Religious Separation

Moore's Corner Church

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We'll continue with our church mission statement. So I've been going through our church covenant, church doctrinal statement, church mission statement.

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So this will be the final point in the Morris Corner Church mission statement.

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It says, the purpose of this church is to glorify God the Father and our

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Lord Jesus Christ. And we covered all the points up until now. So we seek to glorify

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God in cooperation with Christian activity, functioning in harmony with God's holy word, the

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Bible. So if I can just put that in a different way, whatever this church does, whatever organization we support, whatever events we as a church take part in, other churches we fellowship with, they all have to be in line with the scripture.

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We're not going to yoke together with or get involved with someone or some group that is doing things that are unbiblical.

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So part of this statement, what's behind it really is the biblical doctrine of separation.

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This is something that a lot of churches, not only do they not preach it, a lot of churches aren't even really practicing separation these days, but 2

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Corinthians 6, 17, the apostle Paul quoting the Old Testament, he says, come out from among them.

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And really this is God speaking, come out from among them and be separate, says the

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Lord. So we know that Christians and the Christian church is called to be separate. We are called to be holy, set apart, consecrated unto

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God. So religious separation is the idea, just to put this in practical terms, this church will not have any associations with things that are of the world.

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Moores Corner Church is never going to donate to Planned Parenthood or something like that.

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And I know someone might say, well, that's obvious. Well, there's churches that do that. Our church is never going to partner or hold a joint prayer service with our

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Buddhist neighbors in Leverett. We love them as human beings, we pray for them and we would want them to be saved, but we would never have any joint events.

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And again, you might think, well, obviously, but in the day and age we live in, there's a lot of institutional churches that will have joint services with anybody and everybody and support all sorts of ungodly things.

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So the very word church in Greek is ekklesia, which means a called out assembly.

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So the church of Jesus Christ is to be called out of the world. We are to be separate, we are to be different.

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Now, on the other hand, biblical separation does not require Christians to have no contact with unbelievers.

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Like Jesus, we should befriend the sinner without partaking of the sin,

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Luke 7 34. The apostle Paul, I think, expressed a balanced view of separatism where he basically said, if you had to be completely separate from those who were ungodly or immoral, you would basically have to leave planet earth,

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Paul said. So we are to be in the world, but not of the world.