Why is sexual purity so important?

What then, today, is God’s temple? Let us begin at the lowest point. In 1 Corinthians 6:19 we read: “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own, ye are bought with a price?” Here the body of the individual Christian is that temple; his body—it does not say soul—but the body, which is the instrument of his activities, volition, passions, and the like. This is (most wonderful fact, and to be duly pondered) the temple of the Holy Ghost. Do we know it? Are we influenced by such a marvellous fact? Let me lay hold of it in power, then I will shrink from sin of every kind, and cherish the holiness that the presence of such a Guest involves. I shall seek not to grieve Him, but the rather to encourage Him. I am not my own. I am bought with a price that I should glorify God in my body. Oh! for grace! Spend time in reading the context.

"Flee fornication." In this one is not told to fight, but to keep far from it, as Joseph fled from the wife of Potiphar. Other sins may not involve the body in this way, but this is sin against one's own body. And as well as our bodies being the members of Christ, now we are told, "Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost." The Spirit of God dwells within our body in order to display in us the precious reality of His character in our practical lives. Notice that it is not said that our spirits or souls are His temple, but our bodies. So that when we are told, "Ye are not your own," we cannot regard this as being merely in regard to our spiritual interests, but fully applicable to our bodies. Being bought with a price - a price so infinitely great - certainly we are totally the property of the Living God; and it is only right and becoming that we should glorify God in our body.

Never was the honour of the body set in its true light till Christ came and proved it not only in His own person as man but in ours as redeemed by His blood and indwelt by the Holy Spirit. (Compare Rom. 6:12-13, 19; Rom. 8:10; Rom. 12:1 ; Col. 2:23; 1 Thess. 4:4; 1 Thess. 5:23; 1 Tim. 4:3-5.) Even now the Lord disdains not this temple of the Spirit: how much less when changed into the likeness of His glory? (Rom. 8:11, 18-23; Phil. 3:21.) In this body we shall have the portion of our Lord. For "God both raised the Lord and will raise up us by his power." (See 1 Cor. 15; 2 Cor. 4:14.)

It is not merely that our spirits go to be with the Lord in heaven; our bodies shall be raised like His at His coming, as many bodies of the saints which slept arose and came out of their graves after His resurrection. For if death shows man's weakness, resurrection displays God's power. The actual spiritual effect of this is immense. Not our souls but our bodies are declared to be members of Christ. Those who descant on the soul only may claim a superior elevation. But it is never really so in practice or in theory. On the contrary the immortality of the soul is easily perverted to man's pride; not so the resurrection, which not only exalts God and humbles man but delivers from present ease and indulgence where it is held in faith. Of this the Holy Spirit is the earnest, who joins us to the Lord and constitutes our bodies members of Christ. Hence the enormity of fornication. (Vers. 15, 16.) How basely inconsistent with such intimacy, yea union, is impurity with a harlot! It was the more needful to urge this on a city more than any other noted for this sort of licence, besides the broad fact that the heathen in general regarded fornication as an indifferent act like eating and not as in itself a sin. "The two, says he, shall be one flesh; but he that is joined to the Lord is one Spirit." (Vers. 16, 17.)

But its incongruity with our relation to Christ is not all that the apostle urges. Fornication he would have avoided earnestly, because of its peculiar character, differing as it does from every other sin in this that it is against the body itself, while others are external to it. How dreadful then to think not merely of the body so misused, but the Christian's body, temple of the Holy Spirit as it is! not from any mere consecration to Him but from His being in us, and this from God, on the ground of purchase by Christ's blood. Therefore the apostle's appeal to glorify God in their body.

Verse 18. "Flee fornication," etc. Instead of being regarded as a thing indifferent, or even as a trivial offence, this sin is to be dreaded and shunned as a leprosy; for it contaminates both soul and body. Other sins did so but in part; but this completely, by turning that which God has claimed for Himself to an use which He condemns. A wrong is thus inflicted on the body itself, by alienating it from its true honour as an instrument of righteous worship, and again degrading it to the service of sin. It is, therefore, morally, what idolatry is spiritually; and the dissuasive from both is expressed by the apostle in the same terms.8 Each sin is to be fled from, by those who would please God. But there is a further and especial sense in which a believer's body is said to be sinned against by such an act. And this also the Corinthians should have known.

Verse 19. "What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?" There is such a thing as spiritual self-respect. A Christian is expected to forget his first parentage in the remembrance of the second. He is not God's creature only, but His child. As the Son of God became incarnate, to put Himself within reach of our sins, so the believer, who adds knowledge to his faith, should understand that his mortal body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. Sent down by the Father in the name of Jesus, He occupies this earthly house as a pledge and witness of its coming change.9 Now it is God's Spirit which we have of Him, and God's Spirit is His own essential presence. But what God dwells in is His temple. We have in this verse a distributive repetition of the doctrine already stated in an earlier chapter.1 Each Christian body is a temple of the Spirit, even as the collective assembly of saints is His temple, and the place where His honour dwells, in what locality soever that assembly is found. Now what God occupies is His, and not our own. We are not robbed of our natural ownership, but it merges in the higher honour of our calling. Our bodies are His temple — ours, therefore, only as ourselves are His; to be kept then, in sanctification and honour, in His Name.2 Thus a double duty is imposed on the Christian with respect to his own body. He is to manage and govern it with vigilance and godly decision, as a restive and unruly beast; he is to hold it in honour, and tremble to abuse it, because it is the temple of the living God. Are we Christians, and yet ignorant of these things? Once more, then, let the cross be our monitor and shame.

The Apostle then passes on to speak of that which is not lawful for the body — actual sin. Here we are reminded that the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. He reminds us, too, that these bodies are destined for high honour, for even as God has raised up the Lord, so will He also raise up these bodies by His own power. Moreover, our bodies are members of Christ, and he that is joined to the Lord is one Spirit. The Apostle learnt something of this great truth at his conversion, for the Lord said to him, “Why persecutest thou Me?”. To touch the bodies of the saints was to touch Christ. How solemn is all sin, but how specially solemn is sin against the body which is indwelt by the Holy Spirit and belongs to God, and which it is our privilege and responsibility to use for the glory of God. To press upon us the deep importance of holiness, the Apostle reminds us in the course of the chapter that we are washed, sanctified and justified, and further, that our bodies are for the Lord, joined to the Lord, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, belong to God, and are to be used for the glory of God; and, too, the Lord is for the body, and God will raise it up by His power.

But the doctrine that the body is for Christ decided another question, to which the depraved habits of the Corinthians gave rise. All fornication is forbidden. To us, with our present Christian habits of mind, it is a thing of course — to Pagans, new; but the doctrine exalts every subject. Our bodies are the members of Christ. Another truth connected with this is of great importance: if (by union according to the flesh) two were one body, he who is united to the Lord is one spirit. The Spirit whose fulness is in Christ is the same Spirit who dwells in me and unites me to Him. Our bodies are His temples. What a mighty truth when we think of it!

Moreover we are not our own, but were bought with a price — the blood of Christ offered for us. Therefore we ought to glorify God in our bodies, which are His — powerful and universal motive, governing the whole conduct without exception. Our true liberty is to belong to God. All that is for oneself is stolen from the rights of Him who has bought us for His own. All that a slave was, or gained, was the property of his master; he was not the owner of himself. Thus it was with the Christian. Outside that, he is the wretched slave of sin and of Satan — selfishness his rule, and eternal banishment from the source of love his end. Horrible thought! In Christ we are the special objects and the vessels of that love. We have here two mighty motives for holiness: the value of Christ's blood, at which we are purchased; also the fact that we are the temples of the Holy Ghost.

On one thing especially was the apostle urgent, the personal purity of those who bore the name of Jesus; and the more so as the Greeks utterly failed in it. Their habits and their literature, their statesmen and their philosophers, all helped on the evil; their very religion conduced to aggravate the defilement by consecrating that to which depraved nature is itself prone. Few can have any adequate notion of the moral horrors of the heathen world, or of the insensibility of men generally to pollutions so shameless Christ changed all for those who believe in Him, leaving an example that they should follow His steps. "For this is God's will, your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication; that each of you know how to possess himself of his own vessel in sanctification and honour, not in passion of lust even as also the Gentiles that know not God, that no man over-reach and wrong his brother in the matter; because the Lord is an avenger of all these things, even as we told you before and fully testified." Holiness, of course, goes far beyond freedom from sensuality. Still to stand clear of that which was everywhere sanctioned in ordinary life was no small thing. Nor is the apostle satisfied with the negative duty of abstinence, but calls on "each of them to know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honour," instead of letting it drift loosely into sin and shame, "not in passion of lust, even as the Gentiles also that know not God." Acts 15 is proof positive on scripture testimony of that day, painfully confirmed by the disclosures of Pompeii and Herculaneum, to the moral degradation that pervaded even the most civilized portion of the heathen world. When God is dishonoured, man is reprobate; and God, in forgiving and rescuing from the wrath to come through Christ's death and resurrection, gives also a new life in Christ on which the Holy Spirit acts by the word so as to produce fruits of righteousness by Him to God's glory.

Hence the exhortation further, "that he should not over-reach and wrong his brother in the matter, because the Lord is an avenger in respect of all these things, even as we told you before and fully testified." There is no real ground to introduce a new topic here, confounding with Calvin and others τῳ πρ. with τοῖς πρ., still less to suppose with Koppe τῳ enclitic = τινι, "any," like our own Authorised Version (compare 2 Cor. 7:11). It is the apostle's delicate way of referring to the same uncleanness, especially in married circumstances where the rights of a brother were infringed. This demanded and receives special notice. For as the brotherhood of Christians casts them into free and happy and intimate intercourse, there would be peculiar danger in these very circumstances, lest Satan should tempt where flesh was not kept by faith in the place of death, that love only should act in holy ways with Christ before their eyes. There is perhaps no danger more gravely pressed. They are the ways which bring wrath on the sons of disobedience, and all words which make light of the evil are vain: the Lord avenges all these things, and God will judge the guilty. It is not the true grace of God which spares the strongest and repeated warnings; for God called us not for uncleanness, but in sanctification. It is plain that there is no branching off to commercial dealings, or to dishonesty in the affairs of every-day life. Impurity in the social relations of the saints is the evil still in view: and the conclusion is, "Wherefore then he that disregardeth disregardeth not man but God, that also gave his Holy Spirit unto you." Thus does grace, in calling to a moral duty, rise entirely above the mere weighing of such motives as act on men. It is not that delicate consideration of man is omitted: the apostle begins with the slighting of man in the matter, but he forthwith brings in also the immense yet solemn privilege of the Christian, God's gift of the Holy Spirit. How would impurity affect Him Who dwells in the saints, and makes the body God's temple?

The apostle takes up especially the subject of purity, for the pagan morals were so corrupt that impurity was not even accounted to be sin. It appears strange to us that such an exhortation should have been needful to such lively Christians as the Thessalonians; but we do not make allowance enough for the power of those habits in which persons have been brought up, and which become as it were a part of our nature and of the current of our thoughts, and for the action of two distinct natures under the influence of these, though the allowance or cultivation of one soon deadens the other. But the motives given here show upon what entirely new ground, as regards the commonest morality, Christianity places us. The body was but as a vessel to be used at will for whatever service they chose. They were to possess this vessel, instead of allowing themselves to be carried away by the desires of the flesh; because they knew God. They were not to deceive their brethren in these things, for the Lord would take vengeance. God has called us to holiness: it is with Him that we have to do; and if any one despised his brother, taking advantage of his feebleness of mind to encroach upon his rights in this respect, it would be to despise not man but God, who would Himself remember it, and who has given us His Spirit; and to act thus would be to despise that Spirit, both in one's self and in one's brother in whom He also dwells. He who was wronged in this way was not only the husband of a wife, he was the dwelling-place of the Holy Ghost and ought to be respected as such. On what high ground Christianity places a man, and that in connection with our best affections!

If then we are set to walk in a way pleasing to God, we are plainly told that God’s will is that we walk in practical sanctification that abstains from lust, and holds these human vessels as set apart for honourable uses, and not merely for the gratification of evil passions as with those who know not God.

(Vv. 6-8). Further we are warned lest the flesh, taking advantage of the free and happy intercourse of the Christian circle, is allowed to indulge itself in impurity in our social relations with one another. Any wrong of this character against a brother the Lord will avenge. God has called us unto holiness. To give way, therefore to these gross passions is, not only to sin against one another, but to despise God, and ignore the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Uncleanness is here put in contrast to holiness. It is not only righteousness to which we are called, but holiness, which involves the love of what is good and the hatred of evil. Righteousness does not require such feelings as this, but the believer must be holy as well as righteous. If we should think lightly of unseemly conduct, this is not simply despising men's opinions but despising God Himself who, in the very fact of giving us His Holy Spirit has provided the power to both discern and to refuse uncleanness.