Properly Yoked

Light dispels the darkness. In the middle of the night, you might have a hard time seeing the furniture around you. You grope around trying not to bang into the table you know is somewhere around here. Your hands feel around and you might shuffle your feet to make sure you don’t trip on anything that might be lying around. Yet, with just the light of a candle, you can see all around you. Suddenly, your steps can be sure. You can know that you are headed in the right direction and can step over and around any obstacle in your path.

In this passage of 2 Corinthians 5-6, God tells us that we need to recognize that we are new creations when we become Christians and receive Christ into our lives. When we are told that the old is gone, it does not mean that we no longer have the same friends, the same job, the same family, the same problems. We do - but we no longer need to see them same way as we used to. We no longer need to approach them the same way. We now have the Holy Spirit living in us and so we have the power and ability to change our ways: our relationships, our priorities, our sinful actions.

However, God knows that most of us will not just overcome our old ways, so He leads us down the path – He shows us the way. We choose whether we want to take His guidance or whether we prefer our ways. So immediately after He tells us that we are new creations, we are told how we become these new creations: first, we reconcile ourselves to God by receiving Jesus who has been made sin for us though he had no sin; next we struggle with the difficulties and hardships that come our way because we are no longer the same people we were but have become new creations; then we change the way we relate to those who have not gone through this process. Paul calls them “unbelievers” and tells us we should not be yoked to them and asks the question, “What fellowship does light have with darkness?”

God knows that we need others in our lives. He created Eve because He knew that Adam needed someone to be with him (Genesis 2:18). That hasn’t changed throughout history. God created us as social beings, all of us needing someone else in our lives to enjoy life and to help us through it. Marriage, Family and Friends are all structures that God gave us to support us through our lives. However, He also knows that some people are better influences in our lives than others. He knows that our first tendency will be to go to those whom we have always known, to whom we are closest. Yet He also knows that if those same people have not gone through the new birth and become new creations, they are not able to guide us well. When we go to them, we are asking the blind to lead the seeing. We are asking the dark to show the way to the light. This will lead us down the wrong path and many times to the light being extinguished. We will be walking in the dark, unable to see the obstacle in our path and bumping into and tripping over them. When believers are influenced by unbelievers, God tells us that we will go down the wrong way.

This does not mean to be extreme and to stop relating to anyone who is not a believer in Christ. This would mean we would have to take ourselves out of the world. Besides, how do we bring our family and friends with us into salvation and eternal life if we do not relate to them? What God is telling us is that we need to influence those who are in the darkness by shining our light upon them, but we need to be influenced by those whose light is brighter than our own. If you are new in the faith, you will find these people in Bible-instructing churches (not all churches are Christ-centered and Bible-based, hence not all church-goers are walking in the light). If you have been in the faith for a while, do not allow your old friends and your family to influence your decisions – even the smallest decisions and actions will be yours to account for in the Day of Judgment! Instead, surround yourself with true, Spirit-filled Christians. Let those people be the ones with whom you spend time, to whom you listen and from whom you receive testimonies and advise. You are a new creation and you need to be supported in this life. That support needs to come from someone walking in the light since you are now also in the light. After all, what fellowship does light have with darkness?