I am 25yrs old and I did not grow up in a church environment so at 22yrs old I gave my life to the Lord. There’s a lot of things that I do not know and I have been studying on my own aside from what my church teaches. A lot of young adults my age are single and are struggling because we all feel like we are getting old and we are still single and most with no kids. Anyways I have been battling to know some truth behind this “unequally yoked” thing. I read your article and I went to 1 Cor 7:14 and 2 Cor 6:14-18. I only see text about a believer and a non believer is unequally yoked. My question is, what if your mate and you attend different churches due to different denominations? For example a Pentecostal and a Seventh Day Adventist? If you both believe that Jesus died for our sins etc, etc but certain things are believed different like the sabbath and eating fish and pork, etc does that make you too unequally yoked?
The passages I cited in writing about being unequally yoked apply to believers marrying unbelievers. However, you raise a most interesting point in the two denominations you picked in posing your question. The marked differences in belief and practice of Pentecostals and Seventh Day Adventists could cause serious problems if the two parties were both serious about their faith.
SDAs don’t really believe in salvation by grace alone and place the teachings of their founder Ellen White on equal footing with Scripture. The official SDA position is that Ellen White wrote with the same degree of supernatural inspiration as the Gospel writers. Some don’t believe that a person outside the SDA church can be saved, and even those within the SDA family can’t be saved unless they adhere to the Saturday Sabbath. And on the other hand, a number of Pentecostal practices would be questionable to a devout SDA.
I don’t know if this question is hypothetical or not, but I can easily imagine huge problems in a marriage that’s half Pentecostal and half SDA. By the way some Christians believe that the SDA church is a religious cult and therefore the unequally yoked verses would apply.