No one who sincerely desires to attain, in his own person, or promote in others, a purer and more elevated discipleship, can possibly contemplate the Christianity of the present day without an indescribable feeling of sadness and heaviness. Its tone is so excessively low, its aspect so sickly, and its spirit so enfeebled, that one is, at times, tempted to despair of any thing like a true and faithful witness for an absent Lord. All this is the more truly deplorable when we remember the commanding motives by which it is our special privilege ever to be actuated. Whether we look at the Master whom we are called to follow, the path which we are called to tread, the end which we are called to keep in view, or the hopes by which we are to be animated, we cannot but own that, were all these entered into and realized by a more simple faith, we should assuredly exhibit a more ardent discipleship. "The love of Christ," says the apostle, "constraineth us." This is the most powerful motive of all. The more the heart is filled with Christ's love, and the eye filled with His blessed person, the more closely shall we seek to follow in His heavenly track. His footmarks can only be discovered by "a single eye;" and unless the will is broken, the flesh mortified, and the body kept under, we shall utterly fail in our discipleship, and make shipwreck of faith and a good conscience.
Let not my reader misunderstand me. It is not here, by any means, a question of personal salvation. It is quite another thing. Nothing can be more basely selfish than, having received salvation as the fruit of Christ's agony and bloody sweat, His cross and passion, to keep at as great a distance from His sacred person as we can without forfeiting our personal safety. This is, even in the judgment of nature, deemed a character of selfishness worthy of unmingled contempt; but when exhibited by one who professes to owe his present and his everlasting all to a rejected, crucified, risen, and absent, Master, no language can express its moral baseness. "Provided I escape hell-fire, it makes little matter as to discipleship." Reader, do you not, in your inmost soul, abhor this sentiment? If so, then earnestly seek to flee from it, to the very opposite point of the compass; and let your truthful language be, Provided that blessed Master is glorified, it makes little matter, comparatively, about my personal safety. Would to God that this were the sincere utterance of many hearts in this day, when, alas, it may be too truly said that, "All seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ's" (Phil. ii. 21). Would that the Holy Ghost would raise up, by His own resistless power, and send forth, by His own heavenly energy, a band of separated and consecrated followers of the Lamb, each one bound, by the cords of love, to the horns of the altar--a company, like Gideon's three hundred of old, able to confide in God and deny the flesh. How the heart longs for this! How the spirit, bowed down at times beneath the chilling and withering influence of a cold and uninfluential profession, earnestly breathes after a more vigorous and whole-hearted testimony for that One who emptied Himself and laid aside His glory, in order that we, through His precious bloodshedding, might be raised to companionship with Him in eternal blessedness!
Now, amongst the numerous hindrances to this thorough consecration of heart to Christ which I earnestly desire for myself and my reader, "the unequal yoke" will be found to occupy a very prominent place indeed. "Be ye not unequally yoked together [ετεροζυγουντες] with unbelievers: for what partnership [μετοχη] hath righteousness with unrighteousness [or rather lawlessness--ανομια]? and what communion [κοινωνια] hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath a believer with an unbeliever [απιστου]? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, 'I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.' 'Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, and will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be My sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.'" (2 Cor. vi. 14-18.)
Under the Mosaic economy, we learn the same moral principle.--"Thou shalt not sow thy vineyard with divers seeds: lest the fruit of thy seed which thou hast sown, and the fruit of thy vineyard, be defiled. Thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together. Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woolen and linen together." (Deut. xxii. 9-11; Lev. xix. 19.)