A Different Standard

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A week or two ago, I was having a conversation with Stella, our church secretary. We were talking about parenting because I had just been out to talk to my son at lunch and said, you know, if the boys are causing trouble at lunch and you’ve just exhausted all other means of dealing with it, you know, there’s nothing wrong with going and sitting with the girls for a couple days and having lunch with them. That was a whole different conversation.

But as we were talking, Stella said, you know, it’s funny. I tell my daughters, it’s okay to go hang out with the boys. She said, when I was growing up, I always hung out with the boys because boys are less drama.

Stella’s words, not mine. All right. And I said, well, that’s, you know, that’s funny because when I was in high school, I primarily ran around with the girls because I didn’t have any tolerance for the locker room talk.

And Stella said, that’s just so weird about America. In Europe, we didn’t have that. She said, I knew lots of French people in college.

I’m pretty sure y’all have locker room talk. In my experience, they were a lot more open about things than we were. She said, yeah, but we were only in PE one hour a day.

Oh, we have a language thing here. So I had to very gently and in a way that wouldn’t get me or the church sued, explained to Stella what locker room talk was without going into any detail. Now, I tell you that because of where we are in the book of 1 Corinthians.

There are certain, I warned you going into this study, that there were going to be things that were going to be uncomfortable for me to talk about, and there were going to be things that were uncomfortable for you to hear about. First Corinthians is such a long writing that it’s easy to forget some of the stuff that’s in there. And I thought we were to the point of being past some of the uncomfortable stuff to talk about.

And I came out of my office one day this week to Christy and Bob who were sitting out in the main office. I said, somebody remind me why I picked this book to preach through. Because we are not past the uncomfortable things.

We are just getting started and it only gets worse from here. But, I mean worse in the sense of being uncomfortable. But, as we go through this book, even the parts that are not necessarily high on my list to talk about, they are important because they’re God’s word.

They’re important because they speak to the needs of our society. I will be as cautious in explaining what’s going on as I was with Stella, keeping in mind that there are children in the room, some of whom are mine. And so I want to keep things as light as possible.

And realizing that everybody in this room is in a different place in life, I want to make these principles as broadly applicable as possible still remaining faithful to the text. I want you to understand that as we get into all of this over the next few weeks, that we’re going to look at some of these things, but as uncomfortable as they may be to talk about, I honestly believe that the failure of the church, not just our church, but churches in the western world, the failure of the church to address these topics, standing on the authority of God’s word, is a big part of the reason why we find ourselves in the kind of society we live in. Some of you may remember Rita Willoughby, who led the Pregnancy Resource Center until she passed away a couple of years.

But she talked about this in several conversations we had, that churches no longer challenge people to moral purity, and that’s why we have some of the problems that we have. And so we’re going to get into that today because it’s in God’s Word. And so we’re going to be in 1 Corinthians chapter 6 today.

1 Corinthians chapter 6. and we’re going to look at the second half of the chapter if you would turn there with me and once you find it if you’d stand as we read together from God’s word if you can’t find it or don’t don’t have your bible it’ll be on the screen for you this morning so here’s what Paul says all things are lawful for me but not all things are profitable all things are lawful for me but I will not be mastered by anything food is for the stomach and the stomach is for food but God will do away with both of them. Yet the body is not for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body.

Now God has not only raised up the Lord, but will also raise us up through his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?

May it never be. Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her? For he says the two shall become one flesh.

But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with him. Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man commits sins against his own body.

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body, and you may be seated. So Paul is dealing here with the immorality that was rampant in Corinth, and their culture was so saturated with every form of immorality, particularly sexual immorality.

That’s what they were known for in Corinth. Their culture was so permeated with this that it was difficult for the new believers to just make a 180 degree turn from that all of a sudden. And so there were people in the church who were still struggling with this, and Paul is writing to encourage them.

There was this idea in Corinth that especially for men, it was acceptable to engage in sexual relationships with anyone and everyone that they found. Men, women, boys, it did not matter. It was expected.

The idea of prostitution here, this even took place in the pagan worship in Corinth. They would go and visit the temples and would engage in those activities. But this is a symptom of something deeper at Corinth.

It wasn’t just this one sin. It was a whole lifestyle and a whole philosophy that said, whatever seems right to you is what’s right. Whatever feels right in the moment is what’s right.

There was this idea that we were completely free and unrestrained to live however we wanted to. And that’s part of the reason why I’ve told you all through this study that Corinth has so much in common with our modern world. Because there’s the idea that I can do what I want to do.

Who are you to tell me? Who are you to say? I was reading, don’t ask me how I ran across this article, I just read random things.

But I was reading an article about the election they had, I think yesterday or earlier in the week in New Zealand. And they were talking about a former member of parliament or a former minister or somebody in parliament who was making a speech on abortion and said, and you know, it would be really helpful if the religious leaders would just stop talking about it and stop talking about this issue. You know, if y’all could do that, it would be helpful.

Like it’s just up to us to decide what’s. . .

Like the religious leaders in New Zealand were just preaching on that because that’s what they felt like rather than that’s what God’s word says. We don’t get to just decide. It’s a puzzling idea to me, and it may be a puzzling idea to you if you’ve been a Christian for any length of time, that people think moral standards are just what we decide, and yet that’s what the world thinks.

And so no wonder they would look at us and say, well, if you just let it go, if you just change your mind, not just about abortion, but whatever it is, if you just change your mind and let it go, why do you have to make such a big deal about it? Yeah, I didn’t decide this. there’s a lot of things in life that would be easier there’s a lot of things in society that would be easier if we could just let them go and just leave everybody alone and not have to worry about it not have to talk about it but what would be easier for me is not what determines what’s true what I feel like saying is not what determines what is true god determines what is true and he’s revealed it to us in his word I I don’t have a choice I mean I I do have a choice I could keep my mouth shut.

I guess I could try to say something else. And then you have the choice to send me to find something else to do, right? As you should.

Because this tells us what’s true. I don’t decide. But the world in Corinth and so much of our world today said, oh, we decide.

And whatever we feel like works is what’s going to be okay. And that’s what we’re going to do. Paul is dealing with Christians, or at least in some cases professing Christians, who come from this mindset that we choose what’s true.

Not just in sexual issues, but in all forms of morality. We choose what’s true. And here in particular, he is holding up this Judeo-Christian idea of sexual morality that says marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman, and that that’s the only arena in which this is supposed to take place.

Anything else is a violation of God’s design. And that was completely foreign to the people of Corinth. And so he’s addressing the fact that there are these two views, these two standards of morality, and they’re running up against each other because they both can’t be true.

And we see here, through Paul’s discussion at the end of chapter 6, that Christianity’s moral standard is disconnected from the world’s and stands in opposition to it. And both of those statements are important. Again, if you’ve spent much time as a Christian at all, you get the idea that the Christian moral standard that God has revealed in Scripture, it’s not what we decided, it’s not what we voted on, it’s not because it’s tradition, it’s rooted in what God says here.

We get the idea that it stands in opposition to what the world says outside. The world says certain things are okay that God’s Word says are not okay. The world says certain things are not okay that God’s Word says are okay.

They stand in opposition to each other. But we shouldn’t take from that that God’s moral standard is somehow tied to cultures, and whatever culture says is right, God’s going to be on the other side. This is not, you know, God is not the child.

You know, you have two children, and one says, I like chocolate ice cream. the other one says, I like chocolate ice cream too. And the other one says, well, then I like vanilla.

God’s not doing that. God’s not changing his moral standard just to be opposite of the culture. There’s a disconnect.

It’s completely irrelevant. God does not care at all what culture says is right and wrong in the sense of determining what he says is right and wrong. Now, God cares.

God calls us to adhere to his moral standard, but God is not determining his moral standard based on what we do or don’t do. The two are disconnected. We see this all throughout the passage where he compares the two.

We see it all throughout 1 Corinthians, even in the places where we’ve already looked. Last week, for example, it was normal for them to just go into court because they could and to fight each other in court to try to gain some kind of advantage. And Paul says, you’re not supposed to do that.

So even into what we would consider mundane things, Things that, apart from what God has said, we might not even look at as moral issues at all. A lot of times we don’t think about civil lawsuits necessarily being a moral issue. But he looked at what they were doing and said, there’s a disconnect here between what society thinks and what God thinks.

And as believers, we need to understand that. Because we are called, you and I are called to live according to a moral standard that is usually very, very different from what the world says is right. And the moral standard that we’re called to live to is also often very, very different from what feels right.

And yet what feels right inside and what the world says outside is right, don’t determine for us what’s right, God does. And if you feel like, oh, he’s, here he is telling us how to live, I’m telling myself. If you ever feel like, oh, he’s preaching right at me, most of the time I’m preaching at myself, because I’m a human too, I have a sin nature just like everybody else.

I live in the same society everyone else does. We’re all in this same boat. And it’s easy to convince ourselves sometimes that, well, no, I think this is okay.

No, God’s word makes the choice. God’s word makes the choice, not me. So we’re called to live according to a higher standard, and we have to remember that because we are inundated from inside and from outside with messages that tell us the opposite.

Now, Paul’s letter here gives us five reasons. These are probably not the only five reasons, but it gives us five reasons why we as Christians should abandon the world’s moral standards. Now, that doesn’t mean, again, that we abandon all moral standards because they’re still God’s.

But as we look at a way that everybody else seems to think is right, and if we look at a way that feels right, why in the world would we turn against that? Paul outlines a few reasons here that I’d like to share with you this morning. The first reason is that immoral behavior isn’t good for us in the long run.

Look with me at verse 12. He says, all things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. That word profitable has nothing to do with money.

It means the idea of something being beneficial. As believers, and he’s dealing with the idea of our freedom in Christ here, because this is something that took a long time for the early churches to understand. They’d go to one extreme or the other. There were those who said, oh, you must follow the Old Testament law to the letter in order to be saved.

Paul dealt with them in Galatians. Then there were others, they were called legalists. On the other side were what were called the antinomians who said, oh, well, if we’re not bound by the law for salvation, we can do whatever we want.

And neither of these things are true. Even though in Christ we’ve been set free from the Old Testament law, that doesn’t mean that everything that there is in the world, just because we have freedom in Christ, doesn’t mean that everything is good for us. As a follower of Jesus Christ, are you going to lose your salvation if you go out and choose to sin today?

No, but you shouldn’t, because it’s not good for you. It’s not profitable. Just because we have the freedom, just because we have the ability to do something, doesn’t mean that it’s profitable.

And sin is very deceptive. Sin will lie to us. Sin will convince us, oh, it’s just a little bit.

Oh, just a little bit won’t hurt. Sin will take you further than you intend to go. Sin will take you lower than you intended to go.

Sin will keep you gone longer than you intended to be away and make it harder to get back than you ever thought. It’s not good for us in the long run. It might seem fine now.

The Bible even talks about the pleasures of sin for a season. The Bible even says sin can be fun in the moment. God acknowledges that, and yet there’s always a price due.

I like going to restaurants where you pay up front when you order, because I always hate that check that comes when you’ve finished. You sit down and you order, and you order a little more, and yeah, dessert sounds good, yeah, how about an appetite? And then, once you’ve eaten, then the bill comes due.

There’s always that bill, and you think, did I eat all this? Sin is that way, too. There’s always a price that comes due in the long run.

And immoral behavior is not good for us. Listen, some of the things that he writes about here are because he knows that they’re going to hurt us in the long run. The lawsuits that were taking place in the church were going to destroy the unity of the congregation.

He writes about sexual sin. It’s because adultery never, ever, ever makes things better. It leaves a path of broken lives in its wake.

You look at anything that God says is sin, there usually you’re going to see a trail of destruction behind it. where for a moment it seems like a good idea, but it never in the long run turns out to be good for us. Not all things are profitable.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Second thing in verse 12 also, immoral behavior enslaves us. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything.

So just because I can do something, why would I want to become enslaved by something? I’ve just been set free in Christ. Why would I want to take on the bondage of something else? Sin is addictive.

Sin is like those potato chips that used to just say you can’t eat just one. And we probably all have things that we struggle with. Hebrews talks about the sin that does so easily beset us.

Don’t delude yourself into thinking, well, it’s just a little bit, it’s just this one time. Sin has a way of sucking us in, of besetting us, as Hebrews says. Now, I should have started out this way, but in case anyone here is new, when I say sin, I love the definition they give to the kids at camp.

Sin is anything that we think, say, do, or don’t do that displeases God. That’s what we’re talking about. Am I going to give you a list of all of them today?

No, we may talk about some examples. But with God’s Word and our conscience, we can pretty well figure out what’s a sin and what’s not. But that immoral behavior enslaves us.

Verse 13 tells us that immoral behavior ignores God’s design. He says here, food is for the stomach and the stomach is for food, yet God will do away with both of them. Yet the body is not for immorality, but for the Lord.

And the Lord is for the body. See, the Corinthians would think, for example, gluttony is okay. God gave me a mouth and a stomach.

He obviously intended me to use them as much as I want whenever I want. What’s wrong with it? God made me this way.

Yet that’s not what God designed the mouth and the stomach for. Not to engage in gluttony. By the same token, as he’s talking about some of the specific sins, some of the immorality and the visiting of the temple prostitutes and such, people would make the case, well, God created me with a body.

Aren’t I supposed to use it? Not that way. Not to engage in things that are outside of God’s design.

Just because he made things and just because he gifts us with things doesn’t mean that we misuse them and still claim that it’s fine with him. Immoral behavior ignores God’s design. and we come to verses 14 and 15 and I feel like these get scarier as we go along.

Verses 14 and 15, now God has not only raised up the Lord, that’s the Father raising up the Son, but he will also raise us up through his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Your bodies belong to Christ. Shall I then take them away, take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?

He says, may it never be. Talking to the people at the church at Corinth, he says, You belong to Jesus. And wherever you go, you represent Jesus.

Are you really going to carry the name of Jesus with you into a brothel? Are you going to carry the name of Jesus with you into that bar? Are you going to carry the name of Jesus with you to that website?

Are you going to carry the name of Jesus with you to go have that attitude and that conversation? See, when we’re involved in immoral behavior, whatever it may be, it dishonors Jesus Christ if we profess to belong to Him. And then we look at verses 16 and 17.

Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her? For he says the two shall become one flesh, but the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with him. He talks about this union with the temple prostitutes.

Folks, this points to the fact that when we chase after immoral lifestyles, it bonds us to the world where our hearts are supposed to be attached to Christ and are supposed to be pursuing Him. When we start engaging in things that are outside of His will for us, when we start engaging in sinful things as a habit, and by the way, everybody in this room sins. And you may have messed up already today.

I’m not trying to beat you up about it. I can’t get on the highway without having sinful thoughts, right? But as Christians, we’re not supposed to pursue it as a lifestyle.

We’re supposed to repent of it and then move forward with the Lord. But if we pursue sinful things as a lifestyle, it’s going to draw our hearts closer to the world, where our hearts are supposed to be attached to Christ, where we’re supposed to be pursuing Christ and loving Christ. We’re going to find ourselves more and more loving the things of the world. Because what we do in the physical world matters.

It doesn’t happen in isolation from what’s taking place in the spiritual world. And it’s easy to talk about, I mean, it’s easy enough to talk about the dangers of living by the world’s moral standard, the dangers of immorality. It’s one thing to talk about these things and to leave you here today with, well, I feel really bad now.

I’m thinking about all the ways I’ve messed up. But rather than just leave you there, I want to take us through the last few verses of this and see what we can do instead. See what God’s Word calls us to do instead.

What God’s Holy Spirit equips us to be able to do instead. So I want to share with you three tips for godly living in a pagan culture. When we, like the Corinthians, are walking around in a world that bombards us from the outside with messages of just do whatever you want.

When we’re assailed from the inside by the sin nature that tells us, no, that’s a good idea. Who cares what God says? We’re living in the same kind of pagan culture.

What can we do? It’s the same things that Paul told the Corinthians to do. Let’s look at verse 18.

He says, flee immorality. Run away. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body.

Okay, there again, he’s talking about sexual immorality. All sin is equal in the sense that any sin is enough to condemn us before a holy God. If God is absolutely sinless and perfect and holy, then the littlest lie any of us could ever tell is enough for us to fall short of that standard.

So any sin is enough to condemn us. In that sense, all sin is equal. At the same time, the Bible is clear that not all sins are the same. Some of them have even graver consequences and incur more strenuous judgments.

And he happens to be talking about one here, but even there, even this that he majors on, even through the next chapters, because it is so dangerous, he says, flee, run away. I remember growing up in the youth group and hearing, oh, resist temptation, being taught to resist temptation. And there is some mention in the Bible of resisting temptation.

But you know what’s better than resisting temptation? Get out of dodge. Flee temptation.

Flee immorality. You see it come and run the other way because you and I are not going to be strong enough to withstand temptation every time it rears its ugly head. So we get out of there when we see it.

And in those times we have no alternative, we resist. The safest course of action is being the next zip code from temptation. He says here, flee immorality, run from it. And he talks about the sins that the Corinthians were committing with their body and how dangerous it was to them spiritually.

And so for you and me, we need to recognize that there’s a spiritual dimension to our physical lives. The Corinthians, they had this disconnect between the spiritual world and the physical world. Some of the earliest Christian heresies, like Gnosticism, taught that there was this disconnect here.

And so you could do whatever you wanted in the physical sense, and it had nothing to do with the spiritual sense. But God’s Word teaches us that these things are connected. And what we do in the physical world, meaning with our lives, with our hands, with our feet, with our mouths, these things matter because they have an impact on what’s going on spiritually.

They have an impact on us. They have an impact on others. They have an impact on our walk with the Lord.

And I think we forget about that sometimes. So we as believers, if we want to walk in a godly way, we need that reminder that what happens out here doesn’t happen in isolation from what’s going on in here. The two are connected.

We also need to remember who we belong to. Verses 19 and 20. He says, or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own, for you have been bought with a price.

I graduated high school the year before my sister started high school. And so she wasn’t driving yet. And so I would every morning get up and get ready to drive to college, and I’d drop her off at the high school on my way down there.

And she used to get so mad at me because I’d tell her every day when I dropped her off, you remember who you represent. People know us in this town. She didn’t like hearing that.

You know what? I don’t much care for it either when the Holy Spirit tells me the same thing. It’s right.

Just saying my flesh doesn’t particularly care for that correction. We need to be reminded of who we belong to. He says you are the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Now earlier in first Corinthians, we’ve already seen where he talks about the church as a whole, the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit. But he goes on to, because he’s talking about their longing for the Corinthian temples and going there as a place of worship as opposed to hiding in the back room of somebody’s house, worshiping in secret with Christians. But as we get further into 1 Corinthians, starting here, he talks about how we as individual believers are the temple of the Holy Spirit in the sense that the very Spirit of God lives inside of us.

And that Spirit of God was given to us not only to help us and strengthen us and guide us, but was given to us as a reminder of the presence of God with us and that we belong to Him and that we will be received to him when all of this is said and done. The Holy Spirit is there as a down payment and a seal. And for us to be the temple of the Holy Spirit is a marker of the fact that we belong to God. As it says in verse 20, you’ve been bought with a price.

When we recognize that Jesus paid for us, we have to remember then that we belong to him. It’s not up to me any longer to call the shots in my own life. I’ve been bought with a price.

And if we keep that at the forefront of our minds, it changes the calculations as we go through a pagan world. Well, how am I going to live here? What choice am I going to make?

You know what? We’ve already been told what choice to make if we remember who we belong to. And then verse 20 ends with this short phrase, therefore glorify God in your body.

Folks, we can resolve to glorify God in everything that we do. In the big things, in the little things, in all of it. But we make the decision ahead of time.

Before we get into the moment of temptation, before we get in the moment of decision where we have to weigh the pros and cons and, oh, what am I going to do and the pressure’s on. No, we just decide going into it. No matter what happens today, I’m going to do my best as the Holy Spirit empowers me to do it.

I’m going to do my best to choose things that are going to bring glory to God. In little things, in big things, in easy things, in hard things, in all of it. He says, glorify God in your body.

God calls us to live godly lives. Now, everything that he’s written here, everything that I’ve shared so far this morning, is to believers, people who’ve already trusted in Jesus Christ as their Savior. But if you’re listening to this this morning and you’ve never trusted Jesus as your Savior, you don’t have that relationship with him, this is not to you.

Because I’d be asking you to do things that you can’t do. It’s hard enough for Christians to live up to this moral standard, even with the Holy without the Holy Spirit, it’s impossible to do. It was impossible for us before we became believers.

And that’s precisely the reason why Jesus came to earth in the first place, because each of us have sinned against a holy God. Each of us have disobeyed him. We have thought, said, done, or not done things that displeased God.

And no matter how good we tried to be from there on out, we could never erase that wrong that we’ve done. That sin had to be paid for. As I said earlier, the check always do.

And we could spend eternity separated from God because He’s holy. He can’t just allow sin in. He can’t just be okay with sin.

That sin has to be punished, just like any righteous judge would do. That sin had to be paid for. So you and I could pay for it by spending eternity separated from Him, or Jesus could come with no sin of His own and take responsibility for ours and go in our place to the cross where He was nailed there by His hands and His feet, and He shed His blood and He died to pay for those sins in full.

And then he rose again from the dead in the same body three days later to prove it. Now God says that that slate has been wiped clean. All the ways we inevitably fall short are gone.

They’re forgiven. He chooses not to remember them, chooses not to hold them against us. Not because we’re good, not because we’re moral, but because Jesus paid for them.

And all that you have to do to get that forgiveness, all that you have to do to get that relationship with him is simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is and that he did what he said he did. That he’s the son of God who paid for your sins in full on the cross and rose again to prove it. Believe that and ask God for the forgiveness and the salvation and you’ll have it.

And then that’s where this starts. This walking in a way that’s pleasing him. It’s not something we can do on our own.

But by the power of the Holy Spirit in us who comes to live inside of us once we belong to Jesus Christ. Suddenly for the fir