Not Yours to Give
The More Excellent Way, Part 9 — 1 Corinthians 6:12-20
Stonebrook Sunday AM, 3/15/26, Matt Heerema
Please turn with me to 1 Corinthians, chapter 6.
We are in week nine of our walk through Paul's first letter to the church at Corinth. To get a running start on today’s passage, I’d like to remind us where we’ve been. Even though we are breaking this letter up into sections for study, they are all connected.
This letter is written to a church that had many problems.It seems they believed the gospel but kept living as if they hadn't. They were using the world's categories — status, power, personal rights, self-promotion — to navigate the Christian life. So Paul keeps coming back at them from different angles with the same correction: you belong to Christ, not to Corinth. Act like it.
A few weeks ago, we saw that play out in their obsession with celebrity teachers. They were forming tribes, competing for status, arguing over who had the better spiritual pedigree. Paul said: stop. You don't belong to Paul. You don't belong to Apollos. You belong to Christ. And because you belong to Christ, everything belongs to you. Stop scraping for the attention of so-called famous people. You are known, and loved, and redeemed by the most famous, the most significant person in the universe, Jesus Christ.
Then Brad brought us to chapter five. Same church. Different symptom. There was a man living in a sexually immoral relationship — and rather than grieve it, the church was boasting about it. They had forgotten that they are Christ’s body, Holy, Sacred. Instead of being proud about how tolerant they were, they were to remove the unrepentant sinner who claimed to follow Christ from their midst.
Last week we started chapter six, verses one through eleven. Here's the irony Paul is drawing out. The church that was failing in their duty to judge among themselves about serious sin in its midst was now harshly judging each other over trivial matters like money. Paul redirects them to the verdict that actually matters. You were washed. You were sanctified. You were justified — in the name of Jesus, by the Spirit of God.
When you know that verdict, the trivial verdicts like who owes who a million dollars stop being worth fighting over. It’s only money.
One problem. Three symptoms and counting. A church that has forgotten whose it is.
Today, Paul is going to address yet another problem, another symptom of their greater problem, and once again, he is going after the wrong beliefs underneath the behavior. Not just what they're doing wrong — but why. And what he finds at the root will be relevant to every single person in this room.
In today’s passage, we’re going to see: The Corinthian Mantra, God’s Purpose for Your Body, and Our Right Response to Our Rescue.
Let's read the passage.
1 Corinthians 6:12–20 (CSB)
12 “Everything is permissible for me,” but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible for me,” but I will not be mastered by anything. 13 “Food is for the stomach and the stomach for food,” and God will do away with both of them. However, the body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14 God raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by his power.
15 Don’t you know that your bodies are a part of Christ’s body? So should I take a part of Christ’s body and make it part of a prostitute? Absolutely not! 16 Don’t you know that anyone joined to a prostitute is one body with her? For Scripture says, The two will become one flesh. 17 But anyone joined to the Lord is one spirit with him.
18 Flee sexual immorality! Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the person who is sexually immoral sins against his own body. 19 Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, 20 for you were bought at a price. So glorify God with your body.
The Corinthian Mantra
Paul starts by quoting two mantras, or catch-phrases, that apparently the church was using, perhaps they wrote this to him, or it was reported to him, that showed their false beliefs. A way of thinking that had worked its way into how the church understood the Christian life.
The first one: "Everything is permissible for me.” The second one: "Food is for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will do away with both."
By the way, these aren't random. They both come from the same place. There was a popular philosophy in the Greco-Roman world that taught that the physical stuff of life — your body, your appetites, the material world — doesn't ultimately matter. What matters is the mind. The spirit. The rational, spiritual, intellectual life. Physical things are temporary. Spiritual things are eternal. The body is just a shell.
We call this gnostic dualism. And it sounds sophisticated. Almost spiritual, even. It’s a pagan way of thinking that has infected the church since the very beginning. You’ll recognize it. Most of us have believed or do believe some version of it, even in small ways. It’s kind of “in the water” of popular religious thought.
But watch where it leads. If the body doesn't matter eternally, you can go one of two directions. You can indulge it. The body is temporary, so do whatever you want with it now. Eat, drink, be merry. Everything is permissible. That's hedonism, and that's what Paul is dealing with this week.
Or you can suppress it entirely. The body is temporary and therefore evil, so deny every appetite and treat the physical as the enemy. That's asceticism. We'll deal with that error next week in chapter seven.
In our passage this week, Paul is taking on the hedonist.
Now here's what's important to understand about "everything is permissible." The Corinthians didn't make that up out of nowhere. That phrase is a distortion of something Paul himself taught. Paul preached freedom — freedom from slavery to sin, freedom from bondage to the Jewish law. Real, actual freedom that Christians have in Christ. And the Corinthians took that freedom and ran in the wrong direction with it.
You've heard the modern version of this. Maybe you've thought it yourself. "If Jesus forgives all my sins anyway, does it really matter if I sin? I'll just be forgiven." There's a certain logic to it. But that logic shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what grace actually is, and what your forgiveness actually cost. It cost Jesus his life.
Maybe you've been confused by the seeming hypocrisy in the church. We don't live up to the ideals we preach. And if you've been watching Christians closely, you've probably seen this specific failure — Christians who treat their bodies as their own, who indulge what they want, who look no different from everyone else, and then show up on Sunday. It's a fair observation. It's worth taking seriously.
But that's exactly the point. Paul wasn't writing to a church that had it together. He was writing to a church that was a mess — that had taken the freedom Christ purchased for them and run in the wrong direction with it. The fact that Christians fail to live up to this teaching isn't an argument against it. It's evidence that we need it. The church in Corinth needed it. So do we.
Paul’s correction is pretty direct. Your body was not created for you to do as you see fit. Your body was created for God’s glory. To understand why that’s true, we need to understand what God has in mind for our bodies.
God’s purpose for your body
Before Paul gets to his case, he makes two quick moves that might be easy to miss.
First, he concedes the point. "Everything is permissible for me." Fine. Paul doesn't argue with that. But then: "not everything is beneficial." And: "I will not be mastered by anything." The question was never just "is this allowed?" The question is "where does this lead?"
Because here's the thing when you take your freedom for granted and abuse it. You lose it. Paul wrote to the Galatians: "It was for freedom that Christ set us free. Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." The freedom Christ purchased for you is not a license for re-enslaving yourself to appetite.
When you use your freedom to indulge whatever you want, you don't stay free. The appetite grows. It demands more. What started as a choice becomes a compulsion. You thought you were free to do whatever you wanted. Now you can't stop.
That's not freedom. That's just a different master. And we can do this with all kinds of things. Food, drink, money, sex, shopping. We’re really good at shackling ourselves to false masters.
So Paul's correction isn't just "stop doing that." It's deeper than that. It goes after the whole way you see the world. And to do that, he tells us what the body actually is.
First, God created your body.
Verse 13: "The body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body." Paul is saying that your body was made with a purpose built into it. It has a design. A direction. It was made for God — not for appetite, not for indulgence, not for whatever you feel like doing with it on a given Tuesday. For God. For His Glory.
Second, God redeemed your body.
Last week we ended on this verse. 1 Corinthians 6:11: "And some of you used to be like this. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified — in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God."
Paul is talking to people with a past. Some of them had lived exactly the kind of life he's warning against. Sexual immorality. Idolatry. Drunkenness. That was their life. And then something happened to them. Let me be plain about what that something is.
Sin is not just breaking a rule. It is rebellion against a holy God. And it defiles us, and it earns his just judgment. The verdict over our lives, apart from Christ, is guilty. But Jesus took on a human body, lived the life we were supposed to live, and died the death we deserved. God's judgment against sin fell on him instead of us. He rose from the dead. And he offers that rescue to anyone who turns from their sin and trusts him. And when you trust in Christ, He comes to live inside you through His Spirit.
Third, God dwells in your body.
Verse 19: "Don't you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you?" The word Paul uses here for temple is the word for the inner sanctuary. Not just the outer courts of the temple complex. The most sacred space. The place where God himself dwells. That's what Paul says your body is. The Holy Spirit doesn't just influence you from a distance. He inhabits you. You are the place where God lives. Think about that for a second. What does that mean for the way you treat your body, Christian, knowing that God dwells in it?
Fourth, God will resurrect your body.
Verse 14: “God will raise us up with his power.” This is where the dualist philosophy completely falls apart. The body is not a shell you shed when you die and leave behind. God made it, God redeemed it, God dwells in it, and God intends to raise it. What you do with your body now has eternal weight.
So here is Paul's answer to "food for the stomach and stomach for food, and God will do away with both." No. God will not do away with both. God raised the Lord. And he will raise you.
And here is Paul's answer to "everything is permissible." Maybe. But your body belongs to the Lord. It was created for him, redeemed by him, inhabited by him, and destined for resurrection by him. So the question was never "is this permissible?" The question is "does this honor the one who made it, bought it, lives in it, and will raise it?"
Our Right Response to our Rescue
So what do we do with this?
Paul gives us two commands. Verse 18: flee sexual immorality. And the verb “flee” here is present active imperative: “keep on fleeing!” You'll be doing this your whole life. Flee the thing that is trying to enslave you, to kill you.But also, flee toward something: Verse 20: glorify God with your body. Not just “don’t sin!” But actively bring attention, fame, and honor to your savior.
Before I go further — if you're here exploring, or you're not sure what you believe, maybe you're in middle school or high school or college and these questions are just starting to feel real and urgent — you may be thinking: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Bible’s long list of rules. Don't do this. Your body is shameful. Get your act together.”
That is not what Paul is saying. What Paul is saying is that your body has more dignity, more weight, more eternal significance than anyone has ever told you. You were made by God. You are worth rescuing. Someone thought you were worth dying for.
The question isn't about just behaving by a certain set of rules. The question is whether you have been rescued. Whether Jesus is beautiful to you. Whether you want it. And I want to invite you by saying He is what you were made for. All the affection, joy, pleasure, fun, and excitement you are looking for in those sins that enslave you, you’ll never find there. You were meant to find those things in Him.
Here’s the thing with the commands of the Bible like these. We already know we should flee. God’s law is written on our hearts. We know the right thing we should do, the question is always do we want to. Will we.
And many of us have tried! Many of us are struggling in these areas and are not sure how to find the freedom we’ve been promised.So before we talk about how, let's be honest about what doesn't work. You've probably tried these. And you know how they go.
Here are motivations that will fail you.
Rules: ”God told me not to." True. But we know how rules like this work. Kids disobey parents. Students disobey instructors.
Willpower: “I know I shouldn't." Also true. But willpower is the self divided against itself. It's exhausting. It's unstable. Everyone in this room knows that willpower eventually runs out.
Self-interest: “This is bad for me." True again. But self-interest is a fair-weather friend. When the desire is strong enough, it flips on you. You know the consequences. You go anyway.
All three of these have the same problem. The self is still sovereign. You're trying to solve a self-problem with self-resources. It doesn't work. We always choose according to our highest desire in the moment. It’s the way our souls work. Which means the answer to sin is never trying harder. It's wanting something more.
And that points at what Paul is actually giving you. When you understand what it cost to rescue you, and how glad God was to save you, because He loves you, everything changes.
You realize three things.
First: I don't have the right. Verse 19: you are not your own. Verse 20: you were bought at a price. This is not your body to give away. The question is no longer "do I want to resist?" The question is "do I have the authority to go?” But more than that:
Second: it is my honor to obey. You were not just purchased. You were purchased by someone who then gave you dignity you didn't earn. He called you his temple. He called you a member of his own body. In verse 11, he took us when we were dirty, unholy, and guilty, and washed us clean, made us holy, and declared us innocent!
Obedience now isn't begrudging compliance. It's the glad response of someone who has been given something precious. So our greatest motivation when we realize this?
Third: betrayal is unthinkable. You were a slave to your sin. The word Paul uses for “bought with a price” is marketplace language. Redemption language. You were owned by sin, by death, by the flesh. And he bought you out of that. He paid with his life.
To take what he bought with his blood and hand it over to sin is not just disobedience. It is a betrayal of a rescuer. The question is no longer "should I resist?" It's "how could I do that to Him?"
Your body was made by God, for God. In Christ, He reedemed it — bought it back from slavery — at the cost of His life. And he is going to raise your body with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead. It no longer belongs to you. Paul said to the Galatian church:
Galatians 2:20 (CSB)
I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
So when temptation comes, you don’t have to will your way through it by your own strength. You have something better than that: a new identity: “I belong to Jesus. This body is not mine, it’s His.” Don’t give away what belongs to Him.
Let’s pray.
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