I want to begin with a simple question — one to which, it seems, anyone could answer right away: whose is your body? Most of us would say without thinking: “mine, of course mine, whose else?” This is the most intuitive thought of the modern person: “my body, my business,” “I’ve lived in it my whole life — so it’s mine,” “I’m the one who runs it, I’m the one who decides what to do with it.”
But let’s pause. Did you obtain it yourself? Did you choose how tall you’d be, what your eyes and hair would look like? Did you choose whether you’d have problems with your eyesight, your back, your heart; what diseases you would inherit from your parents? No — it came to you without your consent. Some people are happy with their body, others not so much, but we live with the one we have.
Fine, you didn’t choose it — but at least you control it now. Actually, that isn’t quite true either. The heart beats on its own, the stomach digests on its own, you don’t control sleep — you don’t choose the moment you fall asleep, you simply lose consciousness. Your body ages against your will. Most of what happens inside you every second happens without you.
And the most unpleasant part: the “owner” of this body cannot decide when to leave it. You don’t choose the day and hour of your death, and you don’t determine how exactly it will happen. The body will leave you without consultation and without warning, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
To sum up: you didn’t choose your body, you don’t fully control it, you don’t choose when to give it up. If so — in what sense is it “yours”? In modern usage, “mine” means: I chose it, I own it, I can dispose of it. And you can do none of these things with your body.
It turns out to be an amusing paradox. We instinctively say: “my body, my business.” This slogan is printed on T-shirts, repeated on social media, drilled into people in schools. No one has the right to tell you what to do with your body — not your parents, not society, not God. But in reality, we constantly hand our bodies over to someone else. When the state announces a draft, we go and serve. Remember the pandemic? Masks, vaccination passports, queues — the citizen’s body turned out to be not very much his own. When fashion tells us what the body should look like, we remake ourselves: we starve, sweat in gyms, go to cosmetologists. Twenty years ago the ideal was one thing, today another, and we chase it because “that’s how it’s done now.” When the body falls ill, we hand it over to doctors entirely: “do what you must,” sign a consent form we don’t even understand, lie down under anesthesia and surrender. And in the end old age comes, and the body stops obeying us; then death comes — and the body leaves without us.
We say: “the body is mine,” and yet we live as though it were always belonging to someone else — now to the state, now to fashion, now to doctors, now to time. We just pretend to be the owners. Paul gives a completely different answer — one that overturns everything we just listed. He doesn’t say “yours,” not “the state’s,” not “fashion’s or the doctors’.”
Context
A bit of context first. We have been working through Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians for several weeks now, and we have seen various problems in this church: divisions around favorite teachers in the first four chapters, church discipline and a sin that no one was addressing in the fifth chapter, lawsuits among brothers in pagan courts at the start of the sixth. And now Paul approaches yet another subject — perhaps the most sensitive one for Corinth — the subject of sexual immorality, of relationships between man and woman, of what the Christian does with his body.
What Paul wrote about is not some reality detached from us by 2,000 years. Modern Western civilization actually has a great deal in common with Corinth. Corinth was a port city at the crossroads of two seas. Through it passed merchants, sailors, soldiers, and slaves from every corner of the empire — a wealthy, noisy, diverse city; today we’d call it cosmopolitan. And the city had a particular reputation — so particular that the Greek language coined a verb, “to corinthianize,” meaning to live in debauchery. The Roman poet Horace wrote in one of his epistles: “not everyone is given to reach Corinth,” and the line quickly became a proverb. To enjoy oneself there was expensive — a kind of Las Vegas of the first century. Corinth was a byword for vicious pleasure.
Sound familiar? Honestly, the modern Western world hasn’t moved very far from Corinth. The same culture of pleasure, the same economy of desire. The slogans we hear today are paraphrases of the Corinthian ones: “take everything from life,” “my body, my choice,” “It’s my life,” YOLO. The Corinthians were saying exactly the same things, only in Greek. And this background matters: when Paul writes “flee from sexual immorality,” he is not writing into a theoretical vacuum — he is writing to a city where immorality was part of the urban culture, part of religion, part of the economy.
This pagan thinking had penetrated the Christian community as well. Some Corinthian Christians reasoned like this: “we grew up in this culture, we repented and were baptized, but the body is earthly, the body will rot anyway, what difference does it make what I do with my body if in the end it returns to dust? On top of that, I am free in Christ, and works don’t affect salvation — therefore all things are lawful for me.” This is where the slogan that opens our text comes from. “All things are lawful for me” — Paul didn’t invent it; it was their own slogan. In other words: YOLO, take everything from life.
And right before our text, in verses 9–11, Paul lists behavior that is unacceptable for Christians — the sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, men who practice homosexuality, thieves — and writes:
And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified. (1 Cor. 6:11)
He is reminding them: you were there; you were pulled out of it — and now what? “All things are lawful”? Are we going back? No, we are not going back. Paul takes their slogan apart verse by verse, and we will walk with him through the whole passage. Our discussion fits into three points:
- freedom (verse 12): what does Paul mean by Christian freedom?
- sanctity (verses 13–15): why is the body not just a body, but something holy?
- union (verses 16–18): what does “one flesh” mean, and why must we “flee from sexual immorality”?
I. Freedom
“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything. (1 Cor. 6:12)
Most commentators agree that “all things are lawful for me” was a slogan in Corinth, a catchphrase like YOLO. It most likely emerged from a misunderstanding of Paul’s own teaching on freedom. Paul did indeed teach freedom in Christ: the Christian is not justified by keeping rules; the Christian is justified by faith; and Christ frees the one who believes in him from the burden of the law and the dominion of sin.
Listen to how he writes to the Romans:
For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. (Rom. 3:28)
In other words, you don’t need to keep the law to be justified — because no one in the universe has managed it except Jesus Christ. Or this:
For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. (Rom. 8:2)
What could the law do? Only condemn to death. And in that lay our captivity: we waited like prisoners on death row for the just sentence to be carried out — but Christ released us, because he took our place as the criminal. And then the strongest line:
For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. (Rom. 10:4)
The law has come to an end, because Christ has come, and the believer no longer stands before God with a list of sins against the law. The Christian stands in Christ, justified by the righteousness of Jesus.
For a Jew who had lived his whole life under the law, this was the news of true liberation. And for a pagan, accustomed to appeasing the gods with sacrifices, this was the news of liberation as well. It was precisely this message that overturned the religious world of the first century. But the Corinthians heard only “freedom without obligations.” They heard only freedom as the opposite of law: the law is gone? — wonderful, that means “all things are lawful.” Paul foresaw this very reading, and in the same letter to the Romans he poses the question that would arise, and answers it himself:
What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! (Rom. 6:15)
Freedom in Christ is not the freedom to do whatever you want. It is freedom from sin, not freedom for sin.
The Corinthians took one line out of the rich apostolic teaching, ripped it out of context, and turned it into a slogan. They used this slogan to justify sexual immorality, gluttony, and drunkenness. Paul quotes their own words — and immediately begins to correct them. He doesn’t argue with the first half; he doesn’t say, “no, not all things are lawful.” He responds differently: fine, suppose all things are lawful — but what does that actually mean, and what does freedom mean?
The Corinthians understood freedom the way children often understand it: “down with restrictions and limits!” I recognize this understanding because I had the same one as a child. When I was little, around five or six, I used to dream: “when I grow up, no one will tell me what to eat; I’ll eat chips and candy whenever I want and wash it all down with Coca-Cola; I’ll go to bed when I want; I’ll buy whatever toys I want.” If you have children, you know what I’m talking about.
But with age comes wisdom, and our understanding of freedom matures along with us. Few adults eat candy the way they dreamed of as children. Eat too many sweets, and you can develop diabetes; eat too much in general, and you can become obese. A life run on the principle “I eat what I want, no one tells me what to do” leads sooner or later to a hospital — and sometimes kills before its time. I no longer buy every toy I want either. Yes, I now have money I can spend, but the money is not unlimited, and there are other priorities: feeding my family is more important; paying for the children’s school is more important; clothing everyone and putting a roof over their heads — all of that is more important. If I were to spend on whatever toys I wanted instead of all that, this “naive freedom” would harm my family. As a child I thought: a grown-up is someone to whom everything is permitted. And I grew up, and indeed more became permitted to me. But I don’t choose everything that is permitted. Not everything that is allowed turned out to be good and useful. This is not loss of freedom — this is its maturity.
Paul gives us two tests to distinguish adult freedom from childish freedom. The first test is right here in verse 12: “I will not be dominated by anything.” That is, what feels like freedom today can become your master tomorrow. And then you are no longer free — you are a slave. Which means it was never really freedom in the first place. Look around: our world is the most addicted in history. Addiction to nicotine, to alcohol, to drugs, to pornography, to gambling, to endless scrolling on the phone, to impulsive shopping, to the passion to live big and seem more than what you are. In every case the person started with the words: “I’m free,” “I have the right,” “I can stop whenever I want.” And in every case it turned out he no longer can. That is not freedom. That is a new slavery.
The second test Paul gives in the same verse 12 and develops more fully in chapter 10: “not all things are helpful.” Paul is not asking the question, “do I have the right to do this or that?” — he is asking a different question: will this benefit me, will it benefit those near me, will it build me and others up? This is no longer the childish question “may I or may I not.” This is the adult question “is it useful or not.” Wisdom often comes with age. But sometimes age comes alone, and we remain to the end of our days with a child’s understanding of freedom as license.
Consider even God himself. God is almighty, sovereign, doing as he wills; he is the most free person in the universe. And yet God cannot lie, cannot sin, cannot break his promises, cannot deny himself. This does not mean he is unfree — he is absolutely free. But his freedom has a shape, and that shape is his own holy nature. This is what the Corinthians ought to have known, and what we, too, ought to remember.
II. Sanctity
Let’s move to the practical part. The next passage is probably the most explicit in the entire letter:
“Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. (1 Cor. 6:13)
Immediately a question arises — what does food have to do with this? The context before and after is intimate relationships. Paul has just been talking about unacceptable sins of immorality; further on he will talk about how Corinthian brothers were going to prostitutes; in chapter 7 he will speak about the duties of husband and wife to each other. It is all about intimate relationships — and suddenly there’s a line about the stomach.
In fact, it is not Paul who suddenly started talking about food — it is the Corinthians. “Food is meant for the stomach” is another one of their slogans. And this slogan was not really about food — it was about this. Their logic was simple: food, for a Corinthian, was just biology. Hungry — go and eat. “The stomach is for food and food for the stomach” — no moral dilemma. Open the fridge, eat — and no one is lecturing you about what you had for dinner. But this same logic worked for them not only with food. They carried the logic of the stomach over into sexual relationships as well: “the body is for intimacy, and intimacy is for the body”; “the sex drive is a natural need, like hunger”; “you don’t restrict yourself when you’re hungry — you go and eat; well, it’s the same with intimate life.”
We live in a similar environment — the world around us thinks the same way. Almost everyone knows that the sexual revolution began in San Francisco in the 1960s. But few people know that in the USSR in the 1920s the very same trend was underway. Alexandra Kollontai and her followers taught the new “generation of socialist builders” that “the sexual need is like thirst,” “satisfying it is like drinking a glass of water,” “no feelings, no vows, no obligations — just physiology.” They called it the “glass of water theory”: if you’re thirsty, drink. And you can trace this same thinking through every generation from the Corinthians to the present. The only difference is the beverage: the Corinthians said, “food for the stomach, the stomach for food”; the Soviet youth said, “the sexual drive is like a glass of water.” But the substance is the same: to reduce intimacy to appetite, to a biological need, so that satisfying it requires no responsibility, no obligation, no covenant, no love, no marriage, no form.
But here it’s worth pausing: what if the appetite itself is no longer normal? What if we, calling intimacy “just an appetite,” fail to see that our appetite has long since stopped being healthy? Tim Keller offers a striking illustration. Imagine you’ve flown to another planet, and as you get to know the local culture, you notice that young men, when they enter university and move away from their parents, hang large posters of juicy hamburgers in their rooms. They visit each other and admire the beauty of these burgers. The food is photographed in macro, glistening, looking very appetizing. And when you turn on the television, walk through the city, or look at your phone, it is the same everywhere: billboards, Instagram, TV — all about food, on every side, in every form, wrapped and unwrapped. What would you say about such a culture? Either these people are starving to death, or their appetite is utterly perverted, or both.
This is, of course, a parable about our own culture. On our streets, in our films, in our music, in our advertising — it is the same thing, only it isn’t food. And our people are either starving for something essential, or their desire has been thoroughly broken, or both. “Food for the stomach, the stomach for food” sounds reasonable enough. But if the stomach is broken and the appetite is broken, then the very argument that “this is just a need” falls apart.
At this point Paul cuts off their logic abruptly:
The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. (1 Cor. 6:13)
This single phrase exposes the truth: the Corinthians were never really talking about food. Note the grammar: there is a strong contrast here — the Greek has the conjunction “δὲ,” “but,” translated as “but” or “however” — the body, however, is not for sexual immorality. To paraphrase: you say the body is for intimacy and intimacy for the body? — but the body is not for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.
It’s also worth looking at the second half of that phrase: “the Lord for the body.” This means God is not indifferent to the body. God is not unconcerned with what you do with your body. God is not foreign to matter — he himself created the body. He himself took on a body in Jesus Christ. And God raised Jesus’s body from the dead. We sometimes have a dismissive attitude toward the body: “it’ll rot or burn anyway, God will give us a new one.” But verse 14 puts a definitive end to that attitude:
And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. (1 Cor. 6:14)
Stop and think. It does not say “raise us” in some vague sense; it does not say “we will be raised as bodiless angels.” No — he will raise us the same way as he raised Christ: in these very bodies that belong to us now. The same ones we are wearing now. The ones that get sick, age, and grow tired; the ones the Corinthians considered “temporary” — those very bodies will be raised.
And the proof has already been given. Christ was raised in his body — not as a ghost, not as an idea, not as a “spirit left over after death.” He ate fish with his disciples; Thomas put his hand into his wound. It was the very body that had been crucified — glorified, transfigured, but the very same one. Our bodies will be raised the same way — yours, not someone else’s; transfigured, glorified, without disease, without aging, without sin — but yours. The very body you wear now will stand before God in eternity — renewed.
And the next line goes deeper still:
Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? (1 Cor. 6:15)
The Christian’s body is not simply his own — it is part of the body of Christ himself. And immediately follows the question that should have left the Corinthians frozen:
Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never!
Imagine the picture that comes into a Corinthian’s mind when he hears this question. There is the Corinthian Christian — baptized, confessing Christ, a member of the church community. He goes, in his customary way, to the brothel. To him and to most of his fellow citizens, this is as ordinary as stopping into a tavern for a meal and a glass of water. But he is also a member of the body of Christ, joined to Christ more closely than the hand is joined to the body. And here he takes that body — Christ’s body — and joins it to a prostitute. A horrifying picture: Christ — in a brothel.
And we hear Paul’s cry. Two words that carry the full force of his shock: “Never!” This is not just “no”; it is a cry of “by no means!” It is not an objection — it is a cry of horror. Paul is shouting at them: “brothers, stop, think about what you’re doing!”
III. Union
Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” (1 Cor. 6:16)
Paul cries “never!” and then explains the reason for so violent a reaction. He says, “don’t you know that you become one body with the prostitute?” — and then quotes a line we all know from the book of Genesis. So we need to understand what Paul, and Moses before him, mean by “body” or “one body.” For Paul the body is not just a shell, not just an instrument, not just biology. Otherwise his sentence would be a meaningless tautology: “know that when two bodies physically join, they physically join” — there’s no point in saying that twice. “The two will become one flesh” is not just about physical joining. Paul is talking about something larger.
We sense this ourselves on some intuitive level. The body is not merely a container, nor a shell for the soul, nor a temporary vessel. The body is part of who you are. God created us as spirit, soul, and body, and we communicate with others like us not by telepathy but through our bodies. This is clear from a few simple observations.
When we live far from those we love, a phone call alone is not enough. Many of us know this from experience: you can talk with loved ones for hours every day and still miss them. Thank God for the achievements of telecommunications — fifty years ago we didn’t have any of this. But it turns out a phone conversation is not the same thing as physical presence. We need the living person nearby; Viber and Telegram cannot provide that.
Or: when we meet friends and loved ones after a long separation, we do not content ourselves with a wave from the air — we throw ourselves into hugging the people who matter to us. There is something real in that touch that no verbal greeting can convey. There is a living person before you, and he is here. It is not an idea — it is his body, it is him.
Or: a wife is expecting a child, and the husband is preparing to be a father. Conceptually, he knows he is awaiting a son or a daughter; he imagines, prepares, sets up the room. But all of this is only a concept in his head. And then the baby is born — he hears the cry, he takes that little body in his arms, and only then does he truly understand that he has become a father. Because fatherhood is not a concept; it is a connection to a particular body, to this living, crying, warm little human being who is now real.
On the other side, when a person dies, we feel an unbearable grief — we weep. And this is a strange thing, because we know that the soul is eternal; we know that the person has not vanished — his soul is with God; only the body has stopped functioning. And yet we weep precisely because there is no body left to embrace. We cannot hear the voice, cannot touch, cannot be near. The grief of loss is the grief of the loss of a particular body.
So one way or another, we communicate through bodies. There are certain limits to such communication: with some people the distance is greater, with others less — it all depends on the closeness of the relationship. But there is one special kind of bodily communion that God has reserved exclusively for one situation:
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. (Gen. 2:24)
This is exactly where Paul brings us. “One flesh” in the Bible is not only the body. It is the whole person: everything you are — physically, emotionally, spiritually, legally, economically, socially. See what God is doing: he gives intimacy as a language — as the way one person says to another, “I belong to you, fully, exclusively, with all that I am.” And this language works in only one context — in the context of a complete, lifelong, covenanted belonging to one another.
In the history of humanity there have been two diametrically opposed views of intimate relationships. On one side were those we might call the Platonists — you have probably heard the expression “platonic love.” This includes the medieval ascetics and the Victorian moralists. Their view is simple: “the body is bad, and intimacy is something shameful.” On the other side were the pagans — the Corinthians. They said: “the body is just a body; intimacy is the satisfaction of natural appetites.” Some are ashamed to talk about it; others are not ashamed to do it without restraint. The biblical view is neither one. The Bible says: intimacy is neither dirty nor a matter of indifference. Intimacy is a beautiful gift of God, given in one specific context: the covenant of marriage.
In marriage, intimacy is the glue of the covenant. There it is the language by which spouses say to each other “I am yours, you are mine,” and no one else exists. There it is a renewal of the promise. There it is like a signature on the marriage covenant. And here is the important thing to grasp: intimacy in God’s design is not a stand-alone element that can be pulled out of the larger packaging. It is part of a package that comes with all forms of union together — the union of life, of property, of time, of home, of decisions, of responsibility, of children, of old age — the union of everything. Tim Keller, in The Meaning of Marriage, puts it this way:
You should never have physical unity with anyone with whom you do not have unity in every other area of life. God designed physical oneness to be the carrier, the conduit, and the confirmation of the unity of all of life.
This means you cannot be one on the physical level — and walk away in the morning. You cannot put your signature on a covenant if there is no covenant and you do not bear it. You cannot say “I am yours” — and tomorrow be a stranger. In God’s design this connection works only as a single whole — within marriage. But I am getting ahead of myself; this is already the subject of chapter 7. For now, what matters is to see the foundation: intimacy is a gift of God, designed for one specific context. It is a gift for two people who have become one whole until the end of their lives.
And this is why Paul reacts so strongly when he sees how sexual immorality breaks God’s design. Look at what immorality does: it takes that signature, that language, that seal of the covenant — and uses them where there is no covenant. It is like signing your name on a non-existent document. It is like uttering the vow “I am yours forever” — and forgetting it the next moment. When two people are joined physically, but they have no social union, no economic union, no shared life decisions, no responsibility for each other, no obligations, no vow — then physical union becomes a monster. It is like a page torn from a book. Like one note ripped out of the melody. Like a seal without a document. Union on one level without union on all the rest — an empty shell that pretends to a meaning it does not contain. And it is precisely this that destroys a person from within. You think it sets you free — but it enslaves. You think it brings you closer — but it cripples your future capacity for closeness. You think it doesn’t mean anything — but it damages the deepest thing in you.
Sexual immorality is not just “unpleasant,” not just “God said no.” Sexual immorality is the use of the language of covenant without a covenant. Sexual immorality is the destruction of the very possibility of covenant. That is why Paul exclaims, “Never!” — not because he is an ascetic, not because he is afraid of the body, not because he is against intimacy. Paul exclaims because he sees one of the most beautiful jewels God has given to humanity being treated like trash.
And now Paul gives an instruction — direct, short, no compromises: “Flee from sexual immorality.” Not “try somehow not to,” not “be careful,” not “avoid it where possible” — flee. The Greek verb literally means “save yourself by running.” This is what Joseph does in the book of Genesis when Potiphar’s wife grabs him by his garment. Joseph does not stand and reason, does not try to explain to her why she is wrong — he runs, leaves the garment in her hands, and runs. And Paul tells the Corinthians and tells us: you will not win this battle by standing and philosophizing — run!
There is also another word in this verse: “πορνεία” (porneia). That is the Greek for what is translated into English as “sexual immorality” or “fornication”; it is also the root of the word “pornography.” Paul says: flee from porneia. And he is not speaking only of marital infidelity. He is speaking of any intimacy outside God’s design — that is, outside marriage: before marriage, between marriages, alongside marriage, in films, on the internet, in the imagination — all of it is porneia. Because God’s design is one — intimacy only within the covenant of marriage. Everything else is the same monstrosity we have just been describing.
Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. (1 Cor. 6:18)
At first glance this is a strange claim, since almost every sin involves the body in some way. Stealing uses the hands; gossip uses the tongue; gluttony uses the stomach; drunkenness uses the liver; sloth uses everything at once. And Paul says: all those sins are outside the body — sexual immorality alone is a sin against one’s own body. He means that immorality is not just the use of the body as an instrument. Immorality takes the very body that was created for the Lord, bought with the blood of Christ, entrusted to you to steward as something holy, and destined for resurrection — and aims it against its own purpose. This is self-desecration. As if a priest, with his own hands, defiled his own temple.
Conclusion
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. (1 Cor. 6:19)
In the Old Testament the temple was one specific building in Jerusalem, and no one was allowed into the Holy of Holies except the high priest — and only once a year. But now the temple is not a building — it is your own body. The Holy Spirit lives in you. Your body is the temple. And then come three short words that overturn the whole of modern thinking: “you are not your own.” This is the polar opposite of the slogan we began with — “my body, my business.” Paul answers: no, your body is not yours. It belongs to the One who lives in it. It belongs to the One who redeemed it.
Let me now address everyone reading these lines.
If you are now struggling with sexual sin — with pornography, with the imagination, with something you have grown used to and are ashamed to confess — remember what Paul says: your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and porneia is the desecration of the sanctuary in which God himself has taken up residence. Paul does not offer you techniques; he does not say “endure.” He says — flee, run! Leave it behind, the way Joseph left his garment in the hands of Potiphar’s wife — and run.
If you are married — remember: your body is no longer only yours. It belongs to your spouse, just as their body belongs to you. This is a covenant. Do not give to anyone what God has given you both in this covenant — not in reality, not in imagination, not on a screen.
If you are not yet married — remember: your body belongs to Christ. You are part of his body. Any intimacy outside the marriage covenant is an attempt to take part of Christ’s body and give it to someone else. Your body may, in the future, also belong to your husband or wife; live now in such a way that neither Christ nor your future spouse will be put to shame. Chastity is not pressure or self-denial; it is faithfulness to the One to whom you belong.
If Christ is not yet your Lord — then everything we have been talking about formally does not apply to you. But the price has already been paid for you as well: the blood of the Son of God was shed for you too. Today you can receive him — and find true freedom.
Whichever group you belong to, the main thing — the foundation of everything — is this. Paul says so boldly that we are not our own because we have actually been bought. God paid dearly for our freedom. God paid dearly to bring us back to himself. The price was the blood of his beloved Son. The price was the cross. The price was suffering we cannot imagine. When Christ died on the cross, he did not simply forgive your sins — he bought all of you: spirit, soul, and body. And you no longer belong to yourself. You belong to him.
If that is so, then your body is not for the satisfaction of desires, not for impressions, not for self-expression. It is given for one chief purpose: to glorify the One to whom it belongs. So live in such a way that the Owner is not ashamed of the one to whom he has entrusted this body.
You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Cor. 6:19–20)
Amen.