Come Out; Be Ye Separate

Minister:
Date: PM
Text: II Corinthians 6:17
Psalters: 114, 402, 214, 69
Preparatory to the Lord's Supper
  1. The basis.
    1. God made the human race to be one, with Adam as its head.
      1. When Adam fell, then the devil had the whole human race on his side.
      2. God divided the race into the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent.
    2. The necessity of the spiritual separation is because grace makes for two distinct spiritual people in the one world.
  2. The calling.
    1. “Anabaptists” believed in physical separation.
      1. They believed it necessary to withdraw whenever possible from the life of the world, so might “dwell alone” physically.
      2. For them the separation is physical, local and external, from the world and its activities.
      3. Also anabaptistic is the thinking that we must isolate ourselves from certain spheres of life.
    2. The error of the anabaptists.
      1. Isolation gains nothing as far as the spiritual idea is concerned.
      2. The end is that we “cleanse ourselves from the filthiness of the flesh and spirit” (7:1).
    3. The isolation and separate is spiritual.
      1. As the friends of God and loving Jesus as our Husband, there is no room for friendship with and love of another.
      2. Recognize worldliness and ungodliness and flee from it.
  3. Reason is that you are the temple of the living God, i.e., God dwells in you and walks with you.
    1. If purity was required by the Levites as guardians of the temple’s vessels, how much more in us, the vessels.
    2. As redeemed by God’s grace, we must keep ourselves undefiled by any impurity, lest we pollute God’s sanctuary.
    3. We must beware of defiling ourselves by any involvement in the pollution of the world.