To sever a bond that tied heart to heart is a grief not to be dismissed lightly. The pain you feel is real, and it is right to acknowledge the sorrow. Yet what you have done is to cast off a yoke that was not Christ’s, and in that act, though it wounds for a season, there is a merciful deliverance. The precept, “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers,” is not a harsh restraint but a guard set by love. You thought the yoke of Christ was hard when we reminded you of it, and you have ventured to take it upon yourself by this parting. How have you found it? The immediate weight is heavy, but it is a clean weight, not the galling friction of iron linked to iron where the courses run opposite. That other yoke, of affection tangled with false teaching, would have worn a sore you could not long endure. A man may carry a bucket on his head and grow weary, but the same man diving into the sea has a thousand buckets above him and does not feel their weight, because he is in his proper element. To be yoked with Christ is to be brought into your element; to be unequally yoked is to be forever straining against the collar.
You wonder if he ever truly cared, and that question brings its own sharpness. A professing Christian deep in false teachings has a form of godliness but denies the power thereof. The affection that flows from an unregenerate heart, however warm it seems, is not fed from the same fountain as the love that springs from union with Christ. It may be sincere as far as natural feeling goes, but it cannot be that self-denying, Christ-honoring love which endures. Do not torment yourself looking for certainty about his heart; a tree is known by its fruit. False teaching on central truths is rotten fruit. If he held doctrines that diminish the Lord Jesus, then his fidelity was already pledged elsewhere, and you were sharing him with error. That is a betrayal lightened only by the grace that opens the eyes to see it before the covenant was made.
The fear that you must witness him turning swiftly to another is a bitter draught. To see one for whom you cared walk on in a path away from the truth, perhaps with a new companion, is a trial that stings. Yet you are not called to peer down that road. Your duty is to look to the One who has ordered this severing. Moses prayed, “If Your Presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here.” Where Christ’s presence cannot go, there you must not go. If his way embraces teachings that Christ disowns, then his way is not a path where the Shepherd leads. You could not follow him there without leaving the flock. Let him go. Commit him to the Judge who knows the secrets of the heart. Pray for him, but do not stand staring after a cloud of dust that can only blind you with its grit.
What you need now is not to measure his affections but to press upon Christ with the full weight of your heartbreak. My weight of sin helps to press me down on Him; my weight of trouble, my weight of care, my weight of anxiety all help me to press more on my Lord. This sorrow, laid upon Him, becomes a means of leaning more heavily where you must lean altogether. You want a sign that you are held? The sign is Christ’s yoke, which is easy, and His burden, which is light. If your soul now finds a quiet resting place upon His finished work that it did not possess before, then this pain has been a strange mercy. We set our minds on getting this and that, and then blame our Master because we have a heavy burden on our backs. He meant that we should have a heavy burden if we would make one of our own. Cast this bit of a broken yoke upon Him. He can bear what crushes you.
I pray you may now come, always coming, flat and square on Christ. The way to be coming to Christ, as long as you live, is to lean more on Christ, press more heavily on Christ, and depend more upon Christ than ever before. Persuade your own heart concerning Jesus. He is no betrayer. He loved you and gave Himself for you. Let that sweet love persuade you of better things than a questioning mind can conjure. Go to your knees; the seductions of regret and the suggestions of despair are only to be resisted there. And if you must weep, weep at the cross, where tears are understood.