What Would Jesus Say to Our Sex-crazed Culture?

Part Three—Run Away From Your Raging Hormones

1 Corinthians 6:18-20

^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.”^{a 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.

I have to admit that last week’s message was a painful one. Preaching a message about the evils of pornography is simply not a pleasant task—a necessary task but not a pleasant one. Last week was mostly a diagnosis of the problem. It was like we picked up the evil of pornography in our hands, and turned it over and examined it closely in all its dirty, agonizing excess. But this morning things will be a little different. In this message we will move toward the primary solution to the problem, but you might be surprised at what we find.

There are numerous good reasons to avoid sexual immorality. You will harm and possibly destroy your marriage. You could get a sexually transmitted disease. You could get pregnant. You will lose your reputation and ministry. You will harm your children. You will be in bondage. You will waste money. You could get arrested. One and on it goes. I could spend the next ten minutes listing all the certain and possible consequences from engaging in any or all kinds of sexual immorality. But here is the interesting thing—Paul does not list any of these things. His reasons for avoiding sexual immorality are all “Christian” reasons. All of his reasons are theological reasons and none of them would be convincing to an unbeliever. But Paul isn’t writing to unbelievers, is he? He is directing his words at the believer struggling with sexual immorality and specifically he is addressing the believer who engages in sexual immorality and then tries to justify it with spiritual reasons. Paul is not concerned about the sexual immorality outside the church, he is concerned about the sexual immorality inside the church. Paul is talking to believers. Paul is talking to us.

In v. 13 we find another Corinthian slogan: “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food”. Your Bible should have quotation marks around that section. Do you know where these quotation marks came from? They were not in the original because they were put there by those who interpreted your English Bible. Even the slogan in v. 12 is an English interpretation: “Everything is permissible for me.” There are no quotes around this phrase in the Greek text, but all of the commentators agree that this was definitely a Corinthian slogan and they show this by using quotation marks. All the Bible scholars are in agreement that v. 13 is also a Corinthian slogan, however, they disagree as to exactly which part constitutes the original slogan. I am of the opinion that the quote should also include the next phrase. We should “x” out the first quotation mark and put it at the end of the sentence, like this: “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food-but God will destroy them both.” This matches well with the Corinthians idea that the body is not a part of their spiritual lives. This is why Paul spent so much time in chapter fifteen teaching about our future bodily resurrection. Christianity is not like Hinduism or other New Age religions that believe the ultimate religious experience will result in a freedom from the body. They believe our bodies are sinful and hold us back from becoming divine, but the Bible teaches that our bodies are just as important as our souls and we will live for eternity with resurrected bodies.

The Corinthians believed that the food was designed for the stomach and the stomach was designed for food, but that didn’t even matter because God will destroy both of them one day. In the same way, they also believed that the body is meant for sex and sex is meant for the body, but God will destroy them both, so what difference does it make what I do with my body? Ultimately what they were saying was that sexual immorality or porneia was in the same category as food. (Side note: when I use the term “sexual immorality,” remember that this includes all acts of immorality but also out thought life as well. What did Jesus say about lust? “Anyone that looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Lust is mental adultery. Lust is sexual immorality of the heart and needs to be included in the meaning of the phrase “sexual immorality”.) The Corinthians did have debates about food sacrificed to idols and Paul addressed this in later chapters, but he made it absolutely clear that porneia and food were not in the same category. Furthermore he said, “The body is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.”

We could summarize Paul’s teaching this way: “The body is meant for the Lord and the Lord is meant for the body”? Now what does this mean? It’s not really evident at first, but this is the key to understanding how to defeat sexual temptation and immorality so we need to make sure we get this. I told you that Paul’s answer to the problem of sexual immorality is specifically designed for the Christian, and what he is about to tell us would not make any difference if you explained it to a non-Christian. A non-Christian would care less about this, but it should make all the difference in the world to us Christians. This is arguably the most important teaching in the entire New Testament on how to defeat sexual temptation and immorality. This is the premier passage, this is the elite teaching, this is powerful Godly wisdom, so we’d better make sure we get this one right. Are you with me so far?

Paul explains the meaning of this phrase with three rhetorical questions that all start with: “Do you not know?” Verse, 15, 16 and 18 all start this way. Verse 15 reads, 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! Can you see why this is only for the Christian? Paul is alluding to the wonderful and unique spiritual union between Jesus Christ and every believer. This spiritual union transcends our invisible souls and also includes our physical bodies. This union between Christ and us is so powerful that when we engage in sexual union with another person, we are uniting that person with Christ. We are bound to Christ and the other person is bound to us through the sexual union. Therefore, if that sexual union is with a prostitute, we are joined to the prostitute and we are joined to Christ, so it is like joining a prostitute with Christ himself! Would you ever knowingly do this? That is why Paul emphatically answered his own question—Never! Such a thought is utterly disgusting and perfectly profane.

Now please understand that the profane and unholy part of this is not the prostitute as a person. The person who engages in prostitution matters to God and his blood bought grace is available to the prostitute just like it was to you and me. We should never look at a prostitute as a person and say, “How disgusting! She is dirty, unholy and gross.” The prostitute as a person is caught in a horrible bondage of sin and oppression. Christianity Today had an excellent cover article called Red-Light Rescue: The business of saving girls from a life of prostitution. This story is about Christians in Thailand who are rescuing girls and women from prostitution by giving them useful job skills and introducing them to Christ. My point is that when Paul speaks so negatively about the appalling idea of uniting a prostitute with Christ, he has in mind the act of prostitution not the person. Just like any other sin, we can and must love the person while hating the sin. So with that as an understanding we can see that joining the members of a prostitute with Christ is an unholy alliance.

Paul says that sexual union creates a one-flesh union with the other person and he backs this up using the passage from genesis chapter two: “The two will become one flesh.” This is the one-flesh foundation that God intended to be reserved for marriage. Even though the sexual union creates a one-flesh union this does not mean that it also creates a marriage, otherwise every time two people had sex they would automatically be married. That is a ridiculous thought and obviously wrong. Sex outside of marriage is always fornication, but there is still a one-flesh union created without the benefit of a long-term committed union through marriage. So what happens when two people are united through sex and then they separate? It is like this piece of cloth I am holding. The sexual union is like sewing two pieces of cloth together. When they separate you have to tear them apart again, ripping them at the seams or right down the middle. If you have multiple sexual partners it is like a cloth that is repeatedly sewn and ripped, sewn and ripped. The end result is a threadbare, worn and torn mess of a cloth. This is what happens to us when we violate God’s protection for sex within marriage—we ourselves can become a threadbare, worn and torn on the inside. This doesn’t make the person worthless and it doesn’t mean that the individual cannot be fully healed through Christ, but it does show the level of pain that is an inevitable part of such a lifestyle.

The third “do you not know” comes at v. 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. This part flows naturally from what came before. Through the miracle of salvation, we have formed a powerful union with Christ and not only that, our bodies become temples of the Holy Spirit. This is a penetrating truth with an interesting twist. Every other time in the N.T. where Christians are called the “temple” of God, it always refers to the church as a whole, like in Eph. 2.20, In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.  And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. The temple is the entire church, but this time we as individual Christians are called the temple of God. We are the temple of the Holy Spirit in both the collective sense of the universal church but also in the individual sense. Where did God dwell in the original Temple? The shekinah glory dwelt within the holy of holies. Could you walk into the Holy of Holies? No you could not. You would be struck dead before you get your first glimpse of the ark of the covenant. We were forbidden mere entrance into the temple under the old covenant but under the new covenant we actually become the temple, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit! Now we can finally start to understand the phrase: ‘the body is meant for the Lord and the Lord is meant for the body.” Our bodies are united with Christ AND we become the sanctified temple for the Holy Spirit. Can you see how Paul smashed the Corinthians slogan? They said, “the body is meant for sex and God would destroy it in the end,” but Paul is destroying their false theology by claiming that not only is the body not meant for sexual immorality, it is the very abode of the Holy Spirit.

Now that we understand that, here comes the really disturbing part. What happens when we mix sexual immorality with the holy temple of God? When you mix these two you have one of the most profane abuses of God’s temple imaginable. To see just how unholy this union really is, we need to take a trip back to Numbers 25. This surrounds the story of Balaam and his talking donkey. Remember that story? The story starts with Israel approaching the Promised Land after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. On the final leg of their journey, Israel was attacked by two powerful armies but easily defeated them. Their next stop was Moab, so when the King of Moab heard about this mighty army approaching through the desert, Numbers 22 says that Balak king of Moab was “terrified… and filled with dread because of the Israelites.” Balak knew he would be no match for this new army. The sword of Moab would not be strong enough to conquer Israel so Balak resorted to sorcery. Balak summoned Balaam to come and call a curse down upon Israel. Balaam was basically a pagan witch who was given power to curse people and nations. His curses must have been quite effective because the king offered him an immense financial reward if he would curse the Israelites. As the story goes, the Lord did not allow Balaam to curse the Israelites but instead Balaam blessed them three times. The point is that Israel could not be destroyed by curses forces from without, but they were nearly destroyed by forces from within their own ranks. In Numbers 25 we learn that Israelite men were indulging in sexual immorality with the Moabite women. Notice that Israel was not vulnerable to the sword of Moab and they were not vulnerable to the sorcery of Moab, but they were vulnerable to their beautiful women.

The Lord was angry with Israel and sent a plague which was killing thousands of people. If that were not enough, a prominent Israeli man took a prominent Moabite woman into a tent outside the temple to have sex. In the midst of rampant sexual immorality throughout the camp, these two people engaged in sexual immorality beside God’s holy Tabernacle, the place where he dwelt. This was a hideous mixing of sexual immorality with the perfect holiness of God’s presence. This was a blasphemous act of pagan idolatry, irreverent impurity and vulgar disrespect. This was an obscene display, an unholy alliance of profaned pagan witchcraft and the perfect holiness of God that was consummated by raunchy sexual immorality. God’s anger had already broken out upon them before this happened, imagine what outpouring of wrath would follow. I believe this is the kind of scene the apostle Paul wants us to grasp from this chapter. If we use or bodies—which do not belong to us at all—they have been bought by Christ, paid for by his blood. But if we use our bodies, these temples of the Holy Spirit, these members of Christ and engage in any kind of sexual immorality, then have we not just committed the same unholy, sacrilegious act as what happened in front of the tabernacle? Indeed we have! Not only do we profane God’s temple through our sexual immorality, but we also profane the cross by which our bodies and souls were purchased by Christ. Truly, sexual immorality is an awful kind of sin that is why Paul assigns it into a class of its own. But the problem is that we don’t see this sin for what it really is. We don’t see it as an act of unholy blasphemy, therefore we don’t hate this sin like we really should.

But there was one man in Israel’s camp who hated this sin as he should have. The example for hating this sin is also given to us in Numbers 25. Remember, the Moabite woman and Israeli man were in a tent next to the tabernacle. Moses and the people were weeping at this hideous display of idolatry, but one man hated the sin so much that he took immediate action. Phinehas was a priest and the grandson of Aaron, and when he saw this, “he left the assembly, took a spear in his hand^ and followed the Israelite into the tent. He drove the spear through both of them—through the Israelite and into the woman’s body. Then the plague against the Israelites was stopped; but those who died in the plague numbered 24,000.” By any standards this is a gruesome act, and we are so far removed from the theocracy in the O.T. that we cannot conceive of doing such a thing as Phinehas did. The Lord agreed with his actions and blessed him as a result. Now if you think what Phinehas did was gruesome, then imagine how the Lord felt about the mixing of the holy and unholy through sexual immorality near the tabernacle. That was so gruesome that running a spear through two lovers was mild in comparison. Let me be absolutely clear so that no one can possibly misunderstand me: I am NOT advocating that we ever in any way shape or form repeat the actions of Phinehas. We are not living in a theocracy and we have no right whatsoever to even contemplate imitating Phinehas’ radical actions. However, I am saying that we must imitate Phinehas’ radical attitude. His attitude was that this porneia was an extremely blasphemous act that must be stopped. We must also share this radical hatred of porneia and cease its advance in our lives at any cost. When we struggle with porneia—which always begin with lustful thoughts in our minds—we must drive our proverbial spear into the ground and declare that it must stop. We must hate this blasphemous sin to such a degree that we do whatever it takes to stop it. For you Lord of the Rings fans, what Phinehas did reminds me somewhat of what Gandalf did when the Balrog—a fiery demon from the deep—was approaching to attack. He stood firmly on a narrow bridge, drove his staff into the ground and three times screamed, “You cannot pass! You cannot pass! You cannot pass!” Do we hate the sin of porneia enough to say to it, “You cannot pass!”? Do we love our holy Lord enough to take this radical action? If you understand the hideousness of this sin and the holiness of our Lord, this is the only reasonable action.

One more illustration—who wants to earn an easy ten bucks? (Choose volunteer…) I have a five dollar bill in one hand and a stopwatch in the other. All you need to do is to run out the back door of the auditorium and the ten dollars is yours, but you have to do it in five seconds or less. Are you ready? Go! (time volunteer…) You see, that is what Paul meant when he said to “flee sexual immorality.” You run from it with all your might. And in the Greek text it is clear that “flee” means to “keep fleeing”. This is not a one-time event. We need to keep fleeing—keep running away from porneia as fast as we can. First we must stop its advance and bondage in our lives and then flee from it with all our might. Don’t ever stop fleeing. Decide today to not mess around with porneia. If there are sinful actions in your life, declare this moment that it must stop. If you struggle with lustful thoughts—and if you are past puberty and still breathing we all do—then decide to hate that sin as God hates it and run from it with all your strength.

Rich Maurer

January 21, 2007