Whether in you are in a relationship or it’s the relationships of your children, family members, or friends—here is a sobering and encouraging word from Richard Baxter on the issue of being unequally yoked.
Excerpt from The Godly Home
Directions About Marriage (Direction 6)
Do not let carnal motives persuade you to join yourself to an ungodly person. Rather, let the holy fear of God be preferred in your choice before all worldly excellence whatsoever. Do not marry a swine for a golden trough, or an ugly soul for a beautiful body. Otherwise, first, you will give cause of great suspicion that you are yourself ungodly; for those who know the misery of an unrenewed soul and the excellency of the image of God can never be indifferent whether they are joined to the godly or the ungodly. To habitually prefer things temporal before things spiritual in the predominant acts of heart and life is the certain character of a graceless soul. He who deliberately prefers riches and beauty in another, before the image and fear of God, gives a very dangerous sign of a graceless heart and will. If you value beauty and riches more than godliness, you have the surest mark that you are ungodly; if you claim not to value them, then why do you prefer them? How could you do a thing that detects your ungodliness and condemns you more clearly? Does this not show that you either do not believe the Word of God, or else that you do not love God and regard his interest? Otherwise, you would take his friends as your friends and his enemies as your enemies.
Tell me, would you marry an enemy as your own, before any change or reconciliation? I am confident that you would not. Can you so easily marry an enemy of God? If you do not know that all the ungodly and unsanctified are his enemies, you do not believe or know the Word of God, which tells you that “the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:7–8). If you fear God, your chief end in marriage will be to have one who will be a helper to your soul and further you in the way to heaven. If you marry a person who is ungodly, either you have no such end or else you must know that you have not chosen anything wiser than if you chose water to kindle the fire or a bed of snow to keep you warm. Will an ignorant or ungodly person assist you in prayer and holy watchfulness and stir you up to the love of God and a heavenly mind? Can you so willingly lose all the spiritual benefit that you should principally desire and intend? Third, nay, instead of a helper, you will have a continual hinderer. When you should go to prayer, you will have one to pull you back or fill your mind with diversions or disquietness! When you should keep close to God in holy meditations, you will have one to cast in worldly thoughts or trouble your mind with vanity or vexation. When you should speak of God and heavenly things, you will have one to stifle such discourse and fill your ears with idle, impertinent, or worldly talk. One such hindrance so near you, in your bosom, will be worse than a thousand further off. As an ungodly heart that is next to us is our greatest hindrance, so an ungodly husband or wife is worse to us than many ungodly neighbors. If you think that you can overcome such hindrances and that your heart is so good that no such obstruction can keep it down, you show that you have a proud, arrogant heart that is prepared for a fall. If you know yourselves and the badness of your hearts, you will know that you have no need of hindrances in any holy work and that all the helps in the world are little enough, and too little, to keep your souls in the love of God.
Fourth, such an ungodly companion will be to you a continual temptation to sin. Instead of stirring you up to good, you will have one to stir you up to evil—passion or discontent or covetousness or pride or revenge or sensuality. Can you not sin enough without such a tempter? Fifth, what a continual grief will it be to you, if you are a believer, to have a child of the Devil in your bosom and to think how far you must be separated at death! And in what torments those must lie forever who are so dear unto you you know! Sixth, yea, such companions will be incapable of the principal part of your love. You may love them as husbands or wives, but you cannot love them as saints and members of Christ. And how great an absence this will be in your love those know who know what this holy love is.
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