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Pride Is a Sin sermonette 102602.doc
Why Christians Shouldn’t Become Unevenly Yoked
Eric
Snow Sermonette 9-6-03 UCG Ann Arbor
In Joshua Harris’ book I Kissed Dating Goodbye,
he explained his not-so-good experiences with some shopping carts when he has
gone grocery shopping. I’ll use his
experience here, although I’m going to draw a different point than he did
today. Have you ever gone grocery
shopping, and got a bad cart? Maybe you
got one that constantly squeaked as you pushed it. Or it had a defective handle in which the plastic handle moved
back and forth or around the metal underneath.
Or maybe it was simply hard to push since one or more of the casters
would get stuck some as it or they turned.
Perhaps the worst one is the “swerver,” which constantly wants to go to
the side.
Now
imagine for the rest of your life you had to have a bad shopping cart EVERY
time you went into (say) Farmer Jacks, Krogers, Meijers, Kmart, etc. Wouldn’t that be a constant minor trial? Would it drive you half nuts? I think my mother would be, especially since
she hates grocery shopping anyway.
But
now there’s something much worse than this fictional trial, and that’s for
someone to deliberately marry someone who is in constant disagreement with them
on religion. Much like the itch that
can’t be scratched, or the shopping cart with a mind of its own, a Christian
married to a non-Christian will have a relationship that’s a constant source of
conflict.
S.P.S. Christians should never choose to be married
to non-Christians. We should never be
unevenly yoked with unbelievers.
May
say can tune out, go to sleep for next 15 minutes, since only theoretical
issue, since already married, or older & widowed or divorced. But still may have children or grandchildren
or friends this is a live issue for.
Not
about those called after being married.
Just because UCG-IA won’t administratively punish for this doesn’t mean
it’s spiritually good.
II
Cor. 6:14-18
“heterozugoyntes,”
refers to two of a different kind trying to work together, such as plowing with
a donkey and ox together, which the Old Testament prohibits. Marvin Vincent, Vincent’s Word Studies,
p. 324: “Unequally gives an ambiguous
sense. It is not inequality, but
difference in kind, as is shown by the succeeding words.” Cooperation is difficult because of the
differences involved. In Gone With
the Wind (p. 22), Gerald O’Hara, the father of Scarlett: “Only when like marries like can there be
any happiness.”
Constant
friction involved when values fundamentally different. Christianity is a way of life, not just a
couple hours each Saturday at church:
How children will be raised?
What TV and movies will you watch together? What music would you listen to?
What will you eat if the husband or wife wants to eat pork or shrimp and
you don’t? How will they act on the
Sabbath around you when they don’t keep it but you think you should? What would you do when they want to put up a
Christmas tree, paint eggs for Easter, or display lanterns on Halloween? Suppose the conflict turns on something even
more fundamental, such as doing drugs, hanging out in bars constantly, smoking,
heavy drinking, watching or reading pornography?
I
Kings 11:1-9
Solomon
corrupted by being unevenly yoked despite God had appeared to him twice
even. This could happen to us,
regardless of how spiritually strong we think we are. It’s much easier to compromise down than up. Could hope for conversion of mate, but it’s
not likely. One case example.
Gone
with the Wind: Scarlett, thinking she
could change Ashley Wilkes, “Oh Pa . . . if I married him, I’d change all
that.” Gerald: “Oh, you would, would you now? . . . Then
it’s little enough you are knowing of any man living, let alone Ashley. No wife has ever changed a husband one whit,
and don’t you be forgetting that.” This
is overly emphatic, but it states a basic truth nevertheless.
SKIP? Tim LaHaye, as a pastor, counseling woman
who wanted to marry unsaved man: “We
have in our church 36 women and 4 men who are married to unsaved partners. I’ll give you their names and phone numbers,
and you can call any of them and ask, ‘If you had to do it again, would you
marry an unbeliever?’ Out of those 40
people, no one of them would answer yes.”
Conclusion: We as Christians have been called to live a
different way of life from the world.
Christians who marry people in the world who insist on living the
world’s ways are setting themselves up for constant conflict if they wish to
live God’s way of life and their mate doesn’t.
Much like the grocery shopper battling shopping cart with a mind of its
own, a Christian who chooses to be unevenly yoked has chosen to be often
unhappy. Let’s remember Gerald O’Hara’s
general advice when we’re tempted to marry someone in the world: “Only when like marries like can there be
any happiness.”
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