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Thursday, 23 September 2010

1 Corinthians 6:12-20 - Sexual immorality

Some of the Corinthians were misusing their freedom, saying "everything is permissible for me". This demonstrated a complete misunderstanding of what happens when we get saved, what salvation means, and what sex is all about. Similar misunderstandings can be found when people say things like "if God forgives me, then I can do what I like".
First certain things are commanded and other things forbidden not just for the sake of it, but because it is best for us. Sexual immorality is not good for us. It does us harm, physically, emotionally and spiritually, and it harms other people as well.
Secondly we were saved for freedom. Now sin enslaves us.
Thirdly, we were created for God, not for sexual immorality. Paul talks about the resurrection here because the body is important. Your body matters, and so what we do with it matters. At the time the prevalent Greek thinking tended to separate the physical and spiritual (beware of any teaching that says the resurrection is just spiritual). These can lead to immorality. The truth is that there is actually no sharp divide between the spirit and the body, they influence each other. The condition of our spirits influences our bodies, what we do with our bodies influences our spirit.
Sexual immorality is different from other sins, because it has a much deeper effect than other sins. The church is often accused of being obsessed with sexual sins, the accusers saying we should be more concerned about poverty, wars etc. Such accusation is nonsense. On the one hand no one is saying we should be concerned about sexual morality to the exclusion of all else, but that we should be concerned about along with many other things.
More importantly, the thinking behind the accusation is that sexual sins do not really matter, do not really cause any harm. This is nonsense, a tremendous amount of harm is caused by sexual sins. At the extremes sex trafficking, rape etc are very dangerous. A large amount of money and crime is associated with sex crimes. Yet at a more mundane level, ask yourself how much unhappiness and hurt is caused in the world by sexual immorality, be people abusing or being unfaithful to each other.
Finally, we need to remember that we are temples of the Holy Spirit. Sexual immorality degrades the body, as Christians we should respect and exalt the body.

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