Audio Transcript
You may recall in January we returned to the sensitive topic of sexuality and whether sex is as dangerous as Christians make it. Or is it just harmless fun? It was a question from a college student, and the kind of question we would expect from someone living in a hyper-sexualized culture like the one we live in. That was back in APJ 2223. You mentioned there, Pastor John, only briefly and in passing, 1 Corinthians 6:18–20. That text is in our Navigators Bible Reading Plan reading this week, so it’s a good time to return there and to dwell on the text a little more. Today on Ask Pastor John: Sex is about worship.
A listener of the podcast, Sarah in Portland, Oregon, writes in to ask this question: “Pastor John, hello to you and thank you for Ask Pastor John! As I read in 1 Corinthians 6:18–20, Paul warns believers to flee from sexual immorality, emphasizing that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit and should be honored as such. Temple strikes me. How and why do sex and worship come together in Paul’s mind in this text?”
I think Sarah has put her finger on something really significant in this text by using the word worship, even though the word worship does not occur in this text. What the text says in 1 Corinthians 6:18–20 is this: “Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin” — that’s the ESV translation, that word other; I’ll come back to that — “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.”
Sarah is inferring that the activity of sex is worship because Paul brings this bodily action of sexual immorality into relationship with God — the Spirit of God, the glory of God, the temple of God. When Sarah sees that connection, she’s inferring, “Well, that has to do with worship. I mean, temple of God, right? That has to do with worship.”
And indeed that’s true, because worship is the act of glorifying God, praising God, honoring God, loving God, treasuring God, delighting in God. That’s what worship is, and that’s where the text ends — namely, “glorify God [worship God] in your body,” or with your body. And Sarah is asking, “How and why do sex and worship come together in Paul’s mind?”
Bodily Significance
Now, one way to answer that question is to focus for a moment on verse 18, which is extremely difficult to interpret. He says, “Flee from sexual immorality.” Now, that part’s clear. That’s not difficult to interpret. Stop sleeping around; flee sexual immorality. Then he says, “Every sin,” and the word other is not there in the original. It doesn’t say every other sin. It just says, “Every sin a person commits is outside the body” (1 Corinthians 6:18). Now, if those are Paul’s words, what in the world does he mean? Frankly, I have never read any satisfactory interpretation of this text that construes those words to be Paul’s own words.
Here’s what I’m going to suggest: I think those words, in the middle of verse 18, are a slogan used by the false teachers in Corinth to say that the body is insignificant when it comes to morality and sin.
The paraphrase would go something like this: “Flee sexual immorality” — those are Paul’s words — “and yes, I know that some of you at Corinth are saying, ‘Sin is not a matter that has anything to do with the physical or the body. It’s just spiritual and moral, and the body is of no moral consequence.’ I’m aware of that teaching in your church. I’ve already referred to it up in verse 13. And so, I’m now telling you . . .” And then he goes on and gives his counsel about how important the body is. He says, “But the sexually immoral person does in fact sin against his own body. The body really does matter morally.” And then he goes on to prove this by introducing the issue of worship.
The Body for God
Let me say a word about why I interpret the middle of verse 18 as a quote from the bad guys — the false teachers at Corinth — instead of Paul’s own words. Just five verses earlier, if you have the ESV, you can see the quote marks where the translators have in fact cited slogans from the false teachers. There aren’t any quote marks in Greek, by the way. These are editorial translation decisions to regard something as having quote marks around it. We don’t know from the original Greek text where their quote marks were, if there were any in Paul’s mind.
“Paul is introducing a dimension of morality that says something can be immoral whether it hurts anybody or not.”
Here’s the example. There are quote marks around this: “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food” (1 Corinthians 6:13). So, quotes are around that. I agree. I think that’s a slogan of the false teachers in Corinth, and they are saying something very similar to “Every sin a person commits is outside the body” (1 Corinthians 6:18). In other words, “Bodies just don’t matter when it comes to moral and immoral. The stomach is about food. It’s not about sin, Paul. Good grief. Lighten up.”
To which Paul responds in exactly the same way he does in verse 18. He says in the middle of verse 13, “The body is . . . for the Lord.” That’s the same point he’s making in verse 20 when he says, “Glorify God in your body”: “The body is for the Lord. It really, really matters. And you false teachers are wrong in thinking that every sin is outside the body and has nothing to do with the body.”
Life as Worship
So, the reason Paul introduces the reality of worship into the context of sexual immorality — this is getting to the answer of her question — is because there were people in Corinth (and there are people today) who use the body in fornication and say, “It’s just recreation, for goodness’ sake. It’s certainly not designed for adoration like worship. Fornication is recreation, not adoration, Piper and Paul and Bible teachers! Having sex at the end of a date is no more moral or immoral than eating dinner or going for a jog. The use of the body to get tangled up in bed is simply not a moral issue. Killing people is a moral issue. Stealing is a moral issue. Lying is a moral issue. What we do with our bodies, whether eating or jogging or having sex, is simply of no moral significance.”
And in response to that — then and now — Paul brings the use of the body in eating and drinking and sex and every other way into relationship with the Spirit of God, the temple of God, the glory of God, and he makes all of life an issue of worship. “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). Do everything as an act of worship.
Sacred Temple
What we need to realize is that the Bible introduces an aspect of morality that modern secular people do not recognize — namely, the aspect of the sacred or the holy. Modern secular people focus on morality that simply says, “If it doesn’t hurt anybody, it isn’t wrong.” So, it can’t be wrong for two consenting adults to have sex outside marriage.
Now, of course, it would be possible to argue against extramarital sex in the very terms of the world itself by saying, “Oh, yes it does. It does harm people. For example, 87 percent of all abortions in America are performed on unmarried women. Therefore, sex outside marriage is responsible for the murder of 870,000 babies a year.” So, there’s plenty of hurt going around here, connected with extramarital sex, in spite of all the “safe sex” that you can talk about — plenty. But that’s not the way Paul is arguing here.
Paul, along with the rest of the Bible, is introducing a dimension of morality that says something can be immoral whether it hurts anybody or not. This is the dimension suggested by the fact that our body is a temple. It’s a temple of the Holy Spirit. The temple was a sacred place of worship. The issue in the temple wasn’t whether you’re killing people or not; it’s whether you’re pure. It’s whether you’re holy. It’s whether you’re reverent.
So, the aspect of morality that Paul introduces is not whether your behavior hurts someone but whether it’s impure, sacrilegious, defiled, profane, unholy, irreverent. Christians walk to the beat of a different drummer than the world. We don’t just measure our behavior by worldly standards of right and wrong. We seek in everything we do to glorify God with our bodies, and we measure that worship by what God declares to be pure.
