What you do to your body, you do to God's temple (1Cor 6:18-20)

Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body. (1Cor 6:18-20)

Concluding this section dedicated to sexual immorality, Paul says flee from it. That means run. Run for your life. Run faster than you run from every other sin, because this one defiles you in a way that no other sin has the power to do.

If you’re like me, you’re tempted to say “Wait a minute. There are other sins that affects your body. How about drug abuse? Or suicide? That has to affect the body more than fornication”

If you still think of your body as merely a biological entity, you’d be correct in stating those objections, but Paul argues that since the Holy Spirit lives in you, your body is a temple. And the worst sin you can commit against a temple is not tearing it down. It is defiling it. Bringing that which is unclean into it.

The Lord never let fire rain down on the Roman army that destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD. But when Nadab and Abihu approached God’s altar with a fire that wasn’t from God, he torched them alive (Lev 10:1-2)

Your body is a temple. It is holy, set apart for God. It doesn’t belong to you. It is his. He bought it at the price of his son’s blood. Therefore glorify God in it.

Don't prostitute Christ (1Cor 6:14-17)

Now God has not only raised the Lord, but will also raise us up through His power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? May it never be! Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her? For He says, “THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH.” But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him. (1Cor 6:14-17)

The stomach and the food in it will pass away, we learnt in the last verse. But you are a member of the Body of Christ. And that is not temporary, but eternal. God raised him from his grave, to live eternally, and he has promised to raise us up to eternal life with him as well.

As members of the Body of Christ - his hands and his feet, his eyes and his ears and mouth - whatever we do with our bodies we also do with his body. If we prostitute our own bodies, we prostitute his body.

Now when Paul says “he who joins himself with a prostitute”, you need to know how common prostitution was in Corinth. In our culture prostitution is considered immoral, but it is not considered immoral to sleep with just about anyone you’re not married to as long as there’s no exchange of money involved. In Corinth it was almost the other way around. Ancient Greece was a society very much divided by class, and to defile a free woman was a very serious matter. A slave or a prostitute on the other hand was no big deal. So with the average age of marriage for men being 30 years, you can probably imagine how common this sin was.

In addition Corinth had a temple to the goddess Aphrodite. Like with modern paganism, Aphrodite worshippers saw sexuality as a pathway to religious experiences, and their ceremonies were very sexual in nature. That made the temple a natural marketplace for those who sold such services.

So when Paul is talking about joining oneself to a prostitute, he is not saying that prostitution is the only form of fornication that is wrong. But he’s addressing the most common form of fornication that took place in their culture.

While prostitutes were looked down upon, their clients were not accustomed to being under the same stigma. And telling them that if they sleep with prostitutes they are no better than them would be as strange to them as saying if you eat beef you’re no better than a cow.

But sex has the power to create a very unique and powerful union between a man and a woman. Indeed that was the purpose for which God created it. To tie a wife and a husband together for life with unbreakable bonds. Those who treat it as just another biological process soon end up discovering the pain for those bods being torn apart as you move from one partner to another. You have joined yourself to them. In Biblical terms, you have become one flesh with them.

Now when you make yourself one with a prostitute, than you’ve made yourself a prostitute. And if you are one spirit with Christ, if you are a member of his body, then you have prostituted him.

On eating forks (1Cor 6:13)

Food is for the stomach and the stomach is for food, but God will do away with both of them. Yet the body is not for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body. (1Cor 6:13)

Some things are made for each other, and others aren’t. The stomach is for food. A couple of years ago, a dutch medical magazine published an article about a 52 years old woman who came to the hospital complaining about a stomach ache. They ended up giving her an x-ray that revealed that her stomach contained no less than 78 spoons and forks that she had swallowed.

When asked about it she gave the following explanation: “I don't know why but I felt an urge to eat the silverware - I could not help myself.” (Source: The daily mail)

I think you’d join me in saying that woman was insane.The stomach is not for forks and spoons. And if you swallow them it has serious repercussions for your health. Yes indeed. But don’t let yourself get of any easier. The body is not for immorality, and if you use it for that you are no less insane than that woman. And if I ask you about it, you’ll answer with sorrow-filled eyes, those words that so many have uttered before you: “I don’t know why but I felt an urge to commit immorality - I could not help myself”

The particular type of immorality in view in this verse is sex outside of marriage, as we talked about last time. It’s the same Greek word “porneia”.

My hope today is to get you to the point where you’d rather eat a fork than commit fornication. Not because I’m against sex, but because I’m for it. If you love food, you will not eat forks. Because you know that a stomach full of forks will hinder your ability to eat, enjoy and digest food. Now if I may be so blunt as to say this: If you love sex, you ought to know that a past full of sin will limit your enjoyment of it. Those old fork-wounds will add a constant pain of shame and regret to that aspect of your life that will follow you for many years.

Every hint of immorality counts. Don’t console yourself by saying “I haven’t gone all the way”, as if that is all that counts. I’ll tell you that if you’ve gone half the way you have half the wounds. And if you’ve gone half the way twice - well it doesn’t take more than two half forks to make a whole one, does it?

Now what you do with your stomach doesn’t really matter in the big picture. It is a temporal matter of appetite and biology. God will do away with both your stomach and the food in it. But as we will see in the next verse, sex is not merely a temporal matter of appetite and biology. It has eternal significance.

The wrong question (1Cor 6:12)

All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything. (1Cor 6:12)

Does God allow us to sin?

It’s always hard to find right answers to wrong questions. And this question, that has apparently been posed in some form or another by the Corinthians, is most definitely wrong.

No doubt Paul had taught the Corinthians about Christian liberty when he worked among them. He would have preached the good news of a new covenant, where your relationship with God is not founded on works of the law, but on the Grace of God poured out on them through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

So if we asked “will God punish us for our sins”, the answer -- according to the Gospel -- is a loud, clear no! If God has given you new birth through his Spirit, then he also has by his sovereign decree chosen to love you unconditionally. No matter what you’ve done in the past, and no matter what you do in the future.

So doesn’t that mean the same as allowing us to sin?

The question still sounds odd, doesn’t it? It’s odd because it presumes that you want to sin. And as a born-again believer in Christ, you are overjoyed by the fact that God allows you not to sin. And you’re not -- or at least you shouldn’t be -- looking for a way back into the misery that God saved you from.

It’s kind of like asking “will God allow me to knock myself over the head with a two-by-four and then poke out both of my eyes with a rusty shrimp-fork?” Well, he may not have loved you any less if you were to do that, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not still stupid. And it doesn’t mean that there won’t be any consequences if you do it. Your head will still hurt, and you’ll still be blind, even if God still loves you.

Sin is the same way, only a lot more stupid, and with much greater potential to hurt both you and everyone you come into contact with. So are you “allowed” to do it? Is it lawful? If you still insist on asking the wrong question, than yes, it is “lawful”. But it’s not profitable. And it will master you.