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1 Corinthians
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We're continuing our series on Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, and at the moment we're in the section where Paul addresses a whole range of sexual issues — incest, prostitution, divorce, remarriage, marriage, singleness, homosexuality, sexual immorality, and adultery. Today's passage is prompted by the fact that some Corinthian men were visiting prostitutes and didn't seem to see a problem with it.
One of the questions people in contemporary London ask — just as people in ancient Corinth also asked — is: why on earth does this matter? Why does God care who I sleep with? A few years ago, when my former church did a survey asking hundreds of people in the town their biggest objection to Christianity, one of the top seven was exactly that: "Why does God care who I sleep with?"
To many people, Christian teaching on sex — that you either abstain as a single person or express your sexuality only within marriage between a man and a woman — sounds arbitrary. If sex is basically recreation, something two consenting adults enjoy together like a game of squash, then limiting it to certain relationships seems restrictive and strange.
But no culture actually believes sex is only recreation. If I said I wanted to play chess or jump out of a plane with my sister, no one would object. If I said I wanted to have sex with her, everyone would object — because we know sex means something more. The question is: what is that something?
"All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be enslaved by anything. 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... Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. 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, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body." — 1 Corinthians 6:12–20 (paraphrased)
Going back to St. Augustine and through Christian tradition ever since, Christians have understood sex to do three main things:
Augustine called these three purposes faithfulness, offspring, and sacrament. All three, in fact, appear in our own marriage service here at King's: bringing husband and wife together in body, heart and mind as Christ is united with his bride; the foundation of family life in which children are born and nurtured; reflecting the union of Christ and the church.
This is simply what Christians have believed about marriage for two thousand years. You're free to disagree with it — but if it's true, it places real limitations on sex, and on who gets to use it and in what context.
Men in Corinth, like many today, did not want their sexual freedom restricted by obligation to a woman or her children. The Greek verb Corinthiazo actually became a byword in the ancient world for sleeping around with prostitutes — Corinth had a reputation, and a set of slogans to defend it.
You can spot these slogans in the passage by the quotation marks translators have added: "All things are lawful for me" and "food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food." That second one is a crude euphemism — essentially, "the penis is for sex and sex is for the penis, so what does it matter how I use it?"
We have our own modern equivalents — slogans and stickers proclaiming "love is love," which is true on its own terms but is often used to mean you can sleep with whoever you want, and it shouldn't matter what anyone thinks. Every culture develops its own justifying slogans. Paul wants to dismantle the Corinthians' version and show they have fundamentally misunderstood what sex is.
The Corinthians had underestimated how much damage sin does. That's what sinners always do — we rationalise wrong decisions by convincing ourselves they don't really matter. Paul's response: "All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful... I will not be enslaved by anything." Something can be legal and still enslave you.
Think of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings — he believes he owns the ring, but by the end it owns him. Or the old limerick: "There was a young lady from Niger, who smiled as she rode on a tiger. They returned from the ride with the lady inside, and the smile on the face of the tiger." We think we're just enjoying the ride; we don't realise how dangerous sin is. As Anselm of Canterbury told his opponent Bozo thing a thousand years ago: "You have not yet reckoned with the gravity of sin." That's exactly the Corinthians' problem — and often ours. They said, "It's lawful." Paul says: that's not the point. It might be legal, and it might still enslave you.
The Corinthians seemed to think the body was just a shell to be discarded, treating sex as no different to eating or using the toilet. Paul's reply is a brilliantly trinitarian argument:
Christianity actually has a far more positive view of the body than ancient — or modern — paganism. Our bodies are gifts of God, members of Christ, temples of the Spirit.
The Corinthians treated sex as a mere bodily function — like a rumbling stomach demanding food. Paul insists this is entirely wrong: sex unites husband and wife in permanent union, is God's means of bringing new life into the world, and pictures Christ's sacrificial love for the church.
"He who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her... Flee from sexual immorality... the sexually immoral person sins against his own body."
Here's a paradox: the more highly you value sex, the more you'll want to protect it with commitment and restriction. Someone who says "I'll sleep with a thousand people and film it" isn't showing how much they value sex — they're showing how little they think it means. Someone who commits to one person for life is saying the opposite: this matters enormously.
This is the most important of the four — and it's good news. The Corinthians thought they belonged to themselves, free to do whatever they wanted. They failed to grasp that they had been bought at a price — redeemed by the blood of Christ.
"You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body." (v.19–20)
Many of us carry pain around our sexual history — things we've done, things done to us, things we can't undo. We may feel like "damaged goods." But God does not see us that way. He paid the ultimate price — the blood of God himself — to make us clean.
A friend, Matt Chandler, once told a story of bringing a young woman — who had experienced a complicated and painful sexual history — to a church service where the pastor was preaching on sexual immorality. Partway through, the pastor passed a rose around the congregation, asking each person to hold it, smell it, and pass it on.
By the time it reached the end of the room, the rose was broken, bruised, and wilting — handled by everyone. The pastor held it up and said, with anger, "Look at this. Who would ever want something like this?" Matt said everything in him wanted to shout out:
"Jesus wants the rose."
That is the whole point of the gospel — Jesus came to save people who are broken, ruined, handled and passed around. That's exactly who he came for. The nails in his wrists, the blood streaming down him — that was the price paid to purchase people just like that and make them clean forever.
The Heidelberg Catechism begins with this question and answer:
"What is your only comfort in life and in death? That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ, who has fully paid for all my sins, sexual or otherwise, with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil."
We can be tempted to underestimate sin, the body, and sex. But most of all, we must never underestimate the power of the gospel. Christ came for you — to make you whole and to make you pure. Whatever you have done, whatever has been done to you, Jesus paid for it. He paid it all.
