Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what does righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?

(2 Corinthians 6:14 NIV)

Paul said in the seventh chapter of his first letter to the Corinthian church, in his conclusion on marriage: “A woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:39 NIV). You are to marry in the Lord. You are not to marry an unbeliever. Don’t go out there and find them. Don’t go out there and make your associations in that group and fall in love there.

“But what if I limit myself to believers and never get married at all?” That is a denial of the great choices and will of Father God for our lives. If we pray, if we wait on God, if we seek His will, God will give us the most important of all shared experiences in life. He will give you somebody, just for you. The trouble is, we rush in. The trouble is, we don’t wait. The trouble is, we take things into our own hands. We say, “I may not have another chance,” or “I am tired of waiting on the will of God.” And when we do, our life can become a catastrophe.

All the days of such a life can be lived in sorrow, regret, and misery. Marriage has the possibility of being the most glorious of all human relationships. It is of God. But for every one of those precious possibilities, there is an equal horror and terror when God is left out. Most of the problems any pastor will sit with are the terrible heartaches and unbelievable sufferings that enter into a life that did not wait upon Father God and did not take Him into that most sacred of all contracts and covenants.

Our homes are to be built on Scripture. “Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock” (Matthew 7:24-25 NIV).

A Compromised Life

May I apply this word to our social life and responsibility in and on this earth. So many of our Christian people, who are church members, live compromised lives. They are Christians, they have been saved, they have been baptized on a confession of faith. They are members of a church, but they live out in the world. Were you not told they were Christians, you would never know it. They are like Lot.

Lot is the best example and illustration of a compromised Christian living out in the world that I know of in all of Scripture. How do you know Lot was a Christian? You would never know it from reading his story alone. Were it not for what Simon Peter says in his epistle, you would have no idea that Lot was a child of God. “And if he rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless, for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard” (2 Peter 2:7-8 NIV).

Were it not for that passage, you would not know that Lot was a Christian.

Lot and Abraham

Look at those two men: Lot and Abraham. They had become so affluent, they prospered so greatly, that the land could not hold their flocks, and their herdsmen began to fight. Abraham said to Lot, “Let us not have bitter feelings between your household and mine. The whole land is before you. You take what part you want, and I will take what remains. You have the first choice.”

So Lot stood on the height of the land and looked down over the beautiful, fertile, well-watered plain of the Jordan (Genesis 13:5-11). That was in the day before God destroyed it. It was green and verdant, with beautiful cities thriving in industry and commerce and wealth. One was named Sodom, and the other Gomorrah. Lot looked out over that well-watered plain and those great cities and said, “I will choose the great cities and the beautiful plain.”

Abraham took the mountains and lived and walked with God on the mountain peaks of Judea. Lot went down into the valley, and pitched his tent toward Sodom.

I want you to see where each of these men was found when God came to visit them. When the Lord God came down to visit Lot, “The two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of the city” (Genesis 19:1 NIV). He was in the gate. He was at the center of city life, at home in Sodom. When the Lord God appeared to Abraham, “The Lord appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’ So he built an altar there to the Lord, who had appeared to him” (Genesis 12:7 NIV). Abraham was on the mountain, building an altar.

This is the contrast. Lot had pitched his tent toward the world and ended up inside it. Abraham had set his face toward God and built an altar wherever God appeared to him. “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth” (Hebrews 11:13 NIV).

The Call to Come Out

Here is God’s word to us: I will be your strength and your stay, your shield and buckler. I will be a Father unto you. I will care for you. I will give you the desires of your heart, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty (2 Corinthians 6:18). Try Me and see. See if I will not do something better for you. See if I will not give you a greater gift and a finer one.

“Come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you. And I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty” (2 Corinthians 6:17-18 NIV).

Stand up for Jesus. Be counted for Him. See if He will not give you riches and blessings and answered prayers that your heart was not yet big enough to receive.

This is the Christian life: not a life blended into the world, indistinguishable from the surrounding culture, sitting at the city gate of Sodom. It is a life set apart, built on the mountain, its altar facing God. Lot chose the well-watered plain and lost everything. Abraham chose the mountain and became the father of faith. The choice before each of us is the same one they faced: the fertile plain of the world’s approval, or the high ground of God’s presence.

Come out. Be separate. And see what Father God will do.