For some reason, the church doesn’t often talk about sex. Almost like it’s a taboo subject. Which is interesting, because it seems that everyone but the church is talking about it. Or if the church does talk about it, it’s only in a negative context of what you shouldn’t do. But the Bible treats sex much differently.

Sex is God’s thing. He created it, so he knows it best. He knows what it’s for and what it’s not for. And He knows what perversions we need to watch out for. We’ll talk about some of those perversions today, because that’s where the text goes. But I want you to remember that the perversions only exist because there is something to pervert. There is beauty and grace in God-glorifying sex, which is why we must fight to have the right view of sex and our bodies. Sex is a good gift, but it makes a terrible god. Here’s the main idea for today’s text: we glorify God in our bodies when we flee from sexual sin.

Bringing Us Up to Speed
Some things to be aware of as we come to the end of 1 Corinthians 6. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with moral issues, but these aren’t moral issues that exist in a vacuum by themselves. These are moral issues that were compromising the gospel witness of the church. They reveal how the Corinthian church was tolerating sin within its community, which compromised their distinction from the world. In short, these moral issues compromised the very gospel itself

In chapter 5, Paul addressed the issue of a man having sex with his father’s wife, and already in chapter 6, Paul has addressed the issue of the Corinthian brothers taking each other to court. In both of these instances, Paul says they are forgetting who they are and acting like those who don’t inherit the kingdom of God. Acting like those who haven’t been transformed by the gospel. Yet they are part of the kingdom of God precisely because they have been sanctified and justified (1 Cor. 6:11). Here at the end of chapter 6, he addresses another instance of tolerating sin, namely Corinthian men justifying their right to visit prostitutes.

The Root of Sexual Sin
But Paul doesn’t just want them to be moral. The point is not just…don’t sleep with your father’s wife, or don’t sue another Christian, or don’t have sex with prostitutes. Those are just moralistic checkboxes. They don’t actually get at the root of the issue. He wants their morality to flow from a right understanding of who they are in Christ. A right understanding of the gospel.

Without the gospel, morality is damning. Throughout this whole letter, Paul is trying to help them see life through gospel lenses.Their whole life is affected by the gospel. Sex was not the problem. Lawsuits were not the problem. These were not the root issues. They were the fruit of a deeper issue. The symptoms of the disease. And the disease is dissatisfaction with God. 

The root of sexual sin is idolatry—preferring anything other than the true God. Taking something or someone that isn’t God and making them god in your life. When you’re unsatisfied with who God is and who he has made you to be in Christ, it leads to all sorts of sin. We need the framework of the gospel to see that. We need gospel lenses to see that. But the Corinthians lacked those gospel lenses. If we’re honest with ourselves, sometimes we lack those gospel lenses, too. We’ve been changed by the gospel, but we don’t live like it. It’s why a letter like 1 Corinthians can be so helpful for us.

The Nature of Sexual Immorality
Our passage today helps us to build a gospel view of sex by emphasizing the importance of our bodies in God’s redemptive plan. But before we get to how Paul makes his argument, we need to consider the nature of sexual immorality.

The Greek word is porneia and it’s mentioned twice in our text (1 Cor. 6:13,18). We’ve already seen it in 5:1 and we’ll see it again in 7:2. This word is all through the New Testament (Gal. 5:19; Eph. 5:3; Col. 3:5; 1 Thess. 4:3). A related word, pornos, refers to the sexually immoral person (1 Cor. 5:9-11; 6:9; Rev. 21:8)

In his book What Does the Bible Really Teach About Homosexuality?, Kevin DeYoung writes:

“It cannot be overstated how seriously the Bible treats the sin of sexual immorality. Sexual sin is never considered…a matter of indifference, an agree-to-disagree issue like food laws or holy days. To the contrary, sexual immorality is precisely the sort of sin that characterizes those who will not enter the kingdom of heaven. There are at least eight vice lists in the New Testament (Mark 7:21-22; Rom. 1:24-31; 13:13; 1 Cor. 6:9-10; Gal. 5:19-21; Col. 3:5-9; 1 Tim. 1:9-10; Revelation 21:8), and sexual immorality is included in every one of these…You would be hard-pressed to find a sin more frequently, more uniformly, and more seriously condemned in the New Testament than sexual sin.”¹

Porneia—sexual immorality—is incompatible with the kingdom of God. People who practice sexual immorality, who are unrepentant in their sexual sin, have no place in the kingdom.

So, what then is considered sexual sin, or sexual immorality? The biblical definition of sexual sin is anything that perverts the one-flesh union between a husband and wife. Biblical sex is sex between a man and woman who are committed to each other within marriage. So, Paul commands the Corinthians to flee from porneia.

It’s not enough to just say flee from sexual sin. We must understand the reasons why we should flee from sexual sin. Which is why Paul makes these arguments here. If we don’t understand why we should flee from sexual sin, we won’t actually flee from sexual sin. 

So, why should we flee from sexual sin?

Because Our Bodies Matter to God (1 Cor. 6:12-14)

Verses 12-13 can be confusing. He’s coming off of v.11 saying that they are sanctified and justified, and then it seems like all of a sudden he moves to “all things are lawful” and then this stuff about bellies and food. Most translations have some quotation marks here. But that will vary, because it’s not clear where the Corinthian thinking stops and Paul’s thinking starts. But that is the purpose of the quotation marks—to cue us as to what the Corinthians are thinking and how Paul responds.

There seem to be two categories of incorrect thinking here—their view of Christian freedom and their view of the body. It’s widely accepted that “all things are lawful for me” was the Corinthian view of freedom in Christ. In fact, Paul will bring this same phrase up again twice in 10:23. Their thought was that they were free to do whatever they wanted, including going to prostitutes for casual sex, which would have been the accepted practice in that day.

The irony was that in saying they were free, and that everything was permissible, they were actually being dominated by their liberty and being held captive by their selfishness, rather than letting the gospel determine how they lived out their liberty. The point of liberty was to be freed up to love others, not indulge in selfish desires. Paul will return to matters of Christian freedom in chapters 8-10, so we won’t focus on that here because Paul doesn’t—instead, he focuses on the second categorical error—how the Corinthians viewed the body. 

Perhaps he does this because sexual immorality is not actually a matter of Christian freedom—not a matter of agree-to-disagree. All forms of sexual sin are just that—sin. There is no room for a difference in preference here. And since their view of sex came from a misunderstanding of the body, that’s where Paul moves in his argument.

Redemption Involves Our Whole Person
Verse 13 seems to explain how the Corinthians viewed the body. One bodily appetite (food) is just like another (sex), and God will destroy the body, so what you do with your body doesn’t really matter. Anything goes, right? Pauls says on the contrary, the body does matter! The body is not for sexual immorality—or whatever else we think—it’s for God. So much so that he went to the cross to provide a resurrection for the body. This stands in direct contrast to the Corinthian view that the body is just going to be destroyed anyway—so who cares??

God cares! That’s what Paul is saying here. By saying the body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body, he seems to be emphasizing that Christ gave himself up for the body, so it absolutely matters. God’s redemption involves the whole person, body and soul. Bodily resurrection is a key doctrine of the Christian faith. The Apostles’ Creed reads “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” 1 Corinthians 15 is all about the resurrection of the body. Jesus’ bodily resurrection was the proof of our future bodily resurrection. The Corinthians thought they were on some kind of spiritual plane that meant that what they did in their bodies didn’t matter.

Design Means Authority
We don’t get to act like what we do with out bodies doesn’t matter, because it matters to God. He designed our bodies to include sexuality, so as the Creator, he gets to determine how we treat sex. I recently built a workbench for my shop. This is a bench that I had been wanting to build for several years, and I was finally able to make it happen. I didn’t come up with the original design, but I did modify it to fit my needs. I am the creator of that actual bench. I built it to function in particular ways. No one else gets to tell me what it was designed for or how I should use it, because I am the creator of that bench.

God designed our bodies specifically to glorify him through our sexuality. No one gets to tell the Creator of our bodies how they are to be handled. It’s what makes the current cultural emphasis on “you decide what you do with your body and what it’s for” such an affront against our Creator. 

If you are unmarried and wanting sex, it’s not ok to find it wherever you can. If you are married and unsatisfied with sex, it’s not ok to go looking elsewhere. If you are married and you think sex is more about you and your desires than your spouse and their desires, then you haven’t figured out how the gospel affects sex yet. If you’re married and sex is good, well…we’ll talk about that in chapter 7. If you are a young person and you’re trying to figure out all of the hormones that are beginning to develop, and wondering what you do with that desire for sex, the Bible speaks plainly that there is only one way to faithfully act on those desires—in a biblical marriage. But don’t buy into the lie that you can do whatever you want sexually because it doesn’t really matter that much. It matters a lot because our bodies matter to God.

Because Our Bodies Belong to Christ (1 Cor. 6:15-17)

Paul frames the argument here with two “do you not know” statements. They were misunderstanding the reality of conversion—that their bodies no longer belonged to them. It is “no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). So it is unthinkable that they would take their bodies—the members that belonged to Christ—and join them with a prostitute (v.15). This was contrary to the very reality of conversion.

Sex As Glue
They were also misunderstanding the nature of sex (v.16) They have been joined to Christ by his Spirit, which includes their whole person, both body and soul. Paul defines the nature of sex by referencing Genesis 2:24 (Matt. 19:5; Mark 10:8; Eph. 5:29-31). God designed sex to be like marital glue. Have you ever tried to glue two pieces of something together? If the surfaces are clean, and the glue is strong, they can be virtually impossible to get apart without damaging the surfaces. This is especially true of wood glue. When you glue two pieces of wood together, and then try to tear them apart, there will usually be pieces of wood from one piece stuck to the other piece. It’s possible to tear them apart, but it damages each piece in the process.

Those of us who have experienced brokenness in our relationships know this to be true. Many times there are wounds that are difficult to heal, and scars that stay for a long time. While we understand God’s design, the reality of life in a fallen world is that there is hurt and heartache that comes from our broken sexual relationships. The Corinthians were missing the nature of sex, and the reality of conversion to Christ.

Robert Gundry, in his book Soma In Biblical Theology, says that “the whole man, body and spirit, belongs to the Lord. Therefore illicit union with a harlot, although it is ‘merely’ physical, as the Corinthians would say, effects a oneness of physical relationship which contradicts the Lord’s claim over the body.”²

Acting Like Your Body Belongs to You
Your body doesn’t belong to you! You don’t get to do whatever you want. Don’t just read this and say, “well, I’ve never had sex with a prostitute, so I’m good here.” That would be missing the forest for the trees. When we fail to remember the gospel reality that our bodies belong to Christ, then we act like our bodies belong to us.

So, what does it look like when we act like our bodies belong to us? It looks like thinking lustfully towards anyone we are not married to. It looks like knowing which instagram hashtag to search for. It looks like masturbating in the shower to hide it from your parents, or your spouse. It looks like stirring up physical affection for someone before you marry them. It looks like erasing your internet history to cover your tracks. It looks like being sexually selfish towards your spouse. It looks like elevating sex to an obsession level and letting it dominate your mind. It looks like treating pornography like it’s no big deal. It looks like pursuing anything outside of God’s design for sex. “And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11)

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ! The gospel frees us from enslavement to sexual sin! The gospel calls us and empowers us to turn from our sexual sin, to flee from it. If you’re saying…man, I have messed up sexually. Can I tell you something? Man, I have messed up sexually. But as Christians we are not defined by our sins, sexual or otherwise. The enemy wants you to think that what you’ve done sexually is enough for God to sideline you. That’s a lie. Don’t buy that lie. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done because of the cross of Christ.

Sexual Purity vs. Sexual Integrity
Notice I’m not using the language of sexual purity here. Because I think, unfortunately, what that language does is subtly communicate that when you’ve messed up once, there’s no point in trying because you’re not pure anymore. That’s hogwash. There’s no grace there. Instead we want to live with sexual integrity. Which means we live in the blood-bought, gospel-powered reality of repentance from our sexual sin. And you keep on repenting because Jesus loves you and he paid for that sin. He already knows about that sin. So, be honest about it. Fight for sexual integrity. Flee from sexual immorality. Because your body belongs to Christ!

Because Our Bodies House the Spirit (1 Cor. 6:18-20)

There are only two commands in our text today, and they both show up here. Flee and glorify. Which is also why they’re in the main idea. You don’t casually flee from something. It’s more like “run for your life” level.

Last summer, we were in Illinois for a family reunion. If you’ve ever been to Illinois, you know that it’s flat. We were swimming, and all of a sudden a storm came up on us from out of nowhere. We hurried up and got out of the lake and went to our cabin to dry off and change. Next thing I know, my brother-in-law comes running in and says there’s a tornado warning and a tree just fell outside the cabin. I’m half-dressed at this point, so I grab a shirt, pick Addie up and J and I are fleeing down the hill to the underground shelter. I didn’t stop and ask my brother-in-law…ok, so when the tree fell, how close was it to the cabin? And could you actually see the tornado? No. We’re like…that’s it, we’re out! You escape. You bail. You flee. And we are to do the same thing with sexual sin. Unrepentant sexual sin won’t just ruin your life. It will ruin your eternity.

The rest of v. 18 is challenging, but Paul seems to be saying that there is a uniqueness to sexual sin because it is directly counter to God’s design for the body like no other sin. Our sexuality is unmistakably linked to our identity as people made in God’s image. Genesis says he created them male and female. When we sin sexually, we scoff at the image of God in our bodies. 

What’s With the Temple?
Much can be said about the temple imagery woven all throughout Scripture. Paul has already mentioned the Corinthians as the temple (1 Cor. 3:16-17), but the word for “you” in those verses is plural, meaning the church collectively. Here in chapter 6, Paul shifts the focus to individual believers, which is probably why the better translation is “your body is a temple”, not the temple. All through the story, the purpose of the temple was to house and display God’s glory. It’s where God showed up. Which is awesome when you think about what Paul is saying here.Glorify God in your body, which is now a house for the Spirit to display the beauty and wisdom and glory of God. 

Not only does God’s Spirit live in them, but he does so solely because of his grace.God is the source and giver of the Spirit. In his commentary on 1 Corinthians, Paul Gardner notes that “this is God’s grace: his amazing gift to his people. To abuse the body in the way Paul has described in chapter 6 is therefore a rejection of the grace of God and a fracturing of the covenant relationship established by the work and presence of the Spirit who indwells the believer’s body.”³

Bought At a Price
And then Paul goes on to say that they are not their own. Because they’ve been bought at a price. Bought at a price is linked to the purchase of a slave in the slave market. But not bought for freedom. The emphasis here is not that the Corinthians are free, but rather that they are now owned by Christ. 

He is their master. You are not your own. There has been a transfer of ownership. We’ve already seen this idea in v.15-17, but here the language is stronger.

And the gospel is this…that Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, came and lived the sinless life we could never live. He went to the cross and purchased salvation for all those who believe. Paul said they were bought at a price, and that price was the death of Christ. But in his death, he defeated death, and then came back to life. He rose from the grave. Death holds no power over those who are in Christ because death holds no power over Christ! If you’ve turned from your sin and trusted in the finished work of Christ for salvation, then your body houses the Spirit of God!

But the flip-side of that reality is also true. If you have not turned from your sin and you have not trusted the finished work of Christ for your salvation, then you are destined for an eternity apart from God in hell, a place of eternal punishment that was prepared for Satan and his crew (Matthew 25). I don’t want that for you. Would you turn from your sin and trust Jesus today?

Temple Hijacking
Unfortunately this passage is often hijacked by Christians. Many times “your body is a temple” becomes a universal ban for things like smoking, drinking alcohol, getting a tattoo, eating too much food, or just generally not taking care of your body. “Your body is the temple, so live like it” or something similar. But this actually takes away from the intended emphasis on fleeing sexual sin.

Rather than focusing on how a gospel understanding of sex leads us to flee from sexual sin, we use this passage to encompass anything we think someone else shouldn’t do with their bodies.

Now, I’m not saying there aren’t other things we shouldn’t do with our bodies. There are lots of things that wisdom would caution us against. But this passage is not a unilateral ace in the hole—your body is the temple, so don’t do whatever it is that you think someone shouldn’t do. Let’s be careful not to bind someone else’s conscience where Scripture does not. Here Paul says, your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, so don’t sin sexually!

Which brings us to the hinge in v.20—therefore. Because of everything Paul has said about sex and the body…“therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s” (v.20). With the exception of KJV and NKJV, most translations stop v. 20 after the word “body.” I think this is a better translation, not because it changes the meaning, but because it rightly keeps the emphasis on the body, which has been Paul’s point throughout this section. Glorifying God in their bodies is where they were getting hung up, so Paul leaves no doubt about that here.

And I think this is a fitting conclusion, both to the text and to the sermon. How do you glorify God in your body?—you flee from sexual sin. Why? Because our bodies matter to God, our bodies belong to Christ, and our bodies house the Spirit. These reasons highlight the significance of our bodies in God’s redemptive plan. If we don’t embrace the reasons why we should flee from sexual sin, we won’t actually flee from it.

All of us are sexual beings. That is God’s design. And our sexuality is unmistakably linked to our identity as people made in God’s image. How we conduct ourselves sexually matters. Is the direction of your life moving you towards sexual sin, or away from it? We glorify God in our bodies when we flee from sexual sin.

______________________________________

¹ DeYoung, Kevin. What Does The Bible Really Teach About Homosexuality? Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015; page 74.

² Gundry, Robert. Soma in Biblical Theology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976; page 69.

³ Gardner, Paul. 1 Corinthians. Edited by Clinton E. Arnold. Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018; pages 285-286.

______________________________________

This was originally preached as a sermon at Grace Bible Church in Hollidaysburg, PA. You can find the video of that sermon here https://youtu.be/8YJCaKRee3Y