who have gotten caught by a demon of easy money.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's just harmless fun, they said, going up to the casino.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: And a friend who worked on the road, a salesman, found that it was too easy to keep stopping at casinos, too easy and too exciting to win six-figure pots, even though you'd lose bigger six-figure pots the next week.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually, when his wife found out he had remortgaged their house and so forth, he got divorced and became bankrupt and lost his reputation.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's the answer to the question: should a Christian go into business with an unbeliever?
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer is not don't, but beware.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: And if you see yourself getting close to a partnership that draws you away from the Lord, sacrifice whatever you have to get out of it.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: Third question: what should a Christian do who's married to an unbeliever?
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, well, actually, that's that's a pretty easy one right there, because 1 Corinthians, this to the same church, Paul says, stay true to your vows.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: If any brother has a wife who's not a believer and she's willing to live with him, 1 Corinthians 7, 12, he must not divorce her.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: And if a woman has a husband who's not a believer and he's willing to live with her, she must not divorce him.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: Get this, for the unbelieving husband has been sanctified, has been set apart as in a place where the light of Christ is shining upon them through the wife and the unbelieving wife sanctified through a believing husband.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: And otherwise, your children, if you leave them, they're out in the world.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: But if you stay there, they are holy, not meaning they're saved, but they are they're exposed to the gospel because they have Jesus Christ, since you're the temple of the living God.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: They have Jesus Christ living right there, within a few feet of them, every single day.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: But if the unbeliever leaves, let him do so.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Believing man or woman's not bound in such circumstances.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: But then verse 16, how do you know, wife, whether you'll save your husband?
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: How do you know, husband, whether you'll save your wife?
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: Miracles happen, don't they?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: So the Bible's clear, you keep your vows.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: 1 Peter 3:1, if it's necessary for you to shut up and never say anything about it, you try to win your husband, Peter says, without a word.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: By your life.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the final question is, should a single, we're back to the beginning, should a single Christian marry an unbeliever?
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer is not because it's the main message of this passage or Paul had it in mind, but because it's a leading application.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: And because in 1 Corinthians 7, Paul says, mm-hmm, no.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: To Christians who have the free, because of course a lot of wives back then, you know, and some husbands didn't have the choice.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: They were assigned their spouse, but that's why he's speaking to a widow, who then, when her husband dies, is free, and she says, a wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives, but if her husband dies, she's free to be married whom she wishes.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then he adds those words, only in the Lord.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: Just casually, as the thing, I mean, that's pretty obvious, right?
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's just obvious.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: You're free.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's why the church has always taken 12 Corinthians 6.14 to refer to marriage.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because marriage is a certain kind of a yoke.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: And God wants us to devote ourselves, He wants solid, happy, long-lasting, permanent marriages.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the only way you can do that is being utterly devoted to your wife or to your husband.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: But you're utterly devoted first to Jesus Christ, right?
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: So those two things don't work together well, right?
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: If we're the temple of God, you know, it's it's uh that's what you know we and now when Paul gets and when the Bible gives us stories, it's of Solomon whose heart was drawn away, remember?
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because of his wives.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: On that atheist website, by the way, an older atheist weighed in and gave advice that in a way could have come right out of our passage.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: The older atheist says, generally, I agree with the idea of 2 Corinthians, and this is after a whole lot of other pieces of advice about how awful and rotten and so forth all Christians are and so forth.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: But then an older one says, and I you can tell they're older, generally I agree with the idea of 2 Corinthians 6.14, but in seriousness, I still think it's good advice, at least the heart of it.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: Relationships generally need a foundation of commonality in order to succeed.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: A Christian fundamentally sees the universe in existence differently than you do.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: Every action they do.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: We either win God's favor or God's disapproval.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: They have rules they can't question.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: They have an entire Christian culture that expects things of them that atheists would find quite silly.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bad setup.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you're gonna go the distance with this girl, you'd have to decide how your kids would be raised, decide how much of your money is gonna go to her church so she can tithe, how much you'll help her when she's working on a project that means a lot to her.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's for the church.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: Are you gonna go to the church every Sunday?
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: Or does she have to go alone during a meaningful part?
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: And every so often she'll have to wonder if your relationship is more important, or is her faith more important?
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because her faith has a huge community and culture and support structure that goes with it.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: You're just you.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: No offense.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that something?
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's just that's just remarkable.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you're reminded of all of those verses in the Bible that say that intermarriage is a matter, it's an issue of race, not of race, but of religion.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: You shall not, Deuteronomy, intermarry with them.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: Don't give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children, there it is, first 2 Corinthians 6.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: They'll turn your children away from me to worship other gods, other idols.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: You and I and our children are objects of a cosmic battle of the gods.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: And intermarriage will cause so much.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: It would be like, you know, we have a we have a building project uh for uh for the student ministry, and and we're raising money for it.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: And thank you very much.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: We're over halfway there.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it's just great.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: But but before when we started that, what we did is we hired a couple of architects to give us plans to draw blueprints, right?
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then the board considered those blueprints.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: We looked at those blueprints and we decided, well, we like this one rather than that one.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine, though, for a minute, what we had done is we'd hired both both architects, kept both blueprints.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then once we raised the money, we set them both to work at construction here of the Mulvaine building to give the students a wonderful new, a wonderful new place to live.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: So we'd come and we'd check on them.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: And on one side of the project, one construction team, you know, with their blueprints.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then you haven't go to the other side, another construction team with their blueprints.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: Say, how would that work out?
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it wouldn't work out very well.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: It'd be crazy.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's what happens.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: When somebody gets married thinking that perhaps marriage is a mission field.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: God has maybe given them this wonderful person, and they can lead them to Christ, they're sure.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: And anyway, they're so kind, and they're going to church with me right now, and so forth.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what's happened is you actually have two people coming into the marriage with two different blueprints, and they're working against each other, and eventually it won't work out well for you, for him, for her, for either one of you.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: Samuel Langhorn Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain, fell in love at first sight with Olivia Langhorn Langdon, daughter of a wealthy industrialist.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: He was 32, she was 22.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: And she'd been around a little bit, but boy, she was swept off her feet by the most famous American of that day.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, their first date, he took her to New York City to hear Charles Dickens in person read one of his books.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: And she said no to him, time and again, because she grew up in a staunch Christian home.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: And she did not want to marry a non-Christian.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: But he went to church with her.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: He was so gracious with her, he participated in their family devotions.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so after a couple of years, she gave in and she married him.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: And they were deeply in love.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: And for a while it seemed to work out well.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: He joined her in family worship, in church.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: He prayed for the food over meals.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually he said to her, Libby, I gotta tell you, I don't believe any of this.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: I don't believe the Bible.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just gonna stop pretending.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: And he did.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: And bit by bit, over the years that worked away, it drained away her fervency for the Lord, as you can imagine it would.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: She developed a sickness and then another one, and and and she was extremely depressed as as the year 1900 got closer.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: She was in hospital care and she couldn't seem to get better.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: And and he finally said to her in her depression, he loved her, and he just said, Livy, listen, I I know you don't go to church anymore, and you're you've but listen, if if it would help you to lean on your faith, on your Christian faith, please do so.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: And she wept and she said, But honey, I don't have any faith anymore.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: Marriage strains under the burden of an unshared faith.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: An unequal yoke is not good, not just harmless fun, it's harmful to both sides of that marriage.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: And God says, I have a better option for you.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_00: I have a yoke, dear friend, that is easy and that is light, and it'll never harm you.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: Father, I I pray not just for the singles, but for all of us, for we are all lured away by the world.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: For some of its social media, for others it's uh money, and for some it's fame or power or sex.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: And Lord, would you deliver us from these demons as we remember that we are temples of a living God because of Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.