What Do We Have in Common Part 2
2 Corinthians 6:14-16 · Mike Doyle · Jun 12, 2022
Letters to the Corinthians, No. 111
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261927243718

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Good morning. I love hearing kids in the church, don't you? So leave them here. Don't take them out. I want you to know that I wore this shirt just so Jim would be happy. A little review from last week. William Kelly says that the Corinthians were not only needy in their affections, They were careless in their associations with the world. Had Christ been their object, the new life would not have been hindered in a way, for as He creates direction, sustains the affections according to God. So does He guide and guard the feet in the narrow way, His own path outside and above the world. When the Lord Jesus, or where the Lord Jesus, is not before your heart, the world in one form or another will ensnare fair excuses which cover unholy alliances, escape detection, and the Lord's honor somehow before long is compromised. So last week we looked at 14 through 16, which are pretty interesting verses.

Don't be bound together or equally yoked with unbelievers. That was all read by Jim. So the question has to be asked, what can be stronger? to a believer than those rhetorical questions. The first point is that Paul points to the radical difference of the principles of low and high, righteousness and lawlessness, and light and darkness. Those three things are totally opposite. And then he points to the characteristic heads, the difference between Christ and Belial. And then he contrasts the members or followers, believers and unbelievers. What do they have in common? Well, we discovered they had nothing in common. He closes with their joint place as God's temple, contrasted with the temple of idols.

So all forms, the life outward and inward are embraced." So he covers every aspect of the Christian life. So as to exclude alliances with the world and claims the saints holy for Christ set apart from the world. I know that as I studied through this, How can I come out from the world? Since the time I was able to recognize that I even existed, I've been influenced by the world. All that I've done has been, and all that you've done has been, so that we can somehow maneuver our way through this world.

And some say that 2 Corinthians 6.14 just confines to one issue. Just one issue alone, but it covers a multitude of issues.

When he says, don't become or don't get yourself yoked together with unbelievers, that word we talked about last week, it means don't get into one of those. If you're already in one, that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about right now, with the opportunity to be unequally yoked, don't go there.

He doesn't specify the character of the object of the yoke, and therefore we're kind of justified in giving this whole passage the widest application that we can. By bringing its edges to bear directly upon every face of an unequal yoke, we shall see the importance of so doing. Again, do you ever think about, gee, if I go there and I do this, Is there a yoke involved? Am I going to be unequally yoked? So when he gives the command in verse 17, therefore, refers back to everything, actually the whole chapter, come out from their midst and be separate.

Very interesting. The word come out is a Greek word. It's imperative mood, which is the mood of a command. It's aristotelian. It's fact. And it's active voice. You get out. You get out. But then when he says, be separate, it's imperative mood. It's a command. It's Aristence. It's a fact. But it's passive voice. I'll keep you separated. It'll be done. The action in passive voice is something that's done to me. I'm not the initiator of the action.

I'm called to come out, initiate that action. But once I am out, then I will stay separate because of something else acting upon me or someone else. Is separation from the world a powerful testimony to the world? Charles Coates says nothing is more powerful in testimony than separation.

Nothing. Because you don't have to say anything. It's important, I think, like in Isaiah 52, 11, the Lord said, depart, depart and go from there. Touch nothing unclean. Go out in the midst of her and purify yourself. You who carry the vessels of the Lord. So those that were involved in carrying the vessels of the Lord had to be clean and they had to be separate.

Revelation 18, 4 says, I heard another voice from heaven saying, Come out of her, my people." The her there is Babylon. Come out of her, my people, so that you will not participate in her sins and receive her plagues. So there's an appeal, even in Revelation 18, for those that belong to the Lord to come out of Babylon not only a place, but a whole mentality. And primarily because you're not going to participate in her sins and you're not going to receive the plagues that she's about to have.

So, Coates also said that separation is a witness to the power of God. If Christians only remembered what persons they are, and not what they ought to be, not what you should be, but what you already are, they could not associate and be yoked with unbelievers if you understand who you are. So one of the reasons that there's so much emphasis here on positional truth, which is showing us who we are, is for this purpose. We need to remember that as believers, that what we are, who we are as believers, and carry about the sense that we are in perfect contrast to the world.

We have nothing in common with it morally. The world's joys are not ours. Its interests are not ours. We happen to be in a whole new relationship. We get to behold the glory of the Lord. If I make a companion of an unconverted person, how can we ever go together? He's not ever going to behold the glory of the Lord unless he is saved. The things that are so precious to me, the things that fill your heart with divine light, are actually repulsive to them. If I'm beholding the glory of the Lord, That person is beholding the glory of man.

If people go on with an unequal yoke, what have they done? Worst case scenario, they forgot their proper place as sons of God. So I think if you want to highlight one issue in Christianity today, it's ignorance by believers as to who they are, what they have in Christ, and where they are. If you don't have correct biblical-based education, believers are vulnerable to the world and its philosophy. Who we are, where we are, and what we have. We are totally different human beings from everyone else on the planet who are not believers. And we should remember that.

Even in Amos 3.3, he says, shall two walk together except that they agree. I think we ought to test all our companionships by whether there is a real desire after Christ. We ought not to make companionships otherwise. Now, I'm not saying we don't be courteous to everybody. We do. We should be kind and ready to serve in any capacity. We shouldn't repel them because we're a little arrogant about what we think we are.

But here we're talking about the idea of a yoke. Back there it's a wooden piece that you're hooked into and you can't move. You can't move. So either you're going to dominate or the other person's going to dominate. So understand we're talking about yokes here, we're not talking about living in the world. If I'm yoked with someone, I can't go any faster than they're going, and they can't go any faster than I'm going. If I'm in Christ, I'm a new creation. Now, imagine a person who's the new creation in Christ being yoked to a person who's from the old creation.

They are not going in the same direction. Charles Barkley, you know who Charles Barkley is? He's got a great sense of humor. He told Shaquille O'Neal one day that when they left the planet that Shaquille was going to go to a warmer place than he was going to. They were unequally yoked. So movement. If I'm yoked, I must come out. But in some cases, I can't.

I'm so tied up in a relationship I can't part company with the situation that I'm in. Now remember, God is speaking to us as sons and daughters. And He's dealing with us in a family relationship. So, can we count on parental care unless we are separate? I don't think we can.

We have the resources of Egypt, like the children of Israel, But then we find God. God could sustain them where there was no natural resource. They had bread from heaven, they had a rock to drink from, their clothes never wore out in 40 years, and their feet never swolled, never. Their shoes didn't wear out.

When we come to see, or excuse me, when we come out, We can come into and enjoy the wonderful reciprocity, I will be their God and they shall be to me a people. God delights in his people and his people are delighting in him. Undoubtedly, but it is all gain because you begin to prove for the first time that God is really real, that what he says to us, he means. No young believer finds his feet until he has proved God for himself. That's the proof of faith. It's a wonderful thing to find that God is really as good as his word, that he means what he tells us. All you got to do is test him and you'll find out. Usually he's testing you to prove to you that he cares about you. J.B. Stoney used to say, quote, Peter said, we have left all to follow you. Yes, Peter, and you did very well by doing it.

So do believers make progress? If he doesn't act on this principle in verse 17 where it says, therefore come out from their midst and be separate, sayeth the Lord, don't touch what is unclean and I will welcome you. I don't think you do. I don't think we do.

We can look back and we can see our spiritual start when we made a move, however small it was. it might only be speaking to a companion, a friend. We've all had links, and we've had to break them and come out, and we made no progress until we did, until we realized that we were the temple of the living God.

I remember when I first became a Christian, I was 35, so I had developed a fairly good group of friends. I wondered right after I had become a believer, well, what am I going to have to do about them? Because I'm different now, and I just knew I was different. Well, I didn't have to do anything. They all left, which was a real blessing to me. It's wonderful that we know. It's a great blessing that we know that God dwells among us, His saints, and He walks among us, and He lives in us. He never tells us what we ought to be, but we are the temple of God. We already are that.

In Exodus, He dwells among them. In Leviticus, He walks with them. So what is this thought of walking? Walking is God's activities. It's what He's doing. We believers are in a place of rest, and it's His place of rest and the place of His activity. God rests in his saints. He dwells there. He has a place of perfect rest among his people.

Then he walks, Leviticus 26, 12. If you want to see the activities of God, you must look at believers. That's where you see it. He walks among us. Suppose you see a saint separating. That's God's activity. It's God moving in a soul, and that makes it so interesting. God says, come out. Is it I that have to move, or is it God that motivates me to move? I have to move, but the motivation comes from Him.

William Kelly said, the apostles' jealousy was alive to this danger in love and that bound together Christ and the church. Love speaks and acts freely, though with tender consideration. Paul comprehends in his wide warning not only an idolatry, but every kind of worldly association as defiling and unworthy of the believer, because it doesn't suit Christ, nor does it suit the believer who's in the presence of God. If blessed with Christ for eternity, You cannot, without sin, have a relationship with an enemy in time. So some have narrowed this come out or this unequally yoked, maybe even perverted it a little bit by restricting it to an exhortation against a marriage of a believer and an unbeliever. But the whole principle undoubtedly condemns the contracting of any such union It's clear in the face of it that, strictly speaking, it cannot be the direct intent for the corrective insisted on is exactly what one ought not to follow, even in so sad a case.

Talking about someone who's married to a non-believer. Maybe they become a believer and then they read this verse and they think, well, the first thing I have to do is divorce my spouse. So if you have a Christian woman who is married to a non-believer, should she separate from that husband? And if she did, would she expect even a greater censor from God and His children to act rashly like that?

In fact, if we read 1 Corinthians 7, we find that in that verse, those verses 7, 10 through 11, But to the married I give instructions, not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not leave her husband. But if she does leave, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled with her husband, and that the husband should not divorce his wife." If you're unequally yoked, it doesn't mean that you go before the judge and say, well, we're unequally yoked, we need a divorce. The Word of God says different.

So we have this great privilege. ever bound up in an imperative obligation to separate to God from all that's evil. Holiness is, God is holy. Holiness is and must be in the dwelling place where God is. God is holy unto himself. And the heathen, no doubt, is characterized by all sorts of corruption morally. But it is not from heathenism only, but from every evil that God calls out the believer and insists on a habitual avoidance and judgment.

He calls us to come out. I say, I can't come out because I'm in the world. But then he says, yeah, I know you're in the world, but the coming out is something here, not your address. So therefore, come out and do not touch what is unclean. will welcome you.

Here we see that the Corinthians were losers themselves because they did not live up to their dignity. Who were they? Here we see what is true because we're priests and we have a family position in God's family. So he says, touch not the unclean thing. The Lord abundantly and in a way, marked way, shows his care for us. Balaam, our friend Balaam or Belial or Satan, what does he do? His focus is to try to get us and draw us back into the society of unbelievers. That's where He wants us.

Of course, we have to meet them in business, and otherwise we live among them. And Paul said back in 1 Corinthians, if you want to not associate with unbelievers, then you're going to have to leave the planet. You've got to go outside the world somewhere, because they're everywhere. So he speaks of social interaction about them, joining with them in their tastes and their pleasure, yoking up. There the Corinthians fail, so Paul says to them, what communion does light have with darkness? What concord is Christ with Belial? Just don't touch the unclean thing.

Second Peter 2.15 says, forsaking the right way, they have gone astray, having followed the way of Balaam, the son of Baor, who loved, agape, the wages of unrighteousness. And then he says, and I will welcome you. In Revelation 2, we find a letter that the Savior writes to Pergamos. The church suffered from the Balaam attraction.

And consequently, there's these people here described as overcomers. And what does he say to them? I will give you to eat of the hidden manna if you'll come out. May we know more of what the hidden manna is. It's a wonderful way that the blessed Lord Jesus walked here according to the pleasure of God. Revelation 22, 12 through 17 talks about this separation, coming out from among men and being separate.

And notice something about the city of Corinth and the church there. That they, the saints there on whom the greatest spiritual gifts had been bestowed. We talked about that in First Corinthians. No other church had the demonstration of spiritual gifts like they had, most favored of God. If one were to judge the success of a church by the presence of visible gifts, but there was something greater that they had received, and this they could not accomplish but by separation. They were the temple of the living God. They are instructed to be separate and touch not the unclean thing, in order that they might enjoy the highest favor, even that of being received by Him. How much value do we place on the fact that we are received by God alone? It's evident that there is a special blessing consequent on separation. It can't be acquired in any other way.

We talked about it on Sunday School this morning, about spiritual growth and is there an event in a believer's life when he really does abandon all for Christ. Now positionally, that's already been true. He's been placed in Christ. He's totally separated. But in his walk in spiritual growth, I think there comes a time where he does separate, that he goes all in for God. An interesting statement. You don't get the blessings that are waiting for us until we do separate. Isn't that interesting? Positionally, we're blessed, but we don't get to enter into them conditionally. He's talking about the whole church.

The Corinthian church was a temple of the living God, but unless they separated from unholy associations, they would not enjoy the greatest favor of being received by God and enjoying Him. Is that a great pleasure? Is this something that you value, that we value as believers? that I'm received by God and I can enjoy Him, or as we talked about in Sunday school, I can enter into the Holy of Holies, I'm encouraged, I'm even commanded to enter in by the blood of Christ. Nothing that is a hurdle for me to have this incredible intimacy with the Lord Jesus Christ. Nothing's in the way anymore. I can just go in. But I have to be persuaded about that. And then when I go, the blessings there are innumerable.

The word in Revelation 22 is, Holiness becomes thy house, O Lord, forever. Holiness means separation unto God, to Him. Holiness is consistent with what it means to be in the house of God, and it's forever. What is true congregationally is also true individually, and without holiness or sanctification, No man really sees the Lord intimately.

A servant is not fit for the master's use in the day of the greatest decline unless he removes himself out from the vessels of dishonor in God's house. So where do we find a scripture anyone favored with the presence of the Lord or personal communication from him without separating being assisted on? The best example was Moses. Moses turned aside to see a burning bush. And he saw the fire that didn't consume the bush. And he went towards that, and God said to him in Exodus 3, 5, Don't come near here.

Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground. We all stand in that place right now. There cannot be distance, let me just put it another way, there can't be a distinct nearness to God, but apart from everything that is of man.

And then he says in 18, there they were, his temple, in virtue of his dwelling and walking about among them. Now here he says, I will be a father to you. And you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty. So now there's a new relationship. It presupposes the divine nature has been given to us.

God must have his own and they must be holy for holy, for he is holy. And this not only in an inward way, but in an outward one also, without which it would be hypocrisy. in outward ways also to his own glory unless he would be a partner with us in his own dishonor. He will have us clear from associations which are worldly and defiling. He will exercise our souls in order to free us from all that denies or despises his will. He commands those that believe to come out from those that believe not and be separate. So he says, but there's another thing here and it's something that we should pay attention to.

Jehovah as such is introduced under the Septuagint form of the Lord. If you look back early in Genesis, but mostly Genesis, you find out that God reveals himself as Almighty. I'm God Almighty. That's who I am. And then when you get Israel into the picture, he's revealed as Jehovah to the children of Israel, Exodus 6.

But now it's different. To believers, He's revealed as Father, which is reserved only to the Son to declare. Not only out of fullness of enjoyment and in testimony, but bringing us into it in virtue of His death and resurrection and our union with Christ. We are Now, we now have a father that nobody else in history ever had. Family.

Best example of that, John 20, 17, when Jesus rose from the dead and Mary Magdalene is down there looking for his body and she can't find it. And she meets the gardener and the gardener finally identifies himself to her. And she recognizes it's him, the Lord Jesus. And he says to her, Stop clinging to me, for I have not yet ascended to who?

The Father. But I want you to go to my brethren and say to them, I ascend to my father and your father. my God and your God. He wanted to make sure that the message of this family relationship was clear to the disciples, because from their frame of reference, they didn't know God as Father. He says, tell them that I'm going to my Father. And oh, by the way, Mary, I don't want you to identify with me as the Messiah on the earth. I want you to identify with me as a glorified Christ who is your very life, and He's your Father and my Father.

So William Kelly said this, and to our souls what more instructive than the fact everywhere blatant that those saints who cling to the world, which is enmity against God and involves in what is unclean in every turn, never seemed to rise into the liberty of God's sons, especially in their public worship, but habitually drop into language, more befitting the days when God was dealing with a nation and dwelt in the thickness of darkness. Instead of being revealed as he now is in and by his son, according to his true nature and that relationship which is so sweet to the believer as led by the Holy Spirit. The relationship proper to us now, though of course he be evermore Jehovah Shaddai.

It is only Why don't we go there? I think it's only with selfish interests and strong prejudices that we have that men gradually become accustomed to and harden themselves to defiance so flagrant in every way disastrous to them to not enter into this. For as man of the world cannot rise to the level of Christ to be together with his own, If I'm unequally yoked, what I have to do is I have to descend to the level of a fallen Adam in the world. God is thus and evermore put to shame in what claims to be his house, and with a loudness proportioned to its departure from his word.

So lastly, chapter 7, verse 1, Having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God." So what you find out, I think, is that when you start to understand the possessions that we have of the promises and the facts They alone become great incentives for us to purify ourselves, because we come to realize that, boy, the Lord has just incredible blessings for us, such as, I will be your father, and you will be my sons and daughters, and I want to be in that relationship. And He says it's so. What's the motivation? The motivation are the blessings. Grace works that way. It causes us to respond because the blessings are so overwhelming.

So on another point, the position of separateness from the world along with indifference to holiness. There are those in Christianity today that teach that holiness is only a personal thing and they kind of apologize for corporate religious evil as if it didn't compromise them in any of the Lord's dishonor.

The answer to that is verse 14 through 18 of chapter 6. And then there are others whose zeal is solely for religious purity. and whose personal ways are light and loose, and far below those of many of the saints in humanly formed and ordained societies." That's what this verse guards against. Both are condemned by the solemn words before us in verse 14 through 18 and 7-1.

So in closing, may we, as having proved the truth and blessing of Romans 6, 14 through 18, have the grace to find the constant value of come out from them, and I will be to you a father, you will be my sons and my daughters, and to cultivate integrity outward and inwardly, perfecting holiness in the reverential fear of God himself.

We have, therefore, a double relationship in his grace. God dwells and walks in us as his temple. Those are collective blessings that we all have. And besides that, he is our father. And we are to him sons and daughters. Which is an individual intimacy with God himself. Both are found in coming out of separateness to God from among the worldly with responsibility to touch not the unclean thing. So as we continue to grow in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus, I think there is a time for us as believers where we are solicited by God himself to come out to him. I know thinking about coming out to God was sort of a fearful presentation.

I can imagine the Jews walking out of Egypt to what? Abraham, God said, I'm going to make you greater. Your seed will be greater than the sands of the sea, of the shore or the stars in heaven. And I'm going to give you a country. Let's go take a look at it. So he comes out of the era of the Chaldees, which is like a fairly modern bustling city out to the Negev desert. This is it? You'll sustain me here? Yes, I will. We live in a desert in this world, but God is our father and we are his children. So let's close.

Dear Father, How we thank You. How we thank You for the grace that we live under. We thank You for all the provisions that You provide for us and the fact that we know and are persuaded without a doubt that You are our Father. We are members of Your family. We are sons and daughters. And because of that, we are recipients of every blessing possible. And we thank you for that. We pray in your son's precious name. Amen.