The Slow Drift Away From God Happens Quietly
Can you slowly drift from God without ever intending to? What happens when compromise becomes comfortable, conviction grows quiet, and faith stops being deliberate? Discover the invitation to return, be renewed, and live fully as the temple of the living God.
-
The Temple of the Living God
14 Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? 15 What accord has Christ with Belial?[a] Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? 16 What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said,
“I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
17 Therefore go out from their midst,
and be separate from them, says the Lord,
and touch no unclean thing;
then I will welcome you,
18 and I will be a father to you,
and you shall be sons and daughters to me,
says the Lord Almighty.”7 Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body[b] and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.
Come Home: Living as the Temple of God
I want to tell you about a man named David. It's not his real name, but his story is real. David grew up in the church. He sang in the youth choir. He attended vacation Bible school every summer. He could quote John 3:16 before he could ride a bike.
Somewhere in his mid-20s, David began to make a series of choices. Not dramatic choices, not headline-grabbing choices, just subtle, incremental choices that allowed him to drift a bit. He married someone who did not share his faith, not because he stopped believing, but because he told himself, "We're in love. Things will work out okay." He started spending his Sundays watching football instead of attending worship, not because he stopped believing, but because he told himself, "God will understand. I think I'm basically a good person." He stopped reading his Bible, not because he stopped believing, but because life got busy.
Years later, David sat in my office with pain in his eyes and said something like this: "Pastor, I'm not sure exactly how I got to where I am. I never stopped believing. I just stopped being deliberate."
That is exactly the kind of person the Apostle Paul addresses in 2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1. Not the person who walked away from God in a dramatic fashion, but the believer who drifted. The Christian who stopped being deliberate. The follower of Jesus who got comfortable with slow, creeping compromise that, over time, cost them everything, the Apostle Paul calls, in this section, "the promises of God."
That is why Paul has been reminding us in this section: don't waste God's grace. Paul knows that it is possible. He knows that with your only life that passes like a vapor, there are patterns that can get ingrained in you just by cultural influence that will cause you to neglect the grace of God. Life is short, and yet life has meaning and purpose in God, and we can miss it.
That is why Paul writes in chapters 6 and 7 with a high decibel level of urgency for the believer. But this section is also an invitation, a deep, relational, life-giving invitation. Really, it is a call to come home. It is a call to come home and to be renewed in your first love of Jesus and to know and rejoice and live into the gift of all of the promises of God. There are over 7,000 of them in Scripture, but the one Paul really brings home is the gift of God's grace, empowering you to live for the glory of God.
Paul addresses this issue of coming home in three primary areas.
The Image of a Yoke: The Direction of Your Life
Paul begins with a farming metaphor, and his audience in an agrarian culture would have immediately understood this imagery. A yoke is a wooden beam placed over two animals so that the two animals can align their strength and power to plow together. It is about a shared direction, a shared burden, a shared purpose.
Common sense, if you yoke an ox and a donkey together, you do not just get inefficiency. You get frustration, you get imbalance, you get harm ultimately. One pulls stronger, the other pulls differently. One obeys commands, the other resists commands. The field suffers, the animals suffer.
The imagery Paul draws from is actually from the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 22:10, where the Lord gives instruction: "You shall not plow with an ox, and a donkey yoked together." The point is not complicated. Two animals with fundamentally different natures, different strengths, different gaits—when you bind them together, neither of them flourishes. The ox pulls one way, the donkey pulls another way, and the crop rows are a mess. Nothing gets accomplished that was intended.
"Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers" (2 Corinthians 6:14). If you have been a Christian very long, you have heard this verse, and you have probably heard it applied almost exclusively to marriage with the instruction: do not marry an unbeliever. That is true. It absolutely applies here.
But what we often fail to notice when we read verses like this is that Paul's language is much broader than that. Paul is applying this image not only to marriage but to every deep and binding alliance that can be formed throughout our lives. Every relationship, every partnership that takes on some depth of bond, creates entanglements, fundamentally, where you could potentially be binding your life to a completely different set of values, a different ultimate allegiance, a different Lord.
Before we go any further, I need to pause and say something very important, because there are people who misunderstand and misapply this text. Paul is not saying live in a Christian bubble and never speak to anyone who does not go to church or know Jesus Christ. He is absolutely not saying that. In fact, Paul clarified that in 1 Corinthians 5:9-10, where he says, "I did not tell you not to associate with the immoral people of this world, for then you would need to leave the world."
We are all aware, as followers of Jesus, that we are sent into the world. We are all missionaries to the world. Paul is not saying to have friendships with unbelievers. What he is saying is: do not enter into deep, defining, binding alliances where you are bound to a system of values, a set of loyalties, a relationship dynamic that is fundamentally at odds with the direction of the kingdom of God.
Notice what Paul does next. He does not just give a command. He asks five rhetorical questions. These are not softball questions. These are "do you see what you are actually dealing with" questions. These are the kinds of questions he asks to shake you out of being spiritually asleep.
He says, "What partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial?" Belial is a name for Satan. "Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols?" (2 Corinthians 6:14-16).
He is not asking for answers. He is simply making a rhetorical point with these questions. He is emphasizing with the Holy Spirit's emphatic tone: These are not compatible realities. Light does not negotiate with darkness. It overcomes it. Righteousness does not partner with lawlessness. It exposes it.
What he is not doing is saying that a Christ follower is superior to anyone. What he is drawing out is your identity, who and whose you really are. Think about it this way. If you walk into a dark room and you flip on a light switch, the darkness does not argue. It disappears. Why? Because light and darkness cannot coexist as equals. One defines the space.
The Apostle Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is declaring: if you belong to Christ, your life is meant to define the space. If you belong to Christ, your life is meant to be defined by His light, not negotiated with darkness.
There are a thousand examples of this. I think about the brother who came to me years ago. When he got off work at five o'clock, there was a group of guys who all got together and just hung out and had a drink together. One drink over time led to two, two led to three. And instead of coming home to spend an evening with his wife and kids, he lingered longer. As he lingered longer, the joking got more crass at times. And then, as the joking got more crass, it became common for the group of guys to just gossip about people at the office.
The question you begin to ask is: are they discipling you, or are you discipling them?
Paul reminds us of the image of a yoke. Come home. Come home. It is a matter of your life's direction. Come home.
The Image of the Temple: God Dwells in You
Paul moves to a second image: you and I are the temple of the living God. He raises the stakes and emphasizes the urgency for followers of Jesus to take action. He emphasizes that God does not merely influence you; as a believer, you are indwelt by God.
That is why verse 16 says: "We are the temple of the living God." Think about that. Do not let that just pass through your ears. Think about that deeply in the heart. God is declaring: I am not dwelling in a building. I am not dwelling in a location. I am not dwelling in a weekly gathering. I dwell in you, in you, believer. He does not just visit. He dwells.
Then Paul does something extraordinary. He reaches back into the Old Testament, and as he does, he declares something true of the people of God for thousands and thousands of years and remains true: "I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people" (2 Corinthians 6:16).
This is covenant language. This is relationship language. This is a belonging language.
After he quotes the Old Testament, he then piles on with this. The Lord says: "I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty" (2 Corinthians 6:17-18).
I want you to notice the spirit with which God says He is going to dwell in you. Imagine for a moment that you get a phone call, and discover you are about to host a very important guest in your home, and you clean, rearrange, and make space. But imagine the person who calls you says they are not coming to visit. They are coming to move in permanently.
Would you not agree that changes everything? You do not say, "Hey, come to my house, make yourself comfortable around my clutter." You say, "Oh, I have got to make this place worthy of your presence."
In this text, God is not withholding His promise from you because you have not been good enough. That is part of what Paul is saying here, because His promises have already been spoken. They are already made available to you. They are already on the table. The question Paul is asking is: Are you arranging your heart and your life, cleaning out the clutter to make yourself available to receive God's promises?
The truth be told, many are living in an illusion. Wake up and believe what is true. If you are in Christ, you are the temple of God. He dwells in you. It is not an illusion. It is true. It is what the Word of God says about you.
Because a holy God dwells in you, clear space in the temple for the One who wants to dwell there.
Come Out, Be Separate: The Call to Distinction
Paul takes us to this third phase where he says: "Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing" (2 Corinthians 6:17).
This is a phrase that can make us feel uncomfortable on the front end. What does that mean? Well, first of all, let's go back to what it does not mean. It does not mean abandoning the world. That is not the context. Jesus Himself prayed for us in John 17, praying that we would not be taken out of the world but would be protected within it. He also prayed that we would be salty and full of light, influential around people in the world.
What it does mean is that we are not to conform to the world and its fallen values. It means we do not adopt its priorities. It means we are not letting people who oppose God define us because we are salty.
A ship is meant to be in the water, but the water is not meant to be in the ship. The moment the environment outside of us begins to flood the inside, the vessel is in danger. Christians are called to live in the world, but when the world begins to live in us unchecked, then we begin to sink.
Once again, the culture is not supposed to disciple you. You, as a child of God, are designed to disciple the culture. Separation is not about distance. It is about distinction. You are different.
In the middle of the Apostle Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, as he shares with us that we are called to holiness, God also gives us a promise that changes everything. Notice the spirit in which the Father is speaking to you from His Word: "I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty" (2 Corinthians 6:18).
Think about that. That tells us that what we are learning is not coming out of a cold command. It is coming out of a warm relationship. God is not saying to us, "Clean yourself up so I'll accept you." He is saying, "Because you belong to Me, live like you are really My children."
A child in a loving home does not obey simply out of fear. They respond to relationship because they know who they belong to. When I was a kid, and maybe I violated a boundary, maybe I punched my brother when I should not have, my father, when he would discipline me, sometimes would say things like this. He would get down on eye level, hold me by the shoulders, look me in the eye, and he would say, "Son, that's not who we are."
Do you understand what he was doing? He was not just correcting behavior. He was validating identity. That is what God is doing with us with this word.
"Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God." 2 Corinthians 7:1
Notice the word "beloved." Notice the warm relationship. Notice that the Father is not speaking to you in the lens of pressuring you. He is not shaming you. He is speaking to you in love.
This is where our responsibility meets God in the arms of God's warm grace. God provides the promises to transform us. We pursue how to posture and respond to His love. "Cleanse ourselves" does not mean that we save ourselves. It means we cooperate with what God is doing in developing all of us into Christ's likeness.
Holiness is not instant perfection, as we all know. It is an ongoing transformation that undergoes a whole series of iterations as we walk and grow in Christ. My wife, Missy, used to restore furniture, and I would always think, "There's no hope for that piece of furniture. It's gone. It's dusty. It's caked with this and that." Then she would begin to strip the furniture, work out the dirt, the scratches, and the dents. I would look at it four weeks later: beautiful work.
That is kind of like us. When we come to Christ, we have all kinds of scratches and dents and wounds and layers of this and that. But God is restoring us. He is restoring the image of Jesus in you. And He invites you and me to participate in the process.
Where This Lands
Let's bring this down to where we live.
Our relationships matter. People who do not know Christ, our relationships matter because we are on mission. But our relationships also matter with those we bond with and are closest to. I remember years ago coaching my kids' sports teams, and there were certain years where I had to fight for my own heart when I was coaching with a coach who was an unbeliever, and I would pray, "Lord, keep my heart in check. Is he influencing me, or am I influencing him?"
Relationships matter, and being properly yoked matters.
Values: Are we adopting the world's definition of success, or are we living into God's definition of success?
Habits: What are you allowing your mind and your heart, your life to meditate on? What are those things that are dulling your sensitivities to God?
Compromise: What are areas where you have blurred lines that God has made clear?
Notice that this passage is not about legalism. It is really about alignment, aligning your heart with God.
The Lighthouse Keeper
There is an old story of a lighthouse keeper who was responsible for keeping the lighthouse light burning so that ships could pass by safely. But one night, people kept coming to him for oil for their lamps and other needs, and, being a people-pleaser, he gave some of his oil away. By midnight, the lighthouse ran out of oil. The light went out, and ships crashed into the rocks, and people, innocent people, lost their lives.
His people-pleasing disconnected him from his primary calling and led to a disaster.
You will not find one Scripture where God supports you in being a people-pleaser. God has called you to shine, and we cannot shine if we compromise the source. Holiness is not about withdrawing from the Lord. It is about staying filled with the oil of God's presence so that your light remains strong.
The Apostle Paul, here in this passage, in a spirit of urgency, because he knows that certain patterns can get ingrained into our hearts that will win if we do not give them attention, draws a line. But it is not a line to confine you. It is a line that is designed to refine you in a way that defines you for the glory of God.
Be mindful, believer, you are yoked with Jesus Christ. Be mindful that you are the temple of the living God. Do not live under an illusion. Do not enable an illusion. God dwells in you. You are His sons and His daughters. So live in a way that reflects who and whose you really are. Not perfectly, no one will do that this side of heaven, but intentionally, not out of an earthly fear, but out of a holy reverence for a holy God who calls you His beloved, not to earn His love, but because you already have it.
Since we have these promises, let us live into them. Let us live like it.
TL;DR
Spiritual drift rarely happens dramatically—it happens through small compromises over time.
Christians are called to live distinctly, not by withdrawing from the world but by refusing to let the world shape them.
God’s presence now dwells within His people, making believers the temple of the living God.
Holiness is not about earning God’s love but responding intentionally to the promises already given in Christ.
