The Unequal Yoke - Part A

Imagine a believer married to an unbeliever.

It's not an equal yoke. One loves God. One seeks God's will. One longs to be in fellowship with other Christians.

While the unbeliever doesn't understand any of those yearnings that the believer has. But first we want to tell you about a resource that will help you understand God's design for fatherhood. Men in America need to step up and take responsibility for raising the children they father. Boys growing up without male influence get involved more easily in drugs, crime, and socially destructive behavior and they are likely to repeat the cycle of abandoning their children. As a father and a pastor, I'm deeply concerned for the families in our nation. It's clear that so many destructive trends are related to the lack of a dad's influence in the lives of their children. We need to educate men on what biblical manhood truly means. The Dads Make a Difference package includes seven of Skip Heitzig's most important messages to men. Along with the full hour video documentary, Where's Dad?

Hosted by Skip. I think it's safe to say that the family is under attack today. I know that's a phrase that you have heard me say. In fact, I'll tell you the truth. I've said that sentence for 40 years and every year it's been true. And today it's truer than ever before.

It is worse than ever before. Get this package in either digital download or on CD and DVD when you support Connect with Skip with your gift of $50 or more. You'll be joining us as we take Skip's Bible teaching into more major cities. Request the Dads Make a Difference package online at connectwithskip.com or by calling 1-800-922-1888. Great.

Let's turn to 2 Corinthians 6 as we join Skip for today's lesson. You know, some people have very unique marriages. It's not it's not the ideal. It's not what they wanted, but they know how to make it work somehow.

It's a little odd that they make it work. Consider this classified ad in a New Jersey newspaper of a wife running this ad to get her husband back home. Please come home. The children miss you. The lawn hasn't been mowed in three weeks and the garden needs a worm like you.

Sign your loving wife Gretchen. I don't know the dynamics of that relationship, but you got to know that there's enough differences to cause discomfort. Now, we're all different. In fact, differences in relationships are good because opposites attract.

And you've noticed in your own marriages that there's differences between you and your husband, you and your wife. He likes to sleep with the windows open in the wintertime. No covers. She wraps up like an Egyptian mummy in the summertime. He's a night person. She's a morning person. He puts the toilet paper on the roll so it rolls over the top. She puts it so it rolls underneath and it drives him crazy. He likes the beach. She likes the mountains. She's outgoing.

He's more reserved and quiet. All of these differences are great. It makes the world go round. However, when the differences become so that they undermine the stability of the relationship itself, that's when we have problems in a marriage. What are those things? Well, there's a number of them we've already talked about, but one thing we haven't talked about that I want to address today is the unequally yoked relationship or the unequal yoke. Now, some of you have never heard that term before, perhaps. You're thinking unequal yoke.

You're thinking of like runny eggs or somebody who didn't sew the shirt thing right, the yoke on the shirt. It's an unequal or unequal yoke. But we're speaking about a marriage relationship, though Paul uses it to speak of a variety of relationships. We want to narrow it down to the marriage relationship today when a believer is married to an unbeliever. This is a person who is married legitimately but single spiritually. Now, how do relationships like this happen?

And how do people cope who are in them? And it's impossible to have a rich, fulfilling, happy marriage if it's unequally yoked. Consider the words of Zig Ziglar, a Christian motivational speaker. He said, I have no way of knowing whether or not you married the wrong person. I do know that many people have a lot of wrong ideas about marriage and what it takes to make that marriage happy and successful. I'll be the first to admit that it's possible that you did marry the wrong person.

However, if you treat the wrong person like the right person, you could well end up having married the right person after all. I find it interesting that in our present culture, we're seeing a rise in mixed marriages, that is mixed faith, different belief systems getting married. Washington Post put out an article recently, not too long ago, that back in the 80s, it was about 15% of American couples had mixed faith marriages.

Today it's about 25%. They also noted that with that comes a difference in world view and it's a greater strain on the relationship and the chances of divorce, according to all the research the Washington Post compiled, goes up. We talk about mixed faith. That's anything from a Catholic marrying an Evangelical or a Baptist marrying a Mormon or a Jewish person marrying a Christian.

And there's varieties that exist and complications that exist that that article that I'm referring to enumerates. But I want to look with you at two passages of scripture, one in 2 Corinthians, one in 1 Peter. The first is a prohibition against the unequal yoke. The second is to those who, for whatever reason, happen to be in the unequal yoke. So the first one is marrying an unequal partner.

The second passage is managing an unequal partnership. So 2 Corinthians Chapter 6 is marrying the unequal partner. There's one verse that we focus on, but for the sake of context, I'm going back to verse 11 of 2 Corinthians Chapter 6. O Corinthians, we have spoken openly to you. Our heart is wide open. You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted by your own affections.

Now in return for the same, I speak as to children, you also be open. Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness?

What communion has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? What part has a believer with an unbeliever?

And what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For you are the temple of the living God. As God has said, I will dwell in them and walk among them. I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore, come out from among them. Be separate, says the Lord. Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you.

I will be a father to you, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty. When he says don't be unequally yoked together, know that Paul is employing a term that comes from the farm, the ancient farm. When a farmer wanted to plow his fields, he would yoke or harness together two animals. A yoke was a wooden crossbeam that sat on the top of the necks of the animals. Underneath was a U-clamp that clamped the neck to the top brace and put both of the necks of the animals in sync together so that they could pull the plow, they could do farm work.

As long as the farmer chose the same animal, same species, same weight, same strength, same temperament, no problem. If, however, he decided to get two different kinds of animals, let's say he puts on this side an ox, and over here a pony, he has an unequal yoke. The ox wants to move forward, the pony wants to buck and lurch, still learning how to be a pony. If he gets an ox and a donkey, that's an unequal yoke. Ox wants to move forward, donkey wants to stay put.

Let's get more ridiculous. Let's say he gets an ox and a cocker spaniel. That's an obvious unequal yoke.

That whole thing is going to go spinning in circles. So the whole thing of don't be unequally yoked together with people comes from the farm. In fact, it comes from the Jewish law. Deuteronomy 22 says, you shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together. That's an unequal yoke. Now let's put that into a marriage. Imagine a believer married to an unbeliever.

It's not an equal yoke. One loves God, one seeks God's will, one longs to be in fellowship with other Christians, while the unbeliever doesn't understand any of those yearnings that the believer has. So the New Living Translation renders it, don't team up with those who are unbelievers. The RSV, Revised Standard Version, don't be mismated with unbelievers. I'll give you an example just from a note that I received from a woman in the church. She writes, Dear Skip, I'm saved, my husband is not. We're separated because I'm saved. Divorce, is it a sin? When I talk to the Lord about it, I'm so dull of hearing, I can't hear what he has to say.

You can hear the pain behind that little note. The confusion, I can't hear God's voice, I'm married to an unbeliever, it's causing problems in the relationship. The first question to ask is how does such a yoke occur? What are the circumstances for an unequal yoke? And I'm going to give you four pictures, four scenarios, four possibilities. Now you'll excuse me because in each of these examples, I'm going to make the wife the believer and the husband the unbeliever for the sake of simplicity.

And by the way, that happens to be the normal. If one is resisting the relationship, it is most often, not always, but most often the husband. So number one, the possibility of an unequal yoke, one gets saved, one does not. She gets saved, he does not.

That's one possibility. This is where you have two unbelievers, both not Christians. They meet, they fall in love, they get married. But in the course of life, one of them decides, she decides, I need something more.

I need a relationship with the living God and she makes the smartest decision a human being could ever make and that is to give her life to Jesus Christ. And you go, that's great, it is great, but it's also threatening and destabilizing to the husband in that relationship because now there's a third party. Listen to the words of one honest, unbelieving husband named Mark as he explains, at least he was at one point. When a man marries his wife, he never wants anything to come between the two of them. But when a man's wife becomes a Christian, it's a whole different kind of threat. Suddenly she has a love relationship with someone he can't even see. He can't understand anything that she tries to tell him about this new God she has come to know.

All he knows is that she's in love with somebody else and he's jealous. Instead of remaining first priority in her life as when they first got married, he has suddenly been demoted to number two. So the equilibrium in the relationship is destabilized because one is saved, one is not.

Here's the second scenario. One falls away while one remains faithful. This is the marriage of two believers. Both loved the Lord when they got married. They both were committed believers, but after a while he just sort of loses interest and he goes, I'm not into this spiritual thing. I don't want to carry a Bible and read it and go to church.

You go, see you later, I'm playing golf. Another note that I received from a woman in our fellowship, different one. How do I as a woman deal with a spouse who's not interested in God, Christianity or church anymore? Inferring that at one time he was interested, but he's not anymore. He's lost interest. He's fallen away. He's backslidden, but she remains faithful.

So you have an unequal yoke. Third scenario, deception. What do I mean by deception? When they got married, she thought he was a Christian because he acted it to the hilt. He spoke Christian ease fluently. Hallelujah, sister. Praise God, baby. And he learned all the lingo.

Why? Because he was after the check. He wanted to marry her. So he stalked her. I mean, he went with her to church and he got a Bible and he started singing the songs. And it was one colossal con job to get her to marry him. And after they get married, the mask comes off.

Here's the fourth possibility, disobedience. This is where you have a believer willfully dating and subsequently marrying an unbeliever, even though she was told, don't do it. Not a good choice. And I've seen this too many times. For whatever reason, she was attracted to him, attracted to his personality, maybe attracted to his looks, attracted to his financial status. And so she decides she's going to be a missionary in the dating relationship. It's called missionary dating. I'm going to win him to Christ.

I see him as my greatest assignment from God. And her great assignment, eventually she marries her schoolwork and she's married to him now. And what happened is she hasn't converted him to Christ. She hasn't brought him up to that level.

What often happens is he drags her down to his level and she starts compromising like she never compromised before. Just to keep the thing going, to keep it intact. Seeds of disobedience always yield a harvest of consequence. Last year, off the coast of Japan, there was a pretty hefty earthquake, 8.9 on the scale. And waves 60 to 80 feet tall devastated a portion of the coastline of Japan. I was there to see it in the aftermath.

What's interesting is how it happened. You had two plates, the Pacific tectonic plate and the North American plate that were sitting next to each other, suddenly lurched, suddenly moved and moved in different directions one under the other. Just a sudden movement in a different direction caused devastation.

So when two people fall in love but they are moving in different directions, there's going to be some sort of tremor that occurs or earthquake or tsunami that occurs. And when the tremors start showing up in the relationship, then what is typical is blaming occurs. Maybe the believer blames herself.

I haven't been a good wife. If I was more loving, then of course by now he'd be a believer. Or she starts blaming God. God, I've been praying about this for 10 years. You don't want me to have a Christian marriage?

You don't want to answer my prayers? But none of that is helpful because ultimately people are responsible for the own choices that they make. And your husband or wife, who's an unbeliever, has made the choice, I don't want to budge.

That's their responsibility. At Judgment Day, your unbelieving spouse won't be able to say, well, you know, I'd have been a believer if my wife would have been a perfect wife. That didn't work for Adam.

It's not going to work for anybody else. No excuses. Everybody stands for their own choices before the Lord.

Also, I want to give you a word of encouragement. If you're a believer married to an unbeliever, as much as you want your spouse saved, you've got to know that God wants them saved even more than you do. The principle in the Bible is that God is not willing or does not want any one to perish, but everyone to come to eternal life. He respects their choice, but his heart is for your spouse to have their eyes open and come to Christ. For God so loved the world and part of that world includes, of course, your unbelieving mate. But you are in a spiritually vulnerable situation, caught, as it were, between two worlds, the worldly world of your husband or wife, if she or he is not a believer, and the kingdom of God. So you're married legitimately, but you're single spiritually.

So what do you do? Now we turn to First Peter three, if you will, in your Bible. We go from marrying an unequal partner to managing an unequal relationship.

And I'll say as you're turning to that, if you already have it there, just listen to this. Your marriage may not be ideal. It might not be what you wanted. But even with an unequal yoke, you can have a good marriage. You can have a solid relationship, a loving relationship. It's the case of treating the wrong person like the right person, having discovered you married the right person all along. And by the way, if you are married to an unbeliever and you're looking at some couples who are married both believers and you're thinking, that's what I want more than anything else, and we understand that, it could be that you've idealized a Christian marriage. If you think, boy, if I was married to a Christian, there'd never be an argument, there'd never be a disagreement, there'd never be wet towels on the bathroom, my dog would be a Christian dog, would never bark at the neighbors, the sun would always shine at my house where there's a white picket fence.

Not a reality. Problems even in that kind of a scenario. So what do you do as a believer married to an unbeliever?

Well, first, let's just deal with this and move on. You don't divorce them because they're an unbeliever. 1 Corinthians 7, if the unbelieving mate wants to remain, you stay in the relationship because it tells us that the unbelieving spouse and children are sanctified by the believer, simply meaning they have a better avenue, a better chance of coming into the kingdom by your presence being there.

But beyond that, we have 1 Peter 3, and look at verse 1. Wives, likewise, be submissive to your own husbands, that even if some do not obey the word, they without a word may be won by the conduct of their wives. And if you're thinking, well, this is great if you have the right kind of husband, look carefully at the text. It's written to women who have the wrong kind of husband. Their husbands don't obey the word. They don't care about the truth of the gospel. So Peter writes to women who are saved women married to unsaved husbands.

Something else I just want you to notice. He writes to them in verse 1 down to verse 6. He writes to husbands in verse 7 only.

You find that a little bit odd that he spends six times more scriptural real estate dealing with wives than with husbands. You want to know why? Because wives had it six times harder than husbands.

And you want to know why that is? Because 2,000 years ago in the Roman culture, the men held all the chips. The women had no rights. There was a law in Rome called patria potestas, which meant the father's power. He had ultimate authority over his wife, over his children, even life and death. So he was managing his daughter's well-being and had absolute ultimate control over them until they got married. And then the power transferred to her husband.

So this is what it would mean. If a man 2,000 years ago in the Roman culture becomes a Christian, he simply brings his wife with him. She will submit to that and she will come to the church fellowship wherever he's at. That's just how it worked.

If a wife, however, converted while the husband clung to ancestral worship of his gods, he could kill her according to law or certainly cause a lot of ruckus and a lot of problems. So he spends more time, Peter does, dealing with women who are in that delicate situation and one verse toward the husbands who might be married to an unequal spouse. So how do you manage an unequal partnership? Four principles. First of all, with wise submission. I didn't say with blank submission, but with wise submission. Because just like when we discussed submission a few weeks ago, several weeks ago, we mentioned that being submitted to your husband does not mean being submitted to the sinful desires of your husband. You don't submit to sin.

So if he says, let's cheat, let's go get drunk because he's worldly, you don't submit to that. That's where you pull in Acts chapter five, where Peter said, we must obey God rather than men. That wraps up Skip Heitzig's message from his series, Keep Calm and Marry On. Find the full message, as well as books, booklets and full teaching series at ConnectWithSkip.com.

Now, here's Skip to tell you about a special resource we have for you this month. We're facing a number of serious issues in America today, but the crisis of absent fathers in the home is the initial cause of many of the social ills we are seeing accelerate. A few decades ago, Dr. James Dobson predicted that because of the absence of male leadership in the home, we would see packs of young men roaming the streets of America and terrorizing our nation. At the time, it seemed like an extreme view, but today, that's exactly the horror of what is taking place in our cities.

The problems are clear. Teen crime, drug abuse, youth suicide, abortion and much more. The question is, where's dad? That's the title of an hour-long documentary that I host. It's part of our Dads Make a Difference package. This resource also includes seven of my most important messages to men, such as Seeing God as Father and The Legacy of a Godly Dad. This would make a great gift for any man. I hope that you'll order our Dads Make a Difference package now. To order this Dads Make a Difference package, just call 800-922-1888 or go to connectwithskip.com.

That's connectwithskip.com. Come back tomorrow for the second part of Pastor Skip's teaching and discover the radical advice Peter gave for how husbands were to treat their wives. It's all about mutual respect. First of all, be considerate. Notice the word understanding. Dwell with them, your wives, with understanding.

Simply this, men learn to be sensitive to what your wife needs. Make a connection, make a connection at the foot of the cross and cast all burdens on His word. Make a connection, connection. Connect with Skip Hyton is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.