HONOR GOD WITH YOUR BODY ~ 1 Corinthians 6.12-20

12 "Everything is permissible for me"—but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible for me"—but I will not be mastered by anything. 13 "Food for the stomach and the stomach for food"—but God will destroy them both. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14 By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also. 15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! 16 Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, "The two will become one flesh." 17 But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit. 18 Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. 19 Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.

Good Morning~

The Greeks considered the body to be irrelevant to anything significant in life; their emphasis was on the soul.  The object of Greek religion and philosophy was to help a person get beyond the body and to the only thing that really mattered – the soul or the spirit.? “All things are lawful to me” was a popular saying in Corinth, yet Paul sets out to correct their thinking:  not all things are beneficial, even if lawful.  Because Christ bought their freedom through his death on the cross, their bodies belonged to him.   

Because the Holy Spirit takes up residence within believers, our bodies are really like temples that house the Holy Spirit.  Accordingly, our bodies matter.  How we respect them is significant, and we are to  ‘Honor God with our bodies’.  So, while ‘all things are permissible’, the idea is not to be bound by a sinful urge or habit, and so Paul qualifies it with ‘but not all things are beneficial.’  So, when entertaining a behavior, we should ask ourselves, ‘will this grow my spiritual life—you know, be beneficial to my life and character?’ 

Sexual activity is again at issue here because of the highly-charged sexuality of Corinth, and the thought that there was no reason to deny oneself of any bodily pleasure.  They treated sex as an appetite to be satisfied, rather than a gift to be cherished, given to husbands and wives by God. “Just because we have certain normal desires given to us at Creation, does not ?mean that we must always give in to them and always satisfy them.”*  Paul warned that sexual sin was the worst kind of sin a person can commit against his body because it involves the whole person.  (If you doubt that, ask someone who has been sexually abused—though wrong was perpetrated against the body, it mars and scars the mind, heart and soul.)  On the other hand, sex inside of marriage is meant to be a wonderful experience, building on love and faithfulness to one another.

In this day of almost anything goes, sexual sin is rampant.  We have talked about infidelity already, but then there is cohabitation, homosexuality, pornography, and promiscuity in our young.  Many of our young people participate in every kind of sexual act, except intercourse, and still think themselves ‘pure’.  Not wanting to be any more explicit than that, it is a matter of great concern; so, parents get informed!

‘Remember the party game ‘Limbo’?  Participants must pass underneath a suspended bar without touching it, shimmying to the music—with each pass, the bar is lowered a little.  It seems that our morality seems to be going that direction; we try to get under the lowest bar possible, and still make squeak by.  Instead, Christian, let’s raise the bar, striving to ‘be holy, even as he is holy.’  Let’s consider whether we are honoring God with our bodies . . .

Indeed, let’s honor God with our whole self!

Christine

* Warren Wiersbe