Second Corinthians 6:14-16 says, “Do not become dissimilarly yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership do righteousness and lawlessness have? Or what fellowship does light have with darkness? And what concord does Christ have with Belial? Or what part does a believer have with an unbeliever? And what agreement does the temple of God have with idols? For we are the temple of the living God.” You need to know who you are. You are the temple of the living God. Therefore, you cannot have anything to do with idols.
Verse 16 continues, “Even as God said, ‘I will dwell among them and walk among them; and I will be their God, and they will be My people.’” You are the temple of the living God. God wants to dwell with you and walk in your midst. God is your God and you are His people.
What is the result of this? God’s commandment is, “Therefore ‘come out from their midst and be separated, says the Lord, and do not touch what is unclean; and I will welcome you’” (v. 17). Here we see that we must come out of any Christian group which receives both believers and unbelievers. If there is a mixture of believers and unbelievers in a group, even though it may have the name of the church of Christ, we must still come out of it.
In principle it is right to stop unbelievers from coming into our midst. Once a brother asked me, “Have you ever received any person by mistake?” My feeling at that time was that we had not received any wrong person. I answered, “Perhaps we have, but the number is quite small.” He said, “How then are you different from us?” I said, “If any unbeliever has come into our midst, he came in by climbing over the wall at night. But if there is an unbeliever in your midst, you let him in through an open door at twelve o’clock noon.” We must never be proud. We can often be wrong. We can baptize the wrong person and receive the wrong person. However, they will have sneaked in by themselves. We are not wrong in our principle. In so-called Christianity today, as long as a person bears the name of a Christian, he can walk in openly at high noon. It does not mean that we never make any mistakes in procedure. We must be very careful before God not to make any mistakes, but being wrong intentionally or being wrong in principle is another matter. In such a case, we are no longer the church.
If a group knows that a certain person is an unbeliever yet capriciously admits him, this group surely is not the church. It is not necessary for God’s children to maintain oneness with this group. Since this oneness is not Christian oneness, we need not keep it. We are required only to keep the oneness of the wheat; we do not have to keep the oneness between wheat and tares. Today there are many groups on earth which call themselves the church but include both believers and unbelievers. They want to maintain an outward façade of oneness. Please bear in mind that we are not required to keep this kind of oneness. This kind of oneness instead will overturn genuine oneness. The oneness they want to keep is a oneness we want to escape from. Once we get into that kind of oneness, we spoil the genuine oneness.
There is another very important matter in the boundary of Christian oneness. It is true that Christian oneness includes all of God’s children; it is as large as the Body of Christ. Christian fellowship is as broad as the Body of Christ, and the church of Christ is as large as the Body of Christ. This is clearly revealed in the Word of God. As pointed out in the previous section, there is a danger of enlarging the Body of Christ to include false ones. However, another problem arises when God’s children maintain a oneness which is smaller than Christian oneness.