1 Corinthians 6:14-15

Scripture: 1 Cor. 6:14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power.

1 Cor. 6:15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never!

Teaching: Last week we covered Paul’s point to the Corinthians that their bodies – and what they did with them – was not insignificant, as Greek culture believed. Rather, the body God gives us in this life is meant to glorify and worship Him. Paul furthers this point in verses 14-15. Paul reminds the Corinthians in verse 14 that God did not just raise Christ as a disembodied spirit – as the Gospels testify, Christ had a body that could be touched and he even ate food. In the same way, God will raise up believers by the same power and in a bodily form (a point he will come back to in 1 Corinthians 15 in more detail). His point here, though, is that believers should not discount what we do in this body now anymore than Jesus did in his own earthly incarnation. Did Christ live a life of disregard for his earthly body, solely looking forward to the new? No, he lived a sinless life in complete obedience to the Father; this should be our endeavor, too.

In verse 15, Paul applies this point to a specific issue within the Corinthian church and Greek culture: prostitutes. In this time, engaging with prostitutes was common practice in pagan religion ceremonies, and before coming to faith, the Corinthians by and large would have been practicing the same. Paul makes an interesting argument though. He does not say that they lose salvation nor are unredeemable if they commit such sin; rather, he calls them to a higher standard of worship to Christ. Because they know Jesus as Lord, have been saved by grace through faith, of what use then is a pagan religious ceremony? Obviously, none. Even more, by their faith they are now the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, making them the body of Christ. We’ll cover more on this next week, but for now, see this: because they are the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, and the body of Christ, where they go, Christ goes with them. Is it worshipful of the Lord to engage in the same sinful practices of one’s former life, now being bought, redeemed, loved, and indwelled by the Lord?

Takeaway: One of the great struggles for many Christians is the leaving behind of old ways when one comes to Christ. We ask ourselves, “It was OK then, but not now?” The problem with that thought is that we are using the wrong standard to judge a behavior’s acceptability. Some things, such as prostitution, by our culture today, are obviously odious and wrong. But for these Corinthians, it was such a normal practice in their world that it could be compared to going to cheer on your favorite team at their game. Culture changes and shifts over time, and we cannot let what the world says about right and wrong to be our final standard as well. When we come to Christ, we will be changed. No one stays the same because no one is perfect. By following Christ in faith, we become more like Christ and less like ourselves. Thus, we all will face crossroads where something we have been doing in our former life will come in conflict with who we are becoming in Christ. When those days come, our thought shouldn’t be “It was OK then, can’t it be OK now?” but rather, as we discussed last week, “how can I glorify the Lord with everything that He has given me?” As Paul says in verse 12, all things are permissible, but not all things are profitable. God, by His grace, has called us out of the world and given us new life. It would be a shame to view this new life through the lens of the old or justify old things simply because they seemed acceptable before.