17.03 | Chew Toys & Temples
1 Corinthians 5-6
‘Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. 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, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.’
1 Corinthians 6:18-20
Our dog, Blue, has a favourite toy. It’s a furry squirrel, with a big fluffy tail. The tail is filled with some kind of material that makes a crunchy sound when she chews on it. She’s chewed its ears, and bitten off all of its feet, as well as its back right leg completely. She loves it, and spends hours happily chewing and licking, like some weird roadkill pet. But every six months or so we get to the stage where it’s so dirty, chewed, and shredded that we buy her a new squirrel. We’re probably due New Squirrel Day sometime soon.
Paul’s shifting tack today. He’s moving his focus from their first big departure from the ways of grace to the second. This one is all about sex.1
He’s not writing into a vacuum. Corinth was a cosmopolitan, multicultural, city of trade. And it had a reputation. 20th Century German theologian, Ernst von Dobschütz put it this way: ‘The ideal of the Corinthian was the reckless development of the individual. The merchant who made his gain by all and every means, the man of pleasure surrendering himself to every lust. The athlete steeled to every bodily exercise and proud in his physical strength, are the true Corinthian types: in a word the man who recognized no superior and no law but his own desires.’2
Individualism. Commerce. Sex. Physicality. Consumerism. Hedonism.
Sound familiar?
This is a big moment for Christianity. The Jews held strict ethics on sex, but Corinth had none of these. As the church established in Corinth, a key question was how they would inhabit scriptural ideals of sex in the midst of a worldview that viewed sex as a mere expression of pleasure, where orgies and temple prostitution and sexual experimentation were just as ingrained a part of their culture as pornography and Tinder and one night stands have become a part of ours.
So what does Paul do?
It’s a little surprising.
He doesn’t sit down, like an awkward parent, giving them a set of instructions and prohibitions. That would touch the surface level. But Paul is digging deeper. He goes to the underlying value system behind all this.
And it has to do with how we view our bodies.
Because, in a sex-obsessed, hedonistic, individualistic, culture, the body is relegated. It is trivialised. It becomes a mere vehicle for pleasure, a disposable tool to be wielded for our immediate enjoyment and offered to strangers without reserve. It relegates what should be treated as precious and holy, to something akin to a chewed dog’s toy: something to be used and discarded.
Check your heart.
Has your guard gone up?
Do you read this and move to to feeling defensive? Or to feeling shame?
Allow the deeper invitation to sink in. Paul is not leading us to the cell of shame, but to a higher journey of greater beauty. He calls us not to guilt-laden captivity to yesterday, but to a tomorrow where we steward our bodies as vessels of honour and dignity and wholeness. He elevates our bodies to the highest of all honours upon this earth, of hosting the very presence of God Himself. He calls your body a precious part of this. It is God’s temple upon the earth.
Before any talk about sex, we need to talk about the body. It has deep and holy purpose. Your body has deep and holy purpose. And that purpose is not as a vehicle for satisfying our immediate desires; it is to become something so honourable, so pure, so holy, that it becomes host to the presence of God Himself.
Reflect:
Whenever we talk about sex, it goes deep. It often goes to our deepest places of shame, regret, longing, or fear.
Come to the Father. Shame leads us to hide in the bushes, but He calls us out to Him not to reprimand but to restore.
Bring what you need to bring today to the Cross of Jesus again. Leave it there.
And offer your body afresh to Him in the invitation that He may come more fully and dwell in you afresh today.
Pray:
Father,
The further in I get,
The more I realise this:
It is less that your standards are too high for me,
And more that mine are too low for myself.
For where I have inhabited something too low for my body,
I repent today.
Would you flood every place in me of shame and regret
With the washing that comes from the cascades of your love.
And Father,
Today,
I offer you this body afresh.
Purify my desires,
Raise my sights,
And come and fill me,
That I may be a living temple of your presence
Amidst the pains of this hurting world.
Make me ablaze in the things that are whole and good,
That my life may be to your glory.
In Jesus’ Name,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
Deuteronomy 1-2 | Psalm 35:11-28
It runs from chapters 5-7
quoted in Leon Morris: 1 Corinthians: An Introduction and Commentary, p.17