Flee Sexual Immorality
FLEE SEXUAL IMMORALITY
1 CORINTHIANS 6:12-20
Paul’s writes about the right use of “the body”.
The prevailing ethos in the city of Corinth, infamous for its moral laxity and inimical to the Christian standards of purity and self-control, had infiltrated into church life and given rise to an ugly situation which required the reiteration of the basic Christian moral prescription: “flee from sexual immorality” (6:18).
Not only had some church members begun to indulge in immoral practices by misusing their bodies (leading to gluttony and sex outside marriage), they were claiming justification for their actions in the name of Christian liberty (6:12: the first part of each sentence is in quotation marks, cited from the Corinthians’ letter to Paul). The apostle responds with a crystal-clear statement of Christian ethics and with some principles which are as relevant today as when he first expressed them.
The first point to be explained is the meaning in Paul’s letters of “body.” To us it is used of our physical frame, but Paul’s usage is much more complex. The body stands for the real self, the whole person. This specific sense which Paul gives explains 6:18: union with a prostitute is an offense against the whole person—indeed against two people, the man and the woman (6:15), and so is a betrayal of Christian profession as well as a degradation of womanhood.
These verses give us Paul’s authoritative teaching on the body:
Meditation Romans 12:1-2.