Do you remember Billie Burke? She was the famous actress who starred as Glinda the Good Witch of the North in The Wizard of Oz. On one occasion she went on a cruise across the Atlantic Ocean. While she was sitting at dinner one evening in the dining room of that cruise ship, Billie Burke noticed a gentleman at another table who looked like he was in pain.
Billie Burke got up from her table, approached the man and asked him sympathetically, “Are you comfortable?”
The man said, “No, I have a terrible head cold.”
Billie Burke responded and said, “I’ll tell you just what to do for it. Go back to your stateroom and drink lots of orange juice. Take two aspirin. Cover yourself with all the blankets you can find. Sweat the cold out. I know just what I’m talking about. I’m Billie Burke from Hollywood.”
The man smiled warmly and introduced himself in return. He said, “Thanks. I’m Dr. Mayo of the Mayo Clinic.”
I don’t want to make the same mistake as Billie Burke this morning. I feel very unqualified to talk about honoring God with our bodies. I have certainly failed to do that many times. Therefore, I say to you this morning, “I’m Billy Vaus from Tarrytown, New York, and I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I want to tell you about someone who does know what he is talking about. And that’s the Apostle Paul!”
Listen for God’s word to you from 1 Corinthians 6:12-20…
“I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but I will not be mastered by anything. 13 You say, “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy them both.” The body, however, 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.”[b] 17 But whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit.[c]
18 Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. 19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples 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 bodies.
Why should we honor God with our bodies? One reason Paul gives in this passage is because our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit.
When Paul was at Athens he preached to the Greek philosophers as they stood directly below one of the greatest temples ever built by human hands—the Parthenon. At that time Paul said, “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.” (Acts 17:24) It was obviously the belief of the Greeks that the gods could live in temples built by hands. But Paul says, “No.”
Then Paul turns around, in 1 Corinthians, and he says that God can live in a temple, not one built by human hands, but in the temple of our bodies. Perhaps Paul is referring here to the action that takes place when we are spiritually reborn. In Titus 3:4-5, Paul says, “But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.”
So, we are spiritually reborn when the Holy Spirit comes into our lives and the result of that is that we turn away from self and we turn toward Christ in faith. From the moment of spiritual rebirth, the Holy Spirit is living in our lives. And, he says, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” (Hebrews 13:5)
Now, Paul gives this spiritual indwelling as one reason why we should honor God with our bodies. If the Holy Spirit is living in our bodies, then we ought to treat our bodies with honor and respect as the house, or temple, of God himself.
The Greeks tended to go to two extremes in their attitude toward the body. Either they indulged the body, or they denied it. The Greeks viewed the body as a prison from which we escape at death. They longed for the immortality of the soul. Some of the Greeks figured, it doesn’t matter what we do with the body, so we might as well have sex with a prostitute or do whatever we want with our bodies. Other Greeks figured they needed to deny the body altogether and focus on soul pursuits. So, you see, two extremes.
Christianity, by contrast, has a very positive view of the body. Paul says our bodies are important because, if we have put our faith in Christ, the Holy Spirit is actually living in us. Therefore, what we do with our bodies matters. We should neither indulge nor deny.
J. I. Packer, in his book Keep in Step with the Spirit, says that the Holy Spirit is like a houseguest in the body of the believer in Jesus. If you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit notes, cares about, and is involved in everything that happens, not just in your soul, but in your body.
However, the Holy Spirit is not like any house guest that most of us would readily welcome. The Spirit is a house guest who will also act as change agent. When the Holy Spirit moves into the house of your soul and body, he sets about rearranging things.
How would you like it if you had a houseguest who started rearranging pictures on the walls of your home and moving furniture about? How about if a guest started throwing some of your stuff out with the trash? What if your guest decided they were going to stay forever?
Well, that is the kind of houseguest the Holy Spirit is. He comes in and rearranges things. He throws things out that aren’t healthy and brings in things that are. He rearranges pictures. He sets up permanent housekeeping.
Why does the Holy Spirit do this? Ultimately because your body belongs to him. That is another reason Paul gives for honoring God with your body—because your body belongs to Christ.
Paul says, “You are not your own; you were bought at a price.”
What price?
The price of Christ’s own blood.
1 Peter 1:18-19 says, “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.”
Leith Anderson tells the following story…
A shepherd notches the ear of a lamb born to his flock and has rightful ownership. That lamb deliberately walks away. The shepherd searches near and far to get that lamb back. A long time later, he finds not a baby lamb but a grown sheep for sale at an animal auction. The shepherd recognizes his mark on that sheep’s ear. He goes to the auctioneer and says, “I can see the mark. That sheep is mine.”
The auctioneer says, “Listen, you must bid and pay just like anybody else.”
The shepherd bids and pays an outrageous price, far above any reasonable market value in order to get his lamb. He now has a double right to own this sheep: from birth, from redemption.
God has a right to own us as creator and because he has paid the blood of his own Son—an outrageous price far above our market value—in order to redeem us.
Even if you are not a Christian, your body belongs to God because he created it. David writes about this in Psalm 139:13-16…
For you created my inmost being;
You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
When I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
Your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
Were written in your book
Before one of them came to be.
We like to think that we own certain things, even our bodies. But everything we have and are belongs to God.
All of this begs the question: how are we to honor God with our bodies? Paul tells us at least one way to do it in this passage. He says, flee sexual immorality.
The word πορνείᾳ, as we saw earlier in our study of 1 Corinthians, means prostitution. Paul, like the rabbis before him, could use the word to refer to other types of sexual immorality. He uses the word to describe what the man in 1 Corinthians 5 was doing with his stepmother. I doubt his stepmother was a prostitute, but Paul still uses the word πορνείᾳ to describe their relationship.
In 1 Corinthians 6 I think Paul’s concern is for the temple prostitution that is going on in Corinth. We talked about this last week. At one time there were a thousand temple prostitutes in Corinth. Paul is telling the Corinthian Christians to run from all that. Why? Because their bodies belong to God, and they should honor God with their bodies.
“But,” the Corinthians say, “Aren’t we free in Christ to do whatever we want? We don’t have to live by the law anymore. You said so yourself, Paul.”
Paul responds and says, “Yes, you are free in Christ, but not everything is beneficial.”
“But,” say the Corinthians, “we have the right to do anything”
“Maybe so,” Paul says, “But some of the things we do turn around and master us. And we don’t want to be mastered by anything other than Christ.”
Another saying the Corinthians had was: “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food.”
In other words, “The body was made for sex so we might as well have as much as we want wherever we can get it.”
Paul says, “No, one day God will bring food and your current body to an end.” “Besides,” Paul says, “Your bodies were not made for prostitution but for the Lord.”
Some of the Corinthians probably argued with Paul. “If God is going to destroy both food and body then it doesn’t matter what we do with either.”
Paul says, “No, it does matter what you do with your body because one day your body will be raised from the dead just as Jesus’ body was.”
Paul invites the Corinthians to think about what they are doing when they go to have sex with prostitutes. Their bodies, he says, are members of Christ. Shall we unite the members of Christ with prostitutes? “Never,” Paul says emphatically.
Then Paul reminds the Corinthians of one of the most fundamental teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures: “The two will become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24)
Paul obviously thinks that sexual intercourse involves more than bodies. It involves a total combination of body, soul, and spirit. It is not something to be taken lightly as apparently the Corinthians are doing.
Then Paul gives the Corinthians one more reason to flee prostitution. He says that the person who commits prostitution sins against his own body. It makes one wonder if Paul was thinking here of certain sexually transmitted diseases. We don’t know. But it is clear that Paul thought of prostitution as not only a sin against the soul but also against the body.
The problem of temple prostitution going on right next to the church can seem like a very distant issue to us today. It is hard for us to imagine dealing with such a thing.
But when I worked for the National Youth Crisis Hotline back in the 1980s, I regularly talked to runaway teens who were surviving on the streets of America by offering their bodies for prostitution.
David Gushee has written,
Globally, trafficking in persons is one of the fastest-growing criminal activities, second behind drug trafficking. Here are some statistics about sexual trafficking:
- The United Nations estimates that 2.5 million people around the globe are in forced labor (including sexual exploitation).
- An estimated 1.2 million children are trafficked each year.
- 161 countries are affected by human trafficking by either being the source, a transit point, or the final destination.
- In 2006 there were only 3,106 convictions for sexual trafficking, which means that one person is convicted for every 800 persons who have been trafficked.
- The Salvation Army claims that sex trafficking annually generates an estimated $7 billion worldwide.
- Online prostitution advertising generates approximately $33.6 million in annual revenue.
- An estimated 293,000 American youths currently are at risk of becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation. The majority of these victims are runaway or thrown-away youths who live on the streets and become victims of prostitution.
- Human rights investigations by Shared Hope International, discovered minors were sold an average of 10-15 times a day, 6 days a week, totaling between 9,360 and 14,040 sex acts a year.
- 12-14—the average age of entry into prostitution.
- Finally, one stat closer to home: Every month 7,200 men pay for sex with adolescent girls—in the state of Georgia alone.[1]
While most of us may never have to deal with the issue of prostitution directly I think this passage of Scripture raises some questions for us to think about. First, if we have sex outside the covenant of marriage, are we ready to be united to that person we have sex with for life? I ask this question because what Paul and the Hebrew Scriptures say both suggest that sexual intercourse sets up a sort of transcendental connection that is only broken by death. We become one flesh with whomever we choose to have sex with.
Secondly, a practical question I always pose to young people is this: if you have sex outside the covenant of marriage, will you be ready to raise the child who may result from that sexual encounter?
Most young people today respond to that question by saying, “Oh, but pastor, we are practicing safe sex.” To which I say, “Good, but safe sex is not fool proof. And you may end up getting pregnant anyway. Are you ready to deal with the consequences?”
A third question that some of us married people may need to consider sometime is this one: Are we ready to pay the price of losing our spouse, or our children, of ruining their lives and ours if we commit adultery?
Someone recently told me about the devastating effect of her father committing adultery and how he later came to regret it. I said to her, “I wish someone could have gotten to him before he committed adultery and helped him to see that not only would it hurt his wife and family, but it would hurt him.”
God doesn’t give us rules for living like the ten commandments because he is a spoil sport. I believe God gives us rules for living because he has our best interests in mind. He created life to work a certain way and when we follow God’s guidelines for living, we discover what it means to experience a life of human flourishing.
The bad news is that all of us have broken God’s guidelines for human flourishing at one time or another. We have all failed to honor God with our bodies 100% of the time.
The good news is that God can forgive our failures. He can forgive our sin. That is why he became a human being and went to the cross. He did it to buy us back from slavery to sin. He wants to redeem us from the mastery of our sexual impulses. He wants to heal us and free us to live our best lives now.
[1] David P. Gushee, A New Evangelical Manifesto (Chalice Press, 2012), pp. 68-74; “Human Trafficking Statistics,” Polaris Project
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