Loading
Loading
1 Corinthians
1 Corinthians 6 — Lawsuits, identity, and what your body is actually for
5 min read
is still writing to the in , and he's not done being frustrated. The last few chapters dealt with their arrogance and a case of blatant immorality they were ignoring. Now he shifts — but the underlying problem is the same. These believers kept acting like their new hadn't actually changed anything about how they lived.
This chapter moves fast. Paul tackles two completely different issues — lawsuits between believers and sexual immorality — but they're connected by one thread: the Corinthians didn't understand what belonging to Christ actually meant. For their relationships. For their conflicts. For their bodies. For everything.
Apparently some of the Corinthian believers were taking each other to court — in front of Roman judges — over personal disputes. Paul was stunned. He wrote:
"When one of you has a problem with another believer, how do you have the nerve to take it before a secular court instead of letting the handle it? Don't you realize that God's people will one day judge the world? And if you're going to judge the world, can't you handle a minor disagreement among yourselves?
We're going to judge — and you can't sort out everyday disputes?
I'm saying this to shame you. Is there really not a single wise person among you who can settle things between two believers? Instead, you've got brother dragging brother into court — in front of people who don't even share your ."
Then Paul pushed even harder:
"The fact that you have lawsuits against each other at all is already a loss. Why not just accept being wronged? Why not let yourself be cheated? Instead, you're the ones doing the cheating and the wronging — and you're doing it to your own family."
This wasn't about legal systems being bad. Paul's point was about what it says when believers can't resolve their own conflicts. If you're supposed to be a family — people united by something deeper than contracts and courts — then airing your grievances in front of people outside the family is an admission that the family isn't working. It's like two siblings calling the police on each other over a disagreement about chores. Something has already gone wrong long before the phone call.
And then that last line. Paul's real frustration wasn't just that they were suing each other. It was that they were the ones causing the harm in the first place. The was supposed to be different. They were proving it wasn't.
Paul didn't pull his punches here. He wasn't being gentle. He was being honest:
"Don't you know that people who live in unrighteousness won't inherit the ? Don't fool yourselves. The sexually immoral, worshippers, adulterers, those who practice homosexuality, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, the verbally abusive, swindlers — none of them will inherit what God has prepared."
That's a heavy list. And Paul meant it to land heavy. But he didn't leave it there. The very next sentence turns everything around:
"And that's what some of you were. But you were washed. You were set apart. You were declared — in the name of the Lord Christ and by the of our God."
Read that again. Were. Past tense. Paul didn't write that list to condemn them — he wrote it to remind them who they aren't anymore. Every person in that had a past. Some of them had been on that list. And didn't just cover it — it changed them. Washed. . . Three words, each one doing something different. Cleaned up. Set apart. Declared not guilty.
The point isn't "look how bad you were." The point is "look at what happened to you — so stop living like it didn't."
Now Paul addressed a slogan the Corinthians apparently loved to throw around. They'd taken the idea of Christian and turned it into a blank check. Paul quoted their own words back to them — and then corrected them:
"'Everything is permissible for me' — sure, but not everything is beneficial. 'Everything is permissible for me' — but I refuse to be controlled by anything.
'Food was made for the stomach and the stomach for food' — and God will do away with both of them. But the body is not meant for sexual immorality. It's meant for the Lord — and the Lord for the body. God raised Jesus from the dead, and he will raise us up too by his power."
The Corinthians were essentially arguing: "We're free in Christ, so nothing we do with our bodies really matters." Paul's response was brilliant. He didn't deny their . He reframed what actually looks like. You're free — yes. But isn't the absence of all boundaries. It's the refusal to be enslaved to anything. If your "" has you trapped in a pattern you can't stop, that's not . That's a different kind of chain.
Think about how often we make the same argument. "It's my life." "I'm not hurting anyone." "I should be able to do what I want." Paul would say: you're asking the wrong question. The question isn't "am I allowed?" The question is "is this making me more free, or less?"
Paul saved his most striking argument for last. And he didn't soften it:
"Don't you know that your bodies are parts of Christ himself? Should I take what belongs to Christ and unite it with a prostitute? Absolutely not.
Don't you know that whoever joins himself to a prostitute becomes one body with her? says, 'The two will become one flesh.' But the person who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.
Run from sexual immorality. Every other a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against their own body."
Then he landed the argument with one of the most quoted lines in the New Testament:
"Don't you know that your body is a — who lives in you, who you received from God? You are not your own. You were bought at a price. So honor God with your body."
This is where everything in the chapter connects. The lawsuits. The list of sins. The slogan about . All of it was pointing here. The Corinthians kept acting like their bodies were their own property to do whatever they wanted with. Paul said the opposite — your body is occupied territory. The lives there. And it cost something. The price wasn't symbolic. It was a .
That phrase — "you are not your own" — runs against everything our culture tells us. We live in a world built on "my body, my choice" across every category. And Paul isn't arguing for control or shame. He's arguing for something bigger: that belonging to God gives your body more dignity, not less. Every choice you make with your body matters — not because God is watching like a surveillance camera, but because your body is where he chose to live. That changes everything about how you treat it.
Share this chapter