Do Not Be Unequally Yoked
July 26
Paul challenges the church at Corinth in a way that sounds a bit strange. The church is the body of Christ; it is composed of everyone who has repented of their sin and turned to God by faith in Jesus. And yet, he tells this church to not receive the grace of God in vain. (2 Corinthians 6:1) He says that today is the day of salvation. But… they were already saved, right?
There are two possibilities here, and either fits. 1.) Either Paul was saying that there were unbelievers present in the church at Corinth, and he’s calling them to put their faith in Jesus to be saved, or 2.) Paul is encouraging believers to continue to receive and live by God’s grace. In other words, every day is a day to receive grace from God. We need more than just the grace that saved us. We need fresh grace to continue to save us every single day.
Paul says that he and his companions don’t want to give anyone an occasion for offense. (2 Corinthians 6:3) We need to identify that the Greek word translated as offense doesn’t mean offense as it’s often used today. Paul’s word means to stumble. He and his companions don’t want to cause any of the Corinthian believers to stumble into sin. They want to be model Christians that the Corinthians can – and should – imitate. (1 Corinthians 11:1)
Paul’s final section of this chapter has to do with believers being “unequally yoked”. If you were to work a pair of oxen, you wouldn’t yoke a young, inexperienced ox together with an old, experienced ox. Instead of working together, they would fight against each other. And if the young ox had never been in a yoke before, it would fight both the yoke itself, and it would fight with the experienced ox.
Paul applies this principle to various relationships that believers can have with other people. It applies to everything from business relationships to romantic relationships. Spirit-led believers and natural unbelievers operate with a different worldview. They see things differently and have different priorities. These priorities can cause tremendous conflicts in personal relationships.
Application
How many unbelievers are saved in a dating relationship with a believer? A couple begins to date, and the believer ends up compromising his or her Christian convictions. Missionary dating rarely works!
A friend of mine got into a business relationship with an unbeliever. He quickly learned the gravity of Paul’s words when sometime later, he found himself defending himself in Federal Court because of crimes committed by his business partner. Of course, not every believer/unbeliever partnership ends like that. But Paul’s advice is to be very careful! It’s better to not get entangled with someone whose priorities are fundamentally different than yours.
You may recall from our discussions on 1 Corinthians 2:14–3:4 here and here that even among believers, some immature believers conduct themselves as if they were unbelievers. Their priorities are very different from mature believers. So, Paul would say that Spirit-led believers need to realize that they can be unequally yoked with both believers and unbelievers.