The Temple of the Living Jesus
March 22, 2026
Preached by Noah Gwinn
Discussion Questions
Paul commands believers not to be “unequally yoked.” How would you explain in your own words what that means—and what it does not mean—in everyday life?
The sermon emphasizes that this passage is primarily about spiritual partnership in worship and ministry, not total separation from non-Christians. Why is that distinction important?
Paul contrasts things like light vs. darkness and righteousness vs. lawlessness. What do these contrasts reveal about the true difference between a believer and an unbeliever?
The sermon challenges us: if the only difference between us and non-Christians is church attendance, “that is not enough.” In what practical ways should a Christian’s life look meaningfully different?
In 2 Corinthians 7:1, we are called to “cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit.” What are some specific habits, influences, or thought patterns that might need to be addressed in your life?
The sermon ends by grounding our effort in the finished work of Jesus. Why is it essential to remember the gospel (what Christ has done) when pursuing holiness (what we are called to do)?
Scripture Reading
2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1
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? 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 and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.
Before we dive into our text together this morning, I’ll just mention that today will be our last sermon in 2 Corinthians for a few weeks. Next week, Ben Bechtel from Midtown Community Church will be with us, preaching a sermon for Palm Sunday. And then on Easter, Pastor Benjamin will be preaching a sermon from Psalm 22.
While we’re talking about Easter, you may have picked up one of the Easter flyers we made. On the back of that flyer, you’ll see that we’ll be having a Good Friday Service at 7pm that evening. And on Easter Sunday we’ll be having three services. The first will be a sunrise service at Veterans Park just down the road from here, and then the second two are at our normal service times. We would just say that if the sunrise service sounds at all interesting to you, please come! We’ll be singing the same songs and hearing the same sermon, and we need to make plenty of room in our services here for the visitors that we often get on Easter. We expect a full house and would love if we could have plenty of space for new faces to be welcomed in. This is all a part of two of our goals for 2026—wining souls and stewarding our church growth—and making space for those who don’t yet know Jesus is one way that we can all participate in those goals together. So, take that flyer and give it to someone you know who needs an invite to church. By the way, some free advice: this is a great way to initiate a gospel conversation and get some rubber bands up on those boards in the lobby.
Well, let’s pray and then take a look at 2 Corinthians together.
Heavenly Father…
INTRODUCTION
Many of us in the room this morning are fans of the Star Wars movies. But even if you don’t get the appeal, my guess that the name Darth Vader is familiar to you and that you could probably recognize his iconic look if you saw a photo of him. For those who have not seen the movies and don’t know Darth Vader’s backstory, let me bring you up to speed. I don’t think I need to offer a spoiler alert here, the movies are decades old. But Darth Vader did not always have the crazy costume and helmet. And he wasn’t always the bad guy. At the beginning of the story, he was just a boy named Anakin Skywalker. But I really shouldn’t say “just a boy.” No, Anakin Skywalker was the chosen one. He was gifted, powerful, positioned to bring peace to the galaxy. If anyone looked like a hero from the outside, it was him. He wasn’t supposed to become the villain. And yet he did.
But what’s striking is not that it happens, but how it happens. It’s not mainly because of an external enemy. It’s not that he was overpowered in battle or defeated by some invading force. It started internally. Fear of loss. A desire for control. A quiet willingness to justify what he knows is wrong. And slowly, quietly, little by little, what’s happening inside of him begins to reshape everything outside of him—his relationships, his decisions, his identity.
By the time the world sees Darth Vader, Anakin has already been lost for a long time. And that’s what makes his story so unsettling—because it’s not just his story. It’s many of ours. Because the greatest danger to your life, your family, your faith… is usually not what’s happening around you, it’s what’s happening within you. In other words, the real battle isn’t first out there. It’s in here.
The same is true for the church. For all the talk of the danger of secular ideologies in society, or government pressure, or physical security—all legitimate threats—the greatest threat to the church of Jesus Christ is not from outside the church but from inside. That is exactly what our passage is about this morning. The apostle Paul, who wrote this letter, wants the Corinthian church, and you and I, to see that one of the greatest threats the church can ever face is when we lose sight of the call to personal holiness.
To see that, we’ll follow Paul’s own structure in the passage. In these verses he offers two commands and gives his reasoning behind the commands. We’ll do the same. So we’ll look at the call to like-minded partnership and then we’ll look at the call to whole-person cleansing.
THE CALL TO LIKE-MINDED PARTNERSHIP
First, the call to like-minded partnership. Look with me at verse 14. Just the first sentence.
14 Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.
We’ll stop there for right now. The next part will come in just a few minutes. Here is the first command Paul gives: do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. What in the world does that mean? Well, like many of the illustrations in the Bible, here we find an agrarian image. The idea of being yoked comes from when you would hook animals up together to pull something like a plow. Typically, you’d want to use two very similar animals – two oxen, for example. Ideally, they’d both be equally about as strong and well trained, so that one doesn’t start pulling the other one a wrong direction, or slow down the plowing, or speed up so much that the other animal gets injured or something like that. The image was clear for them, even if it’s kind of confusing to us. If Paul was writing to us, he might have used another image.
Maybe this will help to clarify some things. When I was growing up, each year in school we’d have a field day. I think I remember correctly to say that it was usually in the Spring as the weather was starting to get warmer (and the teachers were getting more tired), and we’d go outside and we’d have all kinds of relay races and water games. Maybe you had something similar when you were in school. Maybe some of you who are in school right now are looking forward to dominating in your own field day coming up in a few weeks.
But one of the classic events during field day was always the three-legged race.[1] In the three-legged race, as many of you know, you are partnered up with someone who you stand beside. You each put one of your legs into the same burlap sack and work together to race the other people to reach the finish line. You are yoked to the person beside you. Ideally, you were paired with someone generally your size, but inevitably, one or two pairs were unequally yoked. Maybe one was large and the other was small, or maybe one was super athletic and the other was, well… not. What happens? They trip each other, they fall, they can’t get on the same page. They certainly don’t win.
And this is what Paul is trying to warn us against. As Christians, we’re not to enter a three-legged race, so to speak, with someone so different from us that they’ll cause us to trip and fall and maybe not make it to the finish line.
So it’s worth asking then, who should we not link arms (or in this case, legs) with in the race of life? Look back at verse 14, “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.” On the surface it seems clear: if someone is a non-Christian, we should not yoke up with them. This is absolutely true. But the more we think about the church that Paul is writing to, the more we see that this isn’t the whole picture.
If you remember from the end of last week’s passage in verse 13, Paul is pleading with the Corinthians to “widen [their] hearts” to he and his companions. And then to skip just over our passage to chapter 7 verse 2, he asks the people to “make room in [their] hearts” for Paul and his companions. Our passage is sandwiched between these two calls to open their hearts. What does this mean? Well, there were many in Corinth that had been opposing Paul because they had bought into the false gospel that was being preached by his opponents. And Paul is pleading with them to open their hearts up to the true gospel. He is going out of his way to communicate to them that those who taught this other gospel to the Corinthians were preaching a false gospel. So much so that he calls these false teachers unbelievers. At first this could seem like we’re assuming a lot. But it isn’t the first time Paul has made this kind of a claim. You don’t have to turn there, but at the beginning of Paul’s letter to the Galatian church, he says, “As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.” (Gal. 1:9)
That word for “accursed” is the Greek word anathema. You may have heard that word associated with other streams within Christendom such as when someone is formally excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church and not considered by them to be a Christian anymore. That’s what Paul is getting at. There are people that are preaching a different, false gospel that have infiltrated the church in Corinth and he wants the true believers to see that these people are wolves in sheep’s clothing that are only seeking to devour them, not shepherd them.
So if that’s the case, what does it practically mean to not be unequally yoked with them? And what does it mean for us? Sure, the principle makes sense, but does this apply to all areas of life? Should I not shop at stores belonging to non-Christians? Should I not eat or get my coffee from places owned by non-Christians? Should I only live somewhere where my neighbors are Christians? What about my co-workers? Let’s pick up again in our passage in verse 14.
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? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? 16 What agreement has the temple of God with idols?
We’ll stop here for now. To get a sense of what it practically means to be unequally yoked, let’s think about a few of the words from these verses: partnership, fellowship, accord, portion, agreement. These words, and the Old Testament references to follow, clarify the call. What this call is getting at, is for the worship of God—for the church—to be kept pure. There is a kind of infection that happens when we start to mingle too much with the world in our worship. When those external threats work their way into the church and begin to take hold, the true gospel gets muddied. And when the gospel is muddied, it is lost. So no, we’re not told to disassociate with the blatant unbelievers God has providentially put in our lives. But we are commanded against partnering in the worship of God with those who call themselves Christians but aren’t, as if we’re the same thing or worship the same God. Because we aren’t and we don’t.
So that’s the command. Don’t have ministry partnership with those who masquerade as Christians but haven’t taken hold of the true gospel. But why? Paul asks five rhetorical questions to answer that. Look at verses 14-16 with me again.
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? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? 16 What agreement has the temple of God with idols?
Do you see what he’s doing here? He’s listing things that are so different from each other that there can be no overlap whatsoever. Hear the contrast. Righteousness and lawlessness. Light and darkness. The contrast of Christ and Belial could be strange to us. What is Belial? Belial is a Greek transliteration of a Hebrew word for worthlessness. But more than that, in the ancient world the name Belial became associated with Satan, even though he’s never called that anywhere else in the Bible. It’s similar to how, in our culture, the name Lucifer has become associated with Satan, even though he’s never called that in the Bible.
So why does he say that, as believers, we should not be yoked to unbelievers? Because we are so utterly different at the most fundamental levels that we cannot be pulling the plow the same direction.
Now I should mention, if you’ve been around the church for a while you will probably be familiar with the first phrase of our passage today, “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.” More than likely, you’ve heard that quoted in reference to marriage. Meaning, as a Christian, you should not pursue marriage with an unbeliever. After all, it is very hard to pull the plow the same direction if there isn’t shared agreement on the most foundational truths of life. And while that is certainly a faithful application of this passage, there is more in view here than just marriage. I mean, marriage isn’t mentioned anywhere in the passage. But because marriage is probably on the minds of a few of you, I just wanted to offer a word to those who are hoping to be married someday, and a word to those who are currently married to an unbeliever.
First, to those of you who are single right now who hope to be married someday. I just want to acknowledge that dating is hard. It can feel like there is so much pressure to get married as early as possible, especially in the Christian circles our church would be a part of. I’m thankful our church is filled with so many young couples, but I know that for some of you who are single, that can actually be such a challenge. With every year that passes, you feel your desire for a spouse even more acutely than the last. I want to encourage you—the Lord sees you and knows your desire for a spouse. I also want to say to you—when you feel the difficulty of Christian dating, resist the temptation to lower your standards for the holiness of the person you are considering. You do not want to fudge the line on the most fundamental issue in the most important relationship of your life. You do not want to find yourself unequally yoked.
To those of you who are currently married to an unbeliever. Please feel no shame over that. Although we are told not to seek out a marriage with a non-believer, we are also told that if we find ourselves married to an unbeliever, it is good to remain married to them. And I want to reaffirm to you something I said a moment ago to the singles in our church. The Lord sees you. The Lord knows your specific challenges and laments. The Lord hears your prayers for your spouse. Keep praying.
For all of us, though, the call is to live as distinct from the world. So this should really cause us to take a step back and ask ourselves – am I different enough from my non-Christian friends, family members, coworkers, and neighbors that it would be impossible to pull a plow the same direction as them? One pastor said it this way: “If the only difference between you and a non-Christian is that you are in this room for 90 minutes once a week and they are not, that is not enough.”[2] Friends, we will not reach a lost world with the gospel of Jesus Christ if we are living just like the world. If your life doesn’t look all that different from a non-Christian, what makes Christianity in any way compelling for them? If all they see is more rules and another weekend commitment, what’s the draw?
Church, the gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to be a distinct people that invite the lost into a new way of life with a new family. And with that new way of life is also new hope, new joy, new groundedness, new peace, new contentment, new purpose, and new identity. As Christians, our lives are to be so markedly different that it’s noticeable. If we just look like a cheesy version of the world, we will lose our prophetic witness. The witness of the church, and of the individual Christians that make it up, is to provide people starving for purpose, hope, peace, and freedom with a compelling alternative to the cheap counterfeits the world offers.
But in order to do this, you and I must actually take hold of the gospel for ourselves. Jesus can’t just exist as one of many things in your life. We cannot just keep him on the shelf and pull him off when we want him or need him. Jesus must be everything to us. Living just like the world and keeping Jesus on the shelf for a favor or for “life insurance” so to speak… that is a threat to your soul. And a church made up of those kinds of people will take no ground for the kingdom of God.
There are some of you who are here this morning who feel like you have an unequally yoked soul. Part of you longs for Jesus, but another part of you still finds the cheap counterfeits of the world appealing. Stop straddling the fence. Friends, let Jesus change everything about you. Let him be everything to you.
THE CALL TO WHOLE-PERSON CLEANSING
Well, that was the call to like-minded partnership. Let’s now turn our attention to the call to whole-person cleansing. Look with me at chapter 7 verse 1.
1 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.
What’s the command here? “Let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit…” And why? “Since we have these promises,” Paul writes. What promises? Well, we have a promise of God’s presence with us and a promise of his care for us. Let’s look at each of these in turn.
First, the promise of God’s presence with us. Look at verse 16:
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.
To fully grasp the weight of this promise, I want to take us back in time to the very beginning. At the beginning of the story of Scripture, we find a garden. In this garden, God met with his people. You and I were made to be in perfect harmony with God, and in this garden, our first parents were. God had made his dwelling among them, and he walked with them. He was their God, and they were his people. And yet, they chose rebellion. They distrusted him and disobeyed him, and that brought fracture that still ripples through our world and our hearts today. Their perfect relationship with God was shattered, God sent them out of the garden, and the question rang out: will God ever again dwell with his people?
Fast forward a couple thousand years, Moses is leading the people of God out of slavery in Egypt and God commands Moses to build a special tent called a tabernacle, where he would meet with his people and where sacrifices would be made. The tabernacle was this perfectly constructed, intricately designed tent that highlighted the holiness of God. The presence of God would dwell there. So the tabernacle was built, but as good and intricate and God honoring as it was, a tent isn’t a proper dwelling place for God. It wasn’t a permanent home for God. The people were left wondering still: will God ever fully and finally again dwell with his people?
To these very people, a promise was given. The same promise Paul quotes in our passage. In Leviticus 26:11-12, God says, “11 I will make my dwelling among you, and my soul shall not abhor you. 12 And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people.” The echoes of Eden began to sound. The hope of God dwelling among his people and walking among them came alive once again. The final feast that the tabernacle was a foretaste of was promised.
Once God’s people became settled, they built a permanent tabernacle called the temple. Much like the tabernacle, it was in the temple that God met with his people and sacrifices were made. It was in the temple that the most holy place was, where only the high priest could go, and only once a year. The standards of holiness for the temple were so high that if anyone, even the high priest, didn’t live up to the standards and tried to enter, they would die. Because that’s where God dwelt. And though God was patient with the idolatry and rebellion of his people, in the book of Ezekiel we learn that the glory of the Lord leaves the temple. And so, yet again, we hear the repeated question: when will God again dwell with his people?
This question was asked generation after generation. For 600 years, God’s people asked the question: when will God again dwell among us? Into the silence and waiting, the opening lines of the Gospel of John ring out like a victory cry. “1 In the beginning was the Word [Jesus], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…. 14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That word for dwelt is the word for tabernacle. The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. The Word, who is God, was dwelling again with his people.
So you’ll imagine their shock then, when 30 years later, Jesus tells his closest followers that he will be leaving them. Following his resurrection, Jesus does just that. He ascends to the throne of the universe where he rules and reigns from his Father’s right hand. But before he leaves, he doesn’t want to give his followers any reason to doubt that he will stop dwelling among them. He tells them, and us, that anyone who follows after him will receive his very Spirit to dwell inside of them. No longer will the indwelling presence of God be confined to a tent or a building, now he dwells in each one of us who call him Lord. So that wherever we go, we carry him with us. We are now the dwelling place of God. And when we gather together on Sundays, God is uniquely present among us. And we look forward to the day that is promised in one of the final chapters of the Bible when Jesus will not only dwell with us by his spirit but also in body once again. This is the promise we have:
1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:1-4)
God will again dwell among his people. And yet even now he dwells with us by his Spirit. This is so true a reality that we are called the very temple of God. And we don’t see this in English as clearly, but there are two words for “temple” in Greek, one that’s more of a general term, and the other one carrying a more specific connotation of the most holy place in the temple. The place where God dwelled. The place that had the greatest restrictions of access and the highest standards of holiness. And that’s the word that gets applied to us! Which means, friends, those standards of holiness apply to you and I. If we are to be a dwelling place of the God of the universe who is holy, holy, holy, you and I must also be holy. You and I are the temple of the living Jesus.
So, we have the promise of his presence, but we also have the promise of his care for us. Look at verses 17-18.
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.”
Not only are we the dwelling place of God, but here we are also called his children. And there’s a way to read this that sounds like we need to earn our place in God’s family. Like he’s saying, “I’ll wait for you to go out from them, and once you do that, then I’ll welcome you and be a father to you.” That’s not at all the case. To go out from the idols and evil in the world is an act of repentance. This is our turning from our sin and turning to the Lord. By his Spirit, God is at work in our lives to cause us to turn from our idols. Because that’s what his children do. We have the promise of his fatherly care.
These are the promises that ground the call for us to cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit. That’s the requirement for the temple of God, so of course that makes sense for us. And as we cleanse ourselves in this way, we carry the promise of God’s fatherly care.
So, what does this actually look like? How do we cleanse ourselves of every defilement of body and spirit? Well, think back with me to the beginning of the sermon. Darth Vader. If you remember, I said that for Anakin Skywalker, his descent started internally. Fear of loss. A desire for control. A quiet willingness to justify what he knows is wrong. And slowly, quietly, little by little, what’s happening inside of him begins to reshape everything outside of him—his relationships, his decisions, his identity. It’s a fictional story, but the principle is very real.
So I wonder, what are the decisions you’re making today that are affecting your holiness? What are those little steps in the wrong direction that, over time will reshape who you are? What are you watching on TV? What is the internet history on your phone like? How holy is your thought life when you’re having that same argument with your spouse again? Maybe you’re tired and you’re becoming more and more okay with being spiritually lazy. Maybe nobody but you knows the real state of your heart.
Friends, let us cleanse ourselves of every defilement of body and spirit. It is time to get serious about holiness. Not tomorrow, today. Today is the day to make the hard decision to stop harmful habits and choices. Today is the day to get serious about your relationship with the Lord. You don’t have to wait until next January to start a Bible reading plan. You don’t have to wait for someone else to initiate an accountability or confession relationship. Your cleansing can start today.
CONCLUSION
Well if this is where the sermon ended, it would be woefully incomplete and terribly bad news. Because to this point we’ve really just talked about things that you and I need to do. Good things, things commanded by God, but things that put a lot of pressure on us.
But Church, while there is certainly work for us to do, it is only work that we do in response to the work that Jesus has already done on our behalf. You see, for over thirty years, Jesus walked the earth, living perfectly. He never fudged the line where holiness is concerned. He was blameless. And yet, he was treated as a lawless criminal, and went to a cross for unclean, unholy sinners like you and me so that he could take all of our uncleannesses to himself and give us his perfection. Dying, he took our defilement into the grave with him, and he rose again on the third day leaving all of that impurity in the tomb. Then he ascended to the throne of the universe where he poured out his Spirit on his people, empowering us to grow in holiness day by day, as we are conformed more and more into his image.
If you have not been washed clean by Jesus, I would plead with you to turn to him today. You will run yourself ragged trying to improve yourself and those around you on the strength of your own resources. Let the promises of this passage speak to you. When you and I recognize our unholiness, our inability to do anything about it, and turn in surrender to Jesus, this is his promise to us: “I will make my dwelling among you and walk among you, and I will be your God and you will be my people…. Then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be a son or daughter to me.” In Christ, that can be yours today.
Let’s pray, and I’ll invite the music team and those who will be serving communion to come forward.
Heavenly Father…
[1] This was a helpful illustration from Sinclair Ferguson’s sermon, “The Uneasy Yoke”
[2] This is a quote from Kevin DeYoung’s sermon, “Do Not Be Unequally Yoked”
