God Is for the Body

1 Corinthians: How the Crucified Christ Shepherds a Fractured Flock

Jan 12

Written By Benjamin Vrbicek

January 12, 2025

Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek

View Full Service Here

Sermon Manuscript and Discussion Questions

Scripture Reading

1 Corinthians 6:9-20

9 Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you. 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.

12 “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. 13 “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. 14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. 15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! 16 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.”17 But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. 18 Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. 19 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, 20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

In December, I was thinking about how we’d be coming back in January to our series in 1 Corinthians, and a certain video came to my mind, a commercial of sorts. Last year in the Super Bowl the organization He Gets Us showed a commercial during the game highlighting the ways Jesus understands the brokenness of our world, the ways he gets us. As a follow-up to that video, a person created a commercial with similar branding and a similar feel, trying to highlight not just that Jesus gets us but that he saves us. It’s only a minute long. We rarely show videos, but let’s watch that now.

There was some controversy around these videos. The two videos sparked hundreds of blog posts and essays from everyday Christians to professional writers. Some people thought that the original video offered a less-than-complete picture of Jesus and the gospel. We’re simply showing the second one because it used lines from our passage, “such were some of you.” I tend to think both commercials provided a nice complement to each other, showing that the one who gets us is also the one who saves us. Let’s pray as we begin. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”

Sometimes we can feel like certain rules are arbitrary, maybe even silly. But sometimes rules are not arbitrary or silly but they are given by wise people who want the best for us. I’ll start with a quick story about rules and why they matter.

Years ago I worked in fire protection and our main customers were hospitals. So it was super normal for me to go into a hospital with a ladder and measuring tools and trace the sprinkler piping and all of that. So early in my career we had a small job in a functioning MRI room. You probably know this, but MRI stands for magnetic resonance imaging. Basically, MRIs take fancy pictures of a person’s insides. They work, as the name suggests, by spinning huge, powerful, and super-expensive magnets.

So, the guys in our office and my boss, kept telling me stuff like, “Hey, whatever you do, DO NOT bring metal into MRI rooms. The metal will get sucked into those magnets, and someone might get hurt, and you might break the machine, and, by the way, that machine is worth more than you.” Those sorts of things. I’m a firstborn and rule follower, so I was stressed about this and made sure I didn’t have my belt or my phone or my metal tape measure or any of that. But I did have my ladder, which I thought was made of aluminum and not magnetic.

Anyway, I go into the door of this room with my ladder, and as I do, I feel the six-foot ladder jerk forward, and I grab it with all my strength and hunch down and yell, “No!”

Well, the nurse who was walking behind me had just accidentally bumped the ladder. Let’s say she thought my response was pretty funny. Maybe she would have used the word ridiculous. I would say that I think it’s funnier now than I did at the time.

Why do I tell that story? Well, as silly as it was, she was able to tell me that she’d been working around the machine long enough to say those rules are not silly or arbitrary. She has seen pens fly out of the shirt pockets of doctors who forgot to take them out and almost hurt people. I can’t imagine how much it would hurt to get between the magnet and a steel tape measure flying at you.

My point is that sometimes rules about what goes in and what doesn’t go in are not so arbitrary. The rules are not so silly, especially when they come from God, especially when they come from our Designer and Creator and the one who knows what is best.

Of course, believing the Lord’s ways are the best ways for his people is the very struggle in the Corinthian church and very often the struggle here at Community Church—and for that matter the very struggle in every church. We often struggle to believe the Lord has his best for us, especially in his rules. Instead, we tend to believe that our ownership and our control of ourselves is our best. Which is a theme that brings us back not simply to our church or the Corinthian church but to one man and one woman in a garden being tempted by a serpent “to be like God,” to call the shots for themselves, to make their own rules and to rule their own life. That didn’t go well; it never does.

There would be many ways to organize our study of the passage. I’m going to do it under three different headings: the place, the rules of the place, and the deeper why of the rules.

1. Where and what is this place?

Our first point is where and what is this place? In this passage, we’re not talking about an MRI room, of course. The phrase that’s used is “the kingdom of God.” I’ll read the key verses again, vv. 9–11. If you have a Bible, please just leave it open to see it as well.

I went ahead and read through v. 11 to see the “such were some of you” language. That probably stood out to you as mentioned in the video. I’m sure several other phrases stood out to you as well. We’ll get to some of those in a minute.

But if we are going to talk about inheriting the kingdom of God (or not inheriting the kingdom of God), then we need to know what we mean by this place called the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is where the rule and reign of King Jesus is joyfully acknowledged. Again, the kingdom of God is where the rule and reign of King Jesus is joyfully acknowledged.

There is a sense we can speak about this kingdom as here now. We can speak of the rule of Jesus as acknowledged and obeyed in the hearts of believers. We can speak of the kingdom of God in his church. Perhaps we can even see parts of society where the rule and reign of King Jesus is joyfully acknowledged. So the kingdom of God is in part now. In the opening of Mark’s account of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, right at the very start of Jesus’s ministry, we read, “Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel’ ” (Mark 1:14–15). So the kingdom of God is in part now; it is as Jesus said, “at hand” now.

But here Paul has in mind the future and fullest experience of this place, the fullest experience of inheriting the kingdom of God. I see that from v. 14 in our passage. It’s in the middle of a cluster of sentences, but it clues us into the fact that when Paul says kingdom of God here, he means the future and fullest expression.

14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power.

That language of will also raise us up is future language and it is resurrection language. What God did to the Lord Jesus in raising him bodily from the dead, God will do in the future for every Christian. Paul is saying that one day your body will rise out of the grave by the power of King Jesus and be resurrected never to die again.

I’ll say it like this. When Christians often speak of heaven or inheriting the kingdom, we often mean going to a place with Jesus somewhere in the sky, in heaven. Certainly to be with Christ in that heaven is “far better” than this life (Phil. 1:23). But the end of the world is actually better than just going to heaven. Heaven actually comes down to earth, and, at the end of time, the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of God (Rev. 11:15). Earth becomes the place of the kingdom of God in the fullest sense.

After we die and our loved ones put us in the ground, the Bible teaches that the soul of a Christian goes to be with Jesus. Our souls go to be in heaven. And it’s better—far better. And yet one day, Jesus will return to earth, and when he returns, the souls of every Christian will be reunited with their bodies. And when we are resurrected by the power of God, Christians will be raised up fully alive in a physical way, fully alive in an emotional way, fully alive in a spiritual way, and fully alive in every other way. And then with all the saints we will together joyfully acknowledge the absolute rule and reign and ownership of King Jesus. His rule will be for us our highest good.

Christians tend to debate the exact sequence of these events, but we all agree that in the end, the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of God in the fullest sense, and it will be wonderful. In the kingdom of God, there will be meaningful work that doesn’t lead to thorns and thistles, meaningful relationships that will never end and never have law suits (cf. last week’s sermon and passage), and it will have meaningful hobbies and joys to experience. This is why I speak of the kingdom of God with the language of joyfully acknowledged. When Jesus describes entering this kingdom, he says believers will hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master” (Matt. 25:23). The kingdom of God is a happy place because at the center of it all is a happy king. In his kingdom there will be no more tears, no more death, no more sorrow. And, bringing us back to Paul’s point here in 1 Corinthians 6, in the kingdom of God one day there will be no more sin and no more unrighteousness. Which brings us to the second point.

2. What does not inherit the kingdom of God?

So, if the kingdom of God is the place where the rule and reign of Jesus is joyfully acknowledged, what does Paul say will not inherit that kingdom? I’ll read vv. 9–10 again.

This list is not exhaustive, meaning it’s not naming everything that is excluded. There are other lists in other places. But here Paul is mentioning some of the things that felt relevant to add. He adds things to the list because they were issues in their church and issues in their wider culture. And while much has changed since then, much is still the same. This list is still relevant for our churches and our culture.

I’ll start by talking about the phrase in the list men who practice homosexuality. Likely it stands out to you because of our cultural moment. I think of the lines about faithfully preaching the gospel from Martin Luther, a famous pastor in the past. He says that you are not faithfully preaching the gospel if you preach about everything and yet fail to apply the gospel to the thing in your culture that is most under attack at a given moment. In other words, you can’t be said to preach the gospel faithfully if you ignore the thing on fire. In a similar way, if you were watching the local news channel in southern California, couldn’t you say the TV news station was faithfully reporting the news if they weren’t talking at least a little bit about the tragic fires that are burning down thousands of homes. So, we should talk about what Paul says here.

There are many people in our day who argue for full inclusion in every aspect of the church for those who practice homosexuality. They often signal the theological position of full inclusion by putting a rainbow on their church branding to show that they are a safe space, an inclusive space, that they are an ally to the LGBTQIA+ community.

The arguments for why every sexual lifestyle is approved by God tend to follow one of two arguments (or both of them). The first argument says something like, Perhaps the Bible is outdated, and we should move beyond what the Bible clearly says because we clearly now know more. That’s one approach. The other says something like, Despite what it clearly looks to say here in 1 Corinthians 6—as well as in Romans 1 and 1 Timothy 1 and Genesis 1, 2, and 3, and Ephesians 5 and Matthew 19 and many other passages from many authors, including Jesus—those clear passages are not actually so clear and really, they would say, when understood in light of all that we know now, they actually say there is nothing wrong with the kind of loving homosexual practice we have today.

In other words, some arguments move beyond the Bible and others try to wrestle with the Bible, but both ways, in the end, say that the plain reading of this passage is not correct. In fact, even though Paul clearly says here that homosexuals won’t inherit the kingdom of God, they would say that the exact opposite is true, that those who practice homosexuality will indeed inherit the kingdom of God.

It’s not without reason that Paul says in v. 9, “Do not be deceived.”

I know for some of you, as we have this conversation about what inherits the eternal kingdom of God and what does not, what Paul writes can feel arbitrary, like Who is God to choose? If you don’t feel that way, many of your family and friends and co-workers do feel that way. I was trying to think about places in our society where you can’t bring certain things into certain places, and there are lots of them. And, admittedly, sometimes rules about what we can and can’t bring in does feel arbitrary and silly.

So, you can’t bring gum on the school bus. But what if I don’t spit it out or stick it to the seat or put it in someone’s hair? Like the rule should be not to put your gum in someone’s hair, not that there is no gum allowed. Or what about the airport and TSA? Tons of rules at the airport feel arbitrary or just about money. I can’t bring in a Gatorade, but I can buy one over there for nine dollars. Or, if I only bring 3.4 ounces of toothpaste, and not 3.5 ounces!, then I can’t make a bomb. That feels silly, right?

These feelings about sexuality are not new. As I said, this goes back to the garden of Eden. Look what those in Corinth said. They used slogans to do it. Look at vv. 12–13.

The words in quotation marks were slogans used by the church in Corinth and what follows is Paul’s response to them. The slogan, “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food” is not really about food or the stomach. The slogan uses the metaphor of food to say all desires are normal and natural. They are no big deal. There’s a verse in Proverbs like this too, one that also connects eating and sexual sin. Proverbs 30:20 says, “This is the way of an adulteress: she eats and wipes her mouth and says, ‘I have done no wrong.’” In other words, what’s the big deal? Whatever I want to do, is what God should approve of. He made all these parts. So what’s the fuss about?

But rules are not always arbitrary. Think about not bringing metal into an MRI room, for example. That rule is made by people who know best how to help people stay safe. And God’s rules about what inherits the kingdom of God are not arbitrary. He is the creator and knows what will keep us safe.

In fact, Paul emphasizes that is God the creator who knows best by quoting the Genesis 2 passage. Look with me at what he says in vv. 15–16. Here, Paul is talking about heterosexual sin, which he actually spends more time on.

15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! 16 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.”

Here the issue is not homosexuality, but prostitution, which evidently some in the church were participating in. The quote “the two will become one flesh” comes from Genesis 2. Whenever Paul and Jesus talk about marriage and sexuality, they have what can be called a “back to Genesis approach.” “Oh, we’re talking about marriage and sexuality,” Paul and Jesus say, “That makes me think of what God said at the beginning.” They do this every time it comes up. The point is to say that God is a good creator and what he designed is best. Whether we are talking about homosexuality or the many other issues in the list, God’s rules are for our good. And this leads to the last point.

3. What is the deeper issue and the deeper solution?

So far we’ve talked about the place, namely, the kingdom of God, what it means and what doesn’t inherit it. That’s not where I want to end. I’d like to talk about what I believe is the deeper issue and God’s solution to that problem. Actually, I don’t think this is just what I believe is the deeper issue, but what Paul believes is the deeper issue.

And the real forest fire that we can’t ignore if we are to faithfully preach the gospel in our moment, to allude to the Martin Luther quote, is to not ignore the forest fire of our pride that burns the brightest. It’s the cause of every other vice. The deeper issue about God’s rules—whatever they are and however they challenge us—is that we struggle with them because, at a deeper level, we think we know best. That’s always the issue. That is what our hearts struggle with the most—not homosexual sin or heterosexual sin or drinking too much or taking things that don’t belong to us or using abusive language, or whatever else is in this list or any of the lists of vices. The deeper issue is always pride, the belief that we would run our lives best.

So let me end the sermon by highlighting what appears in this passage to be a contradiction. You might have seen it already; you might not. I could imagine the first readers of this letter wanting to put a finger on one part of the papyrus and put another finger on another part of the papyrus and say, “These don’t match.” If they said it more graciously, they might say, “These don’t seem to match.”

“Paul,” they’d say, “over here in v. 12 you say that while all things are lawful, you won’t be dominated by anything, meaning you won’t be controlled by anything. You won’t be mastered or enslaved by anything. Okay, but then, at the end in vv. 19–20 you say, ‘You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.’ So, over here you’re saying that if we are Christians, we have been purchased by the death and resurrection of Jesus—our lives our bodies, our very selves have been purchased—which means we have been mastered, we have been bought, in a sense, we are owned and even enslaved by Christ. So which is it, Paul?” Don’t be enslaved to anything. Or be enslaved by Christ?”

I think if they said that to Paul, he might smile and say, “If you figure that out, you’ll unlock everything.” And for us, if you can understand how Paul could say both statements in the same paragraph, then you can understand this passage and the rules and the commands, and more, importantly, you can understand why anyone would want to be a Christian.

I’ll give the answer Paul gives. We solve this apparent contradiction, this paradox, by noting that, as Paul writes, “the Lord is for the body.” They had their slogan: the stomach for food and food for the stomach. Paul has his slogan: the body for the Lord and the Lord is for the body (v. 13). To be forsomething is to be inclined toward seeing it thrive.

In and behind and through and underneath and after every truth in this passage, whether it be every seemingly warm truth (like such were some of you) or every seemingly challenging truth (like the sexually immoral will not inherit the kingdom of God)—behind and around and through all of those—is the reality that in Christ, the Lord is for you. This is what unlocks this passage. To be owned by God is the best reality in the world because he is the best owner you could ever have.

What does the Lord do when he is for us and our bodies? For people who scoffed at his rules, for people who feel him as arbitrary and silly and oppressive, what does he do? He saves.

I’ll close by reading v. 11 and then praying and inviting the worship team to lead us in song.

And such were some of you. 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.

Thanks be to God that, as we sang earlier, he has saved us from the wreckage of our choices and he turns life from ashes. Let’s pray. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”

Sermon Discussion Questions

When you think of heaven, what comes to mind? Was the concept of the kingdom of God as a future place here on earth new to you?
Watch and discuss both commercials, the He Gets Us and the He Saved Us Videos. What stands out to you from each that is helpful? (Both can be easily found on YouTube.)
If someone were struggling with the view that sex is reserved for one man and one woman in the context of marriage, what passages would be helpful to discuss?
Spend time discussing and explaining the meaning of each word in v. 11: washed, sanctified, justified and how each relates to the person and work of Jesus and how that should encourage us.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic of homosexuality, I’d suggest two books. The first is by Kevin DeYoung and called What Does the Bible Really Teach about Homosexuality? The second book is by Nancy Pearcy and called Love Thy Body. DeYoung’s book is shorter and more focused on the singular topic of homosexuality, and Pearcy’s book is longer and boarder. But both are excellent, and both affirm the traditional view, the view that Paul teaches here, namely, that sexual intimacy is designed for one man and one woman in the context of marriage.

1 Corinthians1 Corinthians 6