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Why Christians Should NOT Marry Unbelievers

Our Experience.

Full disclosure: One of our sons began spending time a few years back with a secular woman from a Jewish background. He heard us talk about the sorrows (and disobedience) of being married to a non-Christian for years, so he knew it wasn’t an option (something we reminded him of quite forcefully).

Nevertheless, their friendship grew and developed into something more. To his credit, our son told her: “I can’t marry you unless you are a Christian, and you can’t become a Christian just to marry me. I’ll sit with you in church, but if you are serious about exploring Christianity you will have to do it on your own — find your own small group, read books, talk to people other than me.”

Fortunately, she is a woman of great integrity and grit, and she set herself to looking into the truth claims of the Bible. As she grew closer to saving faith, to our surprise, our son began growing in his faith in order to keep up with her!

She said to me one day, “You know, your son should never have been seeing me!”

She did come to faith, and he held the water when she was baptized. The next week he proposed, and they have been married for 2 1/2 years, both growing, both struggling, both repenting. We love them both and are so grateful that she is both in our family and also in the body of Christ.

I only mention the above personal history because so many of our friends in the ministry have seen different outcomes — children who marry outside the faith. The takeaway lesson for me is that, even in pastoral homes where the things of God are taught and discussed, and where children have a pretty good window on seeing their parents counsel broken marriages, believing children toy with relationships that grow deeper than they expect, ending in marriages that don’t always have happy endings. If this is true in the families of Christian leaders, what of the flock?

We need to hear the voices of men and women who are in unequal marriages and who know, to their sorrow, why it is not merely a disobedient choice, but an unwise one.