On Account of Your Body, RUN! - 1 Corinthians 6:12-20

Sermon Series: Confused?

I grew up in a neighborhood with a great bunch of boys that were all close to me in age. I loved this particular group of boys because we didn’t spend hardly any time inside playing video games. Instead we were always outside playing sports or exploring the wooded areas that surrounded our neighborhood. One day while about eight of us were playing in the woods we came across a fallen tree with a great big root ball which had become exposed when the tree had fallen over. For some reason we had stopped our exploration for a few minutes and were simply hanging out around this fallen tree. I distinctly remember one of our friends picking up a fallen limb from another tree and just playfully whacking at the root ball with the limb. That’s when eight unsuspecting boys encountered an incredibly angry swarm of yellow jackets which had made their nest in the exposed root ball of the fallen tree. A small cloud of bees, an intensifying buzzing sound, and a couple of sharp pains from bee stings meant it was time to RUN! That’s the funny thing – when you encounter a swarm of angry yellow jackets you don’t have to sit around and have a discussion about the best course of action. Something inside of each of us went off and we knew it was time to run. But with bees chasing after us and buzzing by our heads, the question while we were running away became, “Where should we run to? Where are we going to find safety from these bees?” Those were the questions that filled each of our heads as we were all running away in different directions.

About 20 minutes later we had all managed to re-assemble. We were all nursing wounds (fortunately most of us had managed to escape with just two or three stings). But what had been a somewhat scary event turned into eight boys laughing their heads off as we started to ask the question, “Where did you run to?” You see we had all scattered and run in separate directions, so no one knew where any of the others had run to. And during that process it seems we were all trying to figure out the question, “Where should I run to?” for ourselves. Most of us had just chosen to run until the sense of danger was gone. We ran until we no longer heard bees buzzing by our heads and when we felt like we were a safe distance away. But we couldn’t stop laughing at three of our friends who had formulated some pretty interesting plans as they were fleeing the angry yellow jackets. One of our friends returned soaking wet. He had run in the direction of the creek and as the creek came into view he had decided to find escape from the bees by submerging himself in the creek. He knew that bees didn’t like water so he knew he could find safety by jumping into the creek and plunging his body underneath. We couldn’t make fun of his plan for it had certainly worked – but when he made his way back to the group soaking wet we couldn’t help but laugh. A second boy had run out of the woods and back into the neighborhood via a lot that had a home being built on it at the time. As he got to the road he saw a Porta-John and decided that that might be a good place to escape and take cover. He quickly entered the Porta-John and secured the door behind him. No bees had made their way into the Porta-John with him, but in order to make sure that there were no bees swarming outside the Porta-John he said that he waited in there for about 10 minutes before coming out. We couldn’t give him a hard time about the effectiveness of his plan (the Porta-John ended up being a safe place), but we sure did laugh imagining him in a Porta-John hiding from a swarm of bees. The third boy had started running and determined that the safest place for him to run was home. But home wasn’t just a house or two away – home for him was more than a quarter of a mile away. Still, this boy ran with great resolve all the way home because he believed that his home was the safest place he could run for rescue and deliverance. When he got back to the group we all laughed at his great resolve, because he wasn’t the most athletic or in-shape boy of the group, but when danger reared its head, he had mustered up the strength to run further than any of the rest of us.

What’s the purpose of me sharing this story? It’s a great illustration for the text today. There are some passages of Scripture that encourage Christians to “stand firm” and not to be moved, even in the midst of great trials or difficulties. There are some passages of Scripture that encourage Christians to face persecutions and trials and to endure them by “turning the other cheek.” But there are also some passages of Scripture that encourage Christians to run. We need to know when those times are, and then we need to know how far we are to run and where we are to run to. When a swarm of angry yellow jackets is coming after you, we all know that isn’t a time to stand firm and turn the other cheek – that’s a time to run. So when does the Bible encourage us to take like measures?

Verse 12 begins with further insight into how the Corinthian church seemed to be confused about the way that God, Jesus, and the Gospel impacted their every day lives. In the previous chapters we’ve seen how a misplaced emphasis on worldly wisdom was negatively impacting the church and their daily lives. In the second half of chapter 6 we are going to see how a wrong understanding of their ‘freedom’ and personal ‘authority’ was leading them to make other choices that were inconsistent with lives that had been transformed by the Gospel. In verse 12 Paul quotes twice what appears to be a popular Corinthian theological slogan at the time – “All things are lawful for me.” Some of the believers who made up the church at Corinth had believed that the redeeming work of Christ was limited to a ‘spiritual’ redeeming (that it did not have implications on the physical realm) and that their profession of faith in Christ had resulted in only a ‘spiritually’ transformation. For them, Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection had been done to “save their soul” – they didn’t believe that Jesus had come to redeem all things and to make all things new. Their assumption was that their soul had been healed and made new, but the body was still broken and wasting away, and would remain a casualty of sin’s devastating results.

This limited view of Jesus’ redemptive work is still a problem that plagues many believers today. Many believers rejoice greatly in the fact that Jesus has ‘saved their soul,’ but that’s all they tend to rejoice in. We have to understand that Jesus' mission was far greater in scope than just saving the souls of men. Man’s sin had devastating effects on all of creation – our souls were stained with sin, but the physical creation (including our bodies) were marred and broken by sin as well. If Jesus’ work was limited to only the salvation of our souls then the salvation He accomplished would have been incomplete. Instead, when Jesus paid the penalty for the sins of humanity on the cross and then was buried and raised again, Jesus did a work of restoring and rescuing all things. That means that not only have our souls been rescued and made new, but that all of creation will experience this too. Jesus is going to remove from the earth the damage done to it by sin; Jesus is going to take these broken bodies and repair them so that they work, function, and look as God had originally intended. This is the fuller, more comprehensive truth of the Gospel that we have to believe and accept. When we limit the scope of Jesus’ redemptive work to only the salvation of our souls then we can begin down a slippery slope of wrong believing, which in turn can lead to sinful living and can ultimately do great damage to our own lives and to the message of the Gospel which is supposed to have transformed our lives.

For the believers who made up the church of Corinth, their belief that salvation was limited only to their souls had led them to believe that their bodies were only temporary, present resources, and that their bodies were still ultimately broken and fading away. As a result they believed that they had great freedom to do whatever they wanted with those broken bodies, for they were a present resource over which they had ultimate authority, and which would one day be gone. So it appears that from a theological standpoint, that many of the believers who made up the church at Corinth did in fact live by the slogan, “All things are lawful for me,” for their souls had been saved and there wasn’t any real need to show great concern for a body that would have no place in eternity.

From the beginning of this particular passage Paul jumps on their theological errors and does his best to correct them so that their behavioral errors might be resolved as well. In verse 12 he is going to give a couple of quick arguments to address the general theological errors of their slogan, and then in verses 13-20 he is going to address a more specific sin that was manifesting itself as a result of this particular theological error. Paul’s first response to the slogan, “All things are lawful for me,” is to answer, “but not all things are helpful.” The believers in Corinth who were wrestling with this particular theological error had become too self-centered in their thinking. They believed that any freedom or authority that they possessed was ultimately for their own good. This stood in great contrast to what Jesus had declared were the greatest commandments, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39). Jesus had taught that the most important thing for us to do was to love God with all of our heart, soul and mind, and then to love our neighbors. Loving God and others always has to come before loving ourselves. But for these particular believers they seemed to be living to fulfill and satisfy ‘self’ before any other. So Paul first attempted to help them remember whose good they were to be living for. When they were living for their good before all others then their choices and their behaviors might not have been for the good of Christ or others (or even their own). Paul then challenged this so-called ‘freedom’ to do whatever they wanted. Paul warned them that while they claimed to have the freedom and authority to do whatever it is they wanted to do, they might actually end up enslaved to those very desires and/or behaviors. When that becomes the case then they aren’t really free at all. So Paul challenged these believers to really think critically about the freedoms they boasted in. There was a very real possibility that those things that they pursued so fervently had in fact enslaved them.

In verses 13-14 Paul begins to address one sin that had begun to manifest itself as a result of this wrong understanding of freedom and personal authority. It was a sin of sexual immorality that was specifically working itself out in several of the male believers visiting and having sexual relations with prostitutes. Paul begins verse 13 with what appears to be another popular Corinthian slogan, “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food.” (Note here that the topic of food is not the issue – Paul is simply using this slogan to begin the discussion on sexual immorality because the believers in Corinth had used this same slogan to draw some parallels and to make some comparisons that were not accurate.) The idea behind this particular slogan is that one of food’s purposes is to satisfy our stomach. When we get a craving for a certain kind of food or our stomach starts to growl we go and get something to satisfy the craving or to help relieve the growling. Additionally – it’s always food that our stomach craves, because the stomach was made for food. (I don’t know this for sure, but I would guess that you’ve never had a craving for a great big bowl of sand to eat or seen a shoe and thought to yourself, “That looks pretty tasty. I bet that shoe would sure help my stomach to stop growling.”) Notice that Paul doesn’t argue against this Corinthian slogan because it is true. The problem was that the Corinthian believers were using the truth of this particular slogan and relating it to other sinful desires. In ways very similar to our stomach craving food our bodies can have cravings and desires for things that are sexually immoral. And for a group of believers who believed that their souls had been saved but that the salvation Jesus had accomplished did not extend to their physical bodies, they had determined that it was okay for them to satisfy the cravings of their body. According to their understanding their bodies were fading away – so there didn’t seem to be any reason to deny those cravings and be concerned about whether or not those cravings were sinful. They thought that their souls had been saved, but that their bodies had not - so as long as those cravings weren’t affecting their souls there wasn’t anything wrong with satisfying them. So Paul sought to correct this misunderstanding by saying, “The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by His power” (6:13-14). Paul is here correcting their wrong theology by declaring right theology. He makes it absolutely clear that feeding the cravings of the body and the desires of the flesh with sexually immoral activity is not okay. While the earlier slogan may have been true – that food was made for the stomach and the stomach for food – the body was not, and is not, meant for sexual immorality. Then Paul draws a right parallel, the ‘thing’ that the body is in fact meant for is the Lord, and the Lord for the body. The basis for this understanding is verse 14, “And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by His power.” (Pay attention here, because this is where God, Jesus, and the good news of the Gospel have real life implications.) After Christ died on the cross and was buried He was not raised only in spirit, neither did His new life apply only to His soul. Jesus rose physically! And if Jesus was raised and given new physical life then those who have believed in Jesus as Savior and Lord will also be raised up by God’s power in like fashion. That means that through His death, burial, and resurrection Jesus was rescuing and redeeming more than just our souls, He was redeeming all things and making all things new – including our physical bodies. So while our bodies may be broken by sin and passing away, Jesus is going to make them new. He will heal and mend our broken physical bodies so that they will be restored to the way that God had originally made them.

This good news has to change the way that we both believe and live. Rather than seeing our bodies as temporary resources that are ultimately broken and fading away, and then treating them as such, we need to understand that Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection is able to make all things new (not just our souls). For those of us who have trusted in Jesus as Savior and Lord this means that our bodies are only temporarily broken and that they aren’t permanently passing away. This means that Jesus has done a work to rescue our physical bodies and to restore them to what God had originally designed them to be. And this news has to change the way that we see and treat our bodies. God is in the process of making our bodies new – so rather than feeding the sinful cravings and desires of the flesh (as if our bodies were made for sexual immorality), we need to guard the purity of our bodies, understanding that they too have been redeemed by Jesus and are meant for Him.

In verses 15-17 Paul gives another argument for why the believers in Christ need to abstain from the sin of being sexually active with prostitutes. He begins verse 15 with a rhetorical question, “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” Paul was assuming here that the believers in Corinth did have this understanding. They should have known that when one comes to faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord then he or she is united with Jesus in more than just a spiritual sense. Because of Jesus’ bodily resurrection, which assures our own bodily resurrection, we need to know that our physical bodies are united to Christ and the means by which God continues to carry out the work of ministry here on earth. Paul followed up that rhetorical question with another question that he did not leave up to the Corinthians to answer - he answered it for them. “Shall I then take [literally ‘take away’] the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never!” Paul says that when we have come into a relationship with Jesus and have become united with Him, our bodies having the purpose of continuing to carry out God’s mission on earth, then we cannot take ourselves (in particular our bodies) away from that mission and unite our bodies to prostitutes by having sexual intercourse with them. Paul goes to Genesis 2:24 for the basis of this argument in verse 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.’” God ordained that the act of sexual intercourse would unite two separate individuals as one flesh, and had designed this to take place only within the context of a marriage relationship. But in our sin, humanity stepped outside of God’s design and plan and started engaging in intercourse simply to satisfy the appetites and cravings of our flesh. We gave no regard to what resulted from intercourse outside of the marriage relationship and chose instead to pretend that intercourse with others had not permanent or lasting effects. But by God’s design sexual intercourse does have permanent effects – it unites and bonds us to the individual, making us one flesh with them. So Paul says we can’t become united with Christ, our bodies intended to carry out His mission on earth, and then take our bodies off of that mission so that we might unite them instead with a prostitute. The Gospel doesn’t give us the freedom and authority to engage our bodies in sexual activity outside of marriage that unites our bodies to those who are nonbelievers and not living for the purpose of making the glories of Christ known. We have been united with Christ, our bodies have been redeemed, and we are to use our bodies as an extension of Jesus, carrying out the mission of God in our communities, our work places, our schools, and our neighborhoods.

Paul concludes this segment of his letter with verses 18-20. And the first part of verse 18 is a strong command that both the church at Corinth and believers today need to pay great attention to. “Flee from sexual immorality.” The verb Paul uses that we translate ‘flee from’ is a present tense, imperative. ‘Imperative’ means that it is a command that Paul is giving. ‘Present tense’ means that we are to understand it as a continuous, on-going action. So in order to have a better understanding of what Paul is commanding we could translate the command, “Keep fleeing [continuously] from sexual immorality.” Paul wasn’t saying, “When the temptation for sexual immorality shows up, flee from it.” He was saying “Make sure you are always running away from sexual immorality. Even when the temptation for sexual immorality isn’t right in front of you, make sure you are running away.” The men at the church of Corinth needed to know where the temptation of sexual immorality was and they needed to always be running from it. They needed to always be running away from the prostitutes and the situations that would cause the cravings of their flesh to flare up and burn hot. And the same needs to remain true for us today. We need to always be fleeing from sexual immorality. We need to know where potential temptations lie and we don’t need to be creeping towards them. We need to be running away from them at all times, further distancing ourselves from those immoralities, and making sure we keep in mind that our bodies (as well as our souls) have been redeemed by Jesus and have been set apart to continue carrying out Jesus’ mission here on earth. Paul then concludes with his final argument against this specific sin. “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.” Sexual immorality is a unique kind of sin that by definition has to involve the body. Pride, hate, idolatry, theft, coveting, etc – these sins aren’t sins of the body; but sexual immorality is. So Paul says remember this, “Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. If you are a believer in and follower of Jesus, the Holy Spirit (the third Person of the Trinity) resides in you; He has taken up residency in your life. So by committing sexual immorality and involving your body in that sin, you are defiling the place where God, Himself, resides in you. The believers who made up the church at Corinth knew that the Holy Spirit was the gift of God given to them and that He resided in them. They needed to remember this and understand the serious nature and implications of the sin of sexual immorality. And lastly they needed to remember that their salvation and redemption, while it was free to them, came at a great cost to God. So Paul uses slave market language in verse 20 when he says, “you were bought with a price.” Like a slave was purchased with money to do the will of the owner, we were bought by God to do His will, which is to glorify Him and to continue to carry out the mission.

So what Jesus accomplished in His death, burial, and resurrection has very real implications for us. Jesus redeemed more than just our souls – Jesus’ victory over sin and death means that He is making all things new – including our bodies. Our bodies are more than present tools that are broken and passing away. Our bodies are presently broken, but God is making them new and has assigned to them a significant and eternal purpose – to continue to carry out the mission of Christ. So we have to remember that the desires and cravings of the flesh for sexually immoral contact aren’t designed for the body. They come as a result of the fall and the sin that plagues our world. Our bodies (like our souls), as a result of our belief in Christ, have been redeemed and given an eternal purpose. So we can’t defy our unity to Christ and unite ourselves with others through sexual intercourse and immorality outside of the context of marriage. We have to be continuously fleeing from the temptations to engage in sexual immorality - much like the third boy who ran from the bees.  It isn't enough to just run until we feel like we are out of harms way or a safe distance from the temptation.  When it comes to sexual immorality we have to keep running from it until we arrive safe at our home in heaven. That home will be the only safe place of eternal deliverance, so we have to resolve to keep fleeing that immorality until we arrive at the safety of our eternal home.  Finally, we have to be remembering that our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit and given the new purpose of accomplishing the plan and will of the Father. We can’t take lightly what we do with our bodies. We have to guard our purity well! We can't mis this real life implication of Jesus' redemptive work and gift of the Holy Spirit.