November 3, 2024|Pursuing Purity III|1 Corinthians 6:12-20
John-Daniel Cutler
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We are continuing our journey through the first recorded letter from the Apostle Paul to the church at Corinth. At the beginning of our series we noted the striking similarities between the city of Corinth and our own nation today. Today is one of those texts that makes that readily apparent.
We titled our 1 Corinthian series, Life in the Church because Paul’s focus throughout the letter seems to be that the Corinthians are not living like the church in various areas as well as he addresses practical aspects of our life together within the church.
Three weeks ago we began looking at chapter 5 under the heading Pursuing Purity and really within chapters 5 and 6 we have this mini-series within the greater series that we will finish up this morning.
In chapter 5 Paul wrote about a man within the body who was living a sexually immoral lifestyle and the church was not only not addressing it rightly, they were proud of their tolerant attitude towards him. Paul commands them to pursue purity through church discipline.
In the first part of chapter 6 we saw Paul addressing lawsuits between believers in the church and saw that relationships were being broken, people were being abused, and believers were acting like the world. Paul showed them that they needed to pursue purity in their relationships with one another, even if that meant suffering loss themselves.
In the latter part of chapter 6 Paul is going to shift back to the idea of sexual immorality. This time applying individually what he commanded corporately in chapter 5.
Here is the central theme as it is applied to each of those sections.
Pursuing purity within the church body corporately.
Pursuing purity within the church body relationaly.
Pursuing purity within the church body personally.
All of this is related because to the extent we pursue purity in our own lives, we will pursue it relationally and corporately.
One of the questions we ask in our Membership Matters class is ‘since church discipline is Biblical, why do we not see more churches practicing it?’
We’ve gotten a few different answers, but a couple of common ones have been ‘fear’ and ‘unwillingness’. In our last class we dove a little deeper into why we fear practicing church discipline. One of the participants hit the nail on the head when they said, because we don’t want anyone looking closely at our lives. We are fearful that if we call out unrepentant sin in the church someone might turn around and look closely at how we are living.
I think one of the reasons the Corinthians were not acting on the sexually immoral man in chapter 5 is because it would mean dealing with their own sexually immorality. As Paul is going to highlight today, this man was far from the only person who needed to deal with the sin of sexual immorality in their life. When we are okay with sin in our life, we tend to be okay with sin in other’s lives.
But as we will see today, there is something especially harmful about sexual sin. In fact, Paul is going to show us that what we do with our bodies matters.
If you get anything from today, let it be this.
“Because we belong to Christ, it matters what we do with our bodies.”
The Apostle Paul is going to deal with various themes in our text today, but the main two I see are, one, our freedom in Christ and two, how we think about that freedom.
We will see within our text today there are two ways of thinking, that we are going to call Corinthian thinking and Christian thinking. Corinthian thinking, as you will see, is worldly thinking and it hasn’t changed very much from Paul’s day to ours. It is still prominent and influential outside and unfortunately, inside the church. In the same way, the Christian thinking Paul puts forth is the same thinking we should have today because Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Paul is going to refute Corinthian thinking, put forth the way Christians should think, and then we are going to finish with the consequences of Christian thinking.
If you haven't already, open your bibles to 1 Corinthians, chapter 6, at verse 12.
Let’s read our text this morning and then go back and look at it more closely.
1 Corinthians 6:12-20 (ESV) 12 “All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything. 13 “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. 15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! 16 Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” 17 But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. 18 Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. 19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, 20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
Within our text this morning Paul is going to highlight our first division this morning, the…
Corinthian thinking about the use of our bodies.
Scholars agree that in portions of this part of the letter, Paul is quoting either a popular saying within the Corinthian church or one from their letter when he says ‘all things are lawful for me’. He says it twice here and then again in chapter 10. Another is in verse 13 ‘food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food’.
If you have an ESV, you will see quotations around those statements. If you have a NIV you will see similar quotations.
These two statements, particularly the first give us a good summary of how the Corinthians were thinking.
“All things are lawful for me.”
This is an expression of absolute freedom and similar things are said both outside and inside the church.
Outside the church it may sound like, ‘no one can tell me what I can or cannot do.’ It is self rule, usually with the only modifier being, ‘as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else’. Right, you’ve heard things like this. You may have even said them.
Inside the church it may sound like, ‘I am no longer under the law but in Christ.’ If that sounds familiar, it is because Paul taught it.
All things are lawful for me, was certainly a Pauline thought. Listen to a few places where he says something similar.
Romans 6:14 (ESV) 14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
Romans 8:1-2 (ESV) 1 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.
But Paul did not mean that since we are in Christ, there is no law that governs us, he was talking specifically about Jewish dietary laws and societal laws that were fulfilled in Christ, who fulfilled the law. It seems the Corinthians had taken this idea and ran with it to extremes.
Today we might call this distorted thinking, Hyper-Grace.
R.C. Sproul was asked about hyper-grace and he really gets to the core of this belief.
The core idea is that grace covers everything. Once we experience grace, we are no longer under the law, in any sense, not even in an instructive sense.
Some within the hyper-grace movement make it sound like once you have experienced grace, then basically you can live however you want—“Free from the law, blessed condition, I can sin all I want and still have remission.”
The problem with this thinking is that it is entirely unbiblical. Paul himself says after talking about grace abounding in Romans, says. Romans 6:1-2 (ESV) 1 What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? 2 By no means!
Paul uses the strongest ‘no’ he can, by no means!
We are free from the law in the sense that we do not keep it in order to be saved, but Paul nowhere teaches that the result of becoming a Christian is an attitude that says, I can do whatever I want. But that is exactly what some people who name the name of Christ think.
When I was about 11 or 12 and I had grown up in church, I had been saved and baptized and had some semblance of what it meant to be a Christian. A friend in my neighborhood had gotten picked up by a bus from a local church in Longview because they gave him candy and maybe even money, I can’t remember exactly. Now this kid lived with his grandmother and they did not attend church anywhere and I don’t think any of them were believers, so I was surprised to hear he had gotten on the bus at all. But, I remember we were playing that Sunday afternoon and he told me that he had gotten baptized that day, so now he could do whatever he wanted and still go to heaven.
To this day, I don't know if they taught him that explicitly or if he was confused, but the result was the same. A confession of Christ that didn’t cost anything, that didn’t demand anything, and that ultimately didn’t change anything.
Look at the outworking of this kind of thinking. Paul goes from the smaller to the larger matter.
It affected the way they thought about food.
13 “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”
God gave me a stomach and an appetite for food, so that must mean I was designed to eat. And since I have a desire to eat, it must be good to fulfill that desire, and since I am free, I can do that anyway that I want.
Do you see the danger of thinking this way?
Eating is no longer a blessed way to sustain our bodies, or to give us energy to live our lives, but a way to fulfill a desire.
Which transitions our thinking from what does my body need to what do I want?
Does it matter what we eat? Absolutely. America is experiencing an epidemic of obesity, and has been for almost 30 years. But not just America, by 2014, some studies suggested that globally, there were now more people who are obese than who are underweight.
I don’t want to spend too much time here this morning because it is not Paul’s main point, but we need to understand the significance, because Paul is going to use this argument to transition to his point.
God is ultimately going to destroy both the stomach and food. When Christ returns and his people are glorified, eating to survive will not be a thing. In our resurrected, eternal bodies, Paul indicates that the necessity of eating will no longer dominate our lives.
But, this kind of thinking reaches farther doesn’t it?
If I have a desire and there is a way to fulfill it, then it must be okay to fulfill. It doesn't end with food.
The Corinthians thought, well if I have a sexual desire then it must be okay to fulfill it. Furthermore, since I am free, I can fulfill it anyway that I want. By the way, this wasn’t just the Corinthian church, this was Greco-Roman culture. Rather than being changed by becoming a follower of Christ, they had brought this thinking into the church.
The general thinking in society today is exactly the same. If it feels good, do it. Right?
Especially in regard to sexual expression.
This is Corinthian thinking. That it does not matter what we do with our bodies, because either we don’t see ourselves as accountable to anyone or because we think incorrectly that what we do with our bodies doesn’t matter. We separate the physical and the spiritual. It doesn’t matter, my soul is secure so I can live physically anyway that I want.
The apostle Paul has much to say about this, so let’s get to our second division this morning.
Christian thinking about the use of our bodies.
Let’s read verse 12 again, this time noting Paul’s answer to their thinking.
1 Corinthians 6:12 (ESV) 12 “All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything.
Paul offers two statements that expose the fallacy of their thinking.
One, even though you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.
It could be unhelpful. Other words that would fit here are profitable or advantageous. Not everything you can do is ultimately good for you.
You could eat McDonalds everyday, but that is not profitable for you.
You could regularly skip the gathering of the saints, but that is not profitable for you.
As a Jew set free in Christ, you could eat bacon for every meal now, but that would not be profitable for you. Do you see?
Christian thinking doesn’t stop with ‘can I do something lawfully?.’ It continues to ‘is this thing good for me’? Is it profitable for me?’
But there is another fallacy in the Corinthian thinking.
Two, even though you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. It could enslave you.
I will not be dominated by anything.
The word Paul uses is not to be brought under the power of anything.
Let’s get back to food for a minute. You are certainly free to eat highly processed sugary foods, but how many of you can stop eating highly processed sugary foods?
How many of you love your caffeine? Coffee, energy drinks, right?
How many of you have tried to cut back and gotten caffeine headaches?
What you were free to eat and drink has gotten a hold of you and you are now enslaved to it.
For our teens, if you haven’t already you will have a desire to hold a hand, to kiss someone and you will tell yourself, it’s just a little intimacy, it’s just hand holding and kissing, but here is the deal. It’s never enough.
There are things in this life that cause our dopamine to spike, that ‘feel-good’ hormone.
But here me when I say, what causes a spike today will barely register tomorrow. So we begin to chase that feeling.
It’s why we overeat, it’s why we binge watch television, it’s why pornography is more prevalent and used than ever before, it’s why more single Christians and non-Christians are sexually active today than ever before.
Paul warns that just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should, one because it may not be good for us and two it may actually ensnare us.
If any addict could gain a moment of clarity in the midst of their pursuit of the next high, they would tell you they regret ever starting whatever the thing they are enslaved by is.
No one sets out to be dominated or controlled by anything, but in the exercising of our freedom we can actually give it away.
Paul moves on to his second explanation of why Christian thinking is different. Let’s pick up in verse 13.
13 “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power.
The logic of desire applied from food to sex is a fallacy. It is not the same.
Nothing satisfies the stomach except food. It was meant for food.
The body was not meant purely for sexual enjoyment. Paul says it was mean for the Lord.
We were created by God, for God.
Furthermore, although God will destroy the necessity of food, he will not destroy the body.
In the same way God raised Christ, he will raise the believer. This is our hope.
This is what we celebrate every Sunday, that our savior is risen, that he is alive, and that he has promised to those who love him and obey his commandments that he will raise us up on the last day.
We are promised a resurrected body, which implies some connection between the body we have now and the body we have then.
Brittany and I were discussing this, and I asked her, ‘what if the way we treat our bodies has an impact on our resurrected bodies?’ That certainly makes you think doesn’t it?
I’m not talking about disease or accidents that affect us physically, but what if the way we treated our bodies in this life affected us in the next? It wouldn’t be a stretch to see Paul making the connection here.
Let’s keep going. Verse 15.
5 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! 16 Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” 17 But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.
Paul’s next line of thinking is reminding us that when we are brought into Christ, it connects us to Christ in significant ways.
First, he reminds us that when we are saved we become a part of the body of Christ.
Shall we then take members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! He says.
That ought to make us a little uncomfortable. Paul wants us to sit with the reality that our actions do not happen in a vacuum.
Evidently some of the Corinthians had brought the pagan practice of engaging in prostitution into the church. Corinthian was known for this. As a matter of fact, others within the Greco-Roman world were known to use Corinthianize as a way to describe engaging in sexual relations with a prostitute.
Before Rome destroyed Corinth and rebuilt it, historians record that the temple in Corinth had 1,000 temple prostitutes that would descend on the city in the evening. This was normal behavior for those outside the church, but unthinkable for those within.
Why?
Because the Apostle Paul says, sex is not like other physical things. Overeating, drinking, these things have bodily effects, but Paul says sex is not just a physical thing, it is in some sense a spiritual thing.
To back up his point, he goes to the creation of the first couple where God proclaims the purpose of sex within the confines of marriage.
Genesis 2:23-25 (ESV) 23 Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”
24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
Jesus used this rationale to explain why divorce is not God’s design in Matthew 19.
Matthew 19:4-6 (ESV) 4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
So strong is this bond, that Jesus says if a man divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
Paul’s argument here is that when you become a Christian you are united in spirit with Christ. You are inseparably bound to Christ. Therefore, you cannot join yourself physically without affecting yourself spiritually. This is the way of Christian thinking, which brings us to our last division this morning.
Consequences of Christian thinking.
Having brought the Corinthian believers through refuting their current thinking and presenting the Christian way of thinking about our bodies, Paul makes his application.
Let’s pick up in verse 18.
18 Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. 19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, 20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
Flee from sexual immorality is one of two commands or imperatives within our text this morning.
If you understand that you can harm yourself and enslave yourself through sexual sin, if you understand that there are spiritual implications for what you do sexually with your body, the only logical course of action is to flee from it.
The word flee is exactly what you think it is, to run as fast as possible in order to reach safety.
A great Old Testament illustration of this is Joseph with Potiphers wife. After she took notice of Joseph she started trying to entice him into her bed, Joseph refused. One day after being repeatedly refused she tried to trap him, alone in the house, she grabbed his clothes and begged him to lie with her. What did Joseph do? He ran and got out of the house.
I heard Voddie Bauchum preaching on sexual sin and the danger of it and he said, if the strongest man in the Bible fell into sexual sin, if the wisest man in the Bible fell into sexual sin, and if the man most after God’s own heart fell into sexual sin, why do we think, in our own power, we can resist it? I am thankful that is not what Paul taught, but rather to flee from it.
Ladies, delete that man’s name from your phone. Teens, go the other way when that boy comes around, do not say yes to taking that girl to the dance. Men, put locks on your computer and phone that won’t let you access sights that tempt you. Don’t read those books if it creates lust in your heart. Sexual sin is not something to take lightly.
If you understand that sexual immorality is not only sinful but inherently harmful, you don’t stay and see if you can overcome it, you don’t flirt with it, you don’t even give it a chance of happening. You flee from it.
Paul continues in verse 19. If you understand that when Christ saved you, you were united in spirit with him and indwelt by the Spirit of God, then it follows that your body is now a temple of the Holy Spirit. If you want to know how God feels about his dwelling place, look no further than how God punished those who treated it without proper reverence.
Leviticus 10:1-2 (ESV) 1 Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it and laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the LORD, which he had not commanded them. 2 And fire came out from before the LORD and consumed them, and they died before the LORD.
2 Samuel 6:5-7 (ESV) 5 And David and all the house of Israel were celebrating before the LORD, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals. 6 And when they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. 7 And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him down there because of his error, and he died there beside the ark of God.
In 1 Corinthians, Paul has already argued that God’s people as a body is the temple of God, but here he makes the application personal. Every believer is a walking, talking temple of the Spirit of God.
You know this, he says, and if you know this, you know that you are no longer your own.
Don’t miss what Paul says here. Christian, believer, you are not your own.
You do not exist for yourself is a more literal translation. If you understand the gospel, you already know this, but Paul says, when it infiltrates your thinking, you behave differently.
Christ shed his blood to purchase you from the bondage of sin and death, to be the propitiation for your sins, he gave his life for his people, how could you possibly still think you belong to yourself?
And if you do not belong to yourself, but to God, body, mind, and soul, what else is left for you but to glorify God with your body.
This is the second command Paul gives.
The word glorify here means to praise, yes. But it is more than that.
The word means to cause the dignity and worth of some person to become manifest and acknowledged.
That is to say, the goal of your life and therefore how you use your body is to make the glory of God known.
How do you do that?
When you refuse to participate in things that are unhelpful and enslaving, you are saying God is better.
When you refuse to satisfy your carnal nature you are saying God is better.
The consequence of Christian thinking is Christian living, and the consequence for Christian living is glorifying God.
John Piper says it this way. ‘God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.’
When you chase your desires with worldly pleasures, you are saying, I am not satisfied in God.
This covers everything from what you eat, to who you sleep with, to how you pursue your career, to how you handle your bank account.
Conclusion-
This brings us back to our statement. Christian, “Because you belong to Christ, it matters what we do with your bodies.”
Maybe you are here this morning and you think there’s no way then, I am coming to Christ. I want to do what I want to do, how I want to do it. Maybe you are a Christian but you are stuck in Corinthian thinking. I want you to hear me this morning.
Friend, Paul doesn’t call us to Christian thinking because he wants us to miss out on good things, he calls us to Christian thinking because he doesn't want us to miss out on the best thing.
You can eat in every five star restaurant in the world, you can boast sexual conquest from one side of the world to the other, you can experience everything this world has to offer to fulfill your desires and in the end it will be worthless. You can deny yourself nothing and gain everything and one day it will all be worthless compared to what you have lost. Jesus said it this way.
Matthew 16:24-27 (ESV) 24 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 25 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? 27 For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done.
Jesus died to secure your soul. He has paid the price to redeem you from a life destined for an eternity of torment apart from the one thing in the world that will ultimately satisfy you, the one thing in the world you were created for, Himself.
Why would you chase anything else?
Let us pray.
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