By Sam Greer
Senior Pastor, Red Bank Baptist Church, Chattanooga
Focal Passage: I Corinthians 6:12-20
According to dailywire.com, in 2016, Americans dedicated well over four and a half billion hours to watching porn on one porn site. The site had over 90 billion video views and 44,000 visitors every minute of every day. It all adds up to over 500 thousand years worth of porn consumed in the span of 12 months. Since 2015, human beings have spent one million years watching porn. The porn industry grosses more in a year than Hollywood and the NFL, NBA, and MLB combined. Has porn become America’s favorite pastime?
The church in Corinth was dealing with sexual sin, which the Holy Spirit led Paul to address. Paul reminds the church in 1 Corinthians 6:13 that “the body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” The believers in Corinth surmised that satisfying their sexual desires with their bodies was similar to satisfying their hungry stomachs with food. Paul argued, however, that both food and stomach will perish, but the body, representing the flesh and the spirit of a person, was meant for union with the Lord. God is paying attention to what we do or don’t do in and with our bodies. Why does what we do in and with our bodies matter?
Our bodies are members of Jesus’ body. Paul, as a member of the body of Christ, refuses to exclude himself from this conversation. In I Corinthians 6:12, Paul clearly communicates that, under grace, all things are lawful, but not all things are beneficial. If there is anything that I am doing in or with my body, which causes another part of Jesus’ body to stumble, then it must be avoided. Being a part of the body of Christ means that I must look out for the spiritual health of the other parts of the body and not just my own.
Our bodies are not our own (I Corinthians 6:15). When a believer answers the call of the Holy Spirit to be saved by grace alone, through faith alone in Jesus alone, that person is bought at a price (v. 20). No longer is that person his or her own, but now he or she belongs to Christ in body, soul and spirit. At the moment when Jesus saves a person, the Holy Spirit immediately takes up residence in that person’s spirit. Paul taught that because of this miraculous and gracious gift of the Holy Spirit, a person’s body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Why do believers often take better care of the corporate place of worship than the temples of the Holy Spirit, their own bodies?
Our bodies will not last (I Corinthians 6:14). Since our bodies will not last, why does what we do in and with our bodies matter? God will raise us up just as He raised up His Son; however, according to Paul, upon our physical death, we are ushered into the presence of the Lord. Then, we must all appear before Christ for judgment for what we did or did not do in our bodies (II Corinthians 5:6-10). Although our earthly bodies will not last what we do in our earthly bodies will last.
In regard to sexual immorality, what are we to do while in our physical bodies? In I Corinthians 6:18, Paul wrote that we are to flee from sexual immorality. Rather than flee from it, too many believers spend their time on social media flirting with sexual immorality. Flee from sexual immorality don’t flirt with it!


