1 Corinthians 6
6
The Report About Lawsuits
1When one of you is in a dispute with another believer, how dare you take them to court to be judged by ungodly people! Why don’t you ask the Lord’s people to help you settle it? 2Don’t you know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? Since you’re going to do that, don’t you think you can judge small cases? 3Don’t you know that we’re even going to judge angels? We should certainly be able to judge the things of this life! 4So if you’re in a dispute with someone, should you ask people that the church doesn’t even respect to settle it? Of course not! 5You should be ashamed. Is it possible that none of you are wise enough to settle disputes between believers, 6so that they’re taking each other to court instead, in front of unbelievers?
7Just by getting into a lawsuit with another believer, you’ve already lost. Wouldn’t it be better to be treated wrongly instead? Wouldn’t it be better just to be cheated? 8Instead, you’re cheating and doing wrong yourselves, and you’re doing it to your own brothers and sisters. 9Don’t you know that people who do wrong won’t inherit God’s kingdom? Don’t be deceived. People who commit sexual sins, or who worship idols or commit adultery, or men who sleep with other men, 10or thieves or greedy people, or those who are often drunk or tell lies or cheat, will not inherit God’s kingdom. 11Some of you used to do things like that. But you were washed and made holy and right with God in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
The Report About Sexual Sins
12Some of you are saying, “I have the right to do anything.” That may be true, but not everything is helpful. If you say, “I have the right to do anything,” you should also say, “But I won’t be controlled by anything.” 13Some of you are saying, “Food is meant for the stomach, and the stomach is meant for food, and God will destroy both of them.” But you can’t say the same thing about the body and sexual sins. The body is meant for the Lord, and the Lord is meant for the body. 14By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us up too. 15Don’t you know that your bodies are part of Christ himself? Should I take a part of Christ and join it to a prostitute? Never! 16Don’t you know that when you have sex with a prostitute, you become one with her in body? Scripture says, “The two will become one.” 17But whoever is joined to the Lord becomes one with him in spirit.
18So keep far away from sexual sins. All the other sins a person commits are outside the body. But if a person commits sexual sins, those are sins against their own body. 19Don’t you know that together you are a body, which is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you? You have received the Spirit from God. You don’t belong to yourselves; 20you were bought with a price. So honor God together as one body.
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1 Corinthians 6
6
1-4And how dare you take each other to court! When you think you have been wronged, does it make any sense to go before a court that knows nothing of God’s ways instead of a family of Christians? The day is coming when the world is going to stand before a jury made up of followers of Jesus. If someday you are going to rule on the world’s fate, wouldn’t it be a good idea to practice on some of these smaller cases? Why, we’re even going to judge angels! So why not these everyday affairs? As these disagreements and wrongs surface, why would you ever entrust them to the judgment of people you don’t trust in any other way?
5-6I say this as bluntly as I can to wake you up to the stupidity of what you’re doing. Is it possible that there isn’t one levelheaded person among you who can make fair decisions when disagreements and disputes come up? I don’t believe it. And here you are taking each other to court before people who don’t even believe in God! How can they render justice if they don’t believe in the God of justice?
7-8These court cases are a black eye on your community. Wouldn’t it be far better to just take it, to let yourselves be wronged and forget it? All you’re doing is providing fuel for more wrong, more injustice, bringing more hurt to the people of your own spiritual family.
9-11Don’t you realize that this is not the way to live? Unjust people who don’t care about God will not be joining in his kingdom. Those who use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex, use and abuse the earth and everything in it, don’t qualify as citizens in God’s kingdom. A number of you know from experience what I’m talking about, for not so long ago you were on that list. Since then, you’ve been cleaned up and given a fresh start by Jesus, our Master, our Messiah, and by our God present in us, the Spirit.
12Just because something is technically legal doesn’t mean that it’s spiritually appropriate. If I went around doing whatever I thought I could get by with, I’d be a slave to my whims.
13You know the old saying, “First you eat to live, and then you live to eat”? Well, it may be true that the body is only a temporary thing, but that’s no excuse for stuffing your body with food, or indulging it with sex. Since the Master honors you with a body, honor him with your body!
14-15God honored the Master’s body by raising it from the grave. He’ll treat yours with the same resurrection power. Until that time, remember that your bodies are created with the same dignity as the Master’s body. You wouldn’t take the Master’s body off to a whorehouse, would you? I should hope not.
16-20There’s more to sex than mere skin on skin. Sex is as much spiritual mystery as physical fact. As written in Scripture, “The two become one.” Since we want to become spiritually one with the Master, we must not pursue the kind of sex that avoids commitment and intimacy, leaving us more lonely than ever—the kind of sex that can never “become one.” There is a sense in which sexual sins are different from all others. In sexual sin we violate the sacredness of our own bodies, these bodies that were made for God-given and God-modeled love, for “becoming one” with another. Or didn’t you realize that your body is a sacred place, the place of the Holy Spirit? Don’t you see that you can’t live however you please, squandering what God paid such a high price for? The physical part of you is not some piece of property belonging to the spiritual part of you. God owns the whole works. So let people see God in and through your body.
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THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved. Used by permission of NavPress. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers.