Blessed Hope Bible-Presbyterian Church
500 Upper Bukit Timah Rd, Singapore 678106
The Apostle Paul speaks of those who remain single and are not married. They are not to be despised for remaining single, for not having any sexual relationship with woman. He says it is good. But it must not be construed as a more desirable spiritual state for a person. And the single man or the single woman should not be pressurised to get married.
The believer is urged to possess his body in holiness. This is his reasonable service. Our Lord paid the price to purchase his salvation, cleansing him for all his sins. The nail pierced hands are testimony of the suffering that the Lord endured. More than that is the weight of human sins that was upon Him when He bore it alone on the cross rescuing the believer from the judgment of hell fire.
The late Adrian Rogers made this insightful observation, “Do you know what a carnal person is? A carnal person is a selfish person. He is living as though he belonged to himself; and so, what he wants to do, what he wants to think, what he wants to feel, what he wants to say, what he wants to buy, where he wants to go, how he wants to act — he does. He acts as though he owns himself, when he does not. The cure for carnality is to be aware of the Savior’s purchase of you, to see the price that was paid for you.”
The believer is exhorted to flee sexual immorality. This is a command to act decisively, to move hastily from danger from fear of being ensnared. Let this be a spiritual reflex in your life. All other sins a man commits are outside his body but sexual sins harms the body. It defiles him. How so? As one writer puts it succinctly, “It wastes the bodily energies; produces feebleness, weakness, and disease; it impairs the strength, enervates the man, and shortens life.” [Barnes]
The believer is to possess his body in honour by abstaining and fleeing any form of immorality. He is joined in one spirit with the Lord. In him dwells the Spirit of Christ. When the believer commits immorality outside marriage, he sins against Christ who is joined to him.
Matthew Poole said well, “Christ is united to the person of the believer, and He is the Head of the church, which is His mystical body; so that the bodies of believers are in a sense the members of Christ, and should be used by us as the members of Christ, which we should not rend from Him: but he that doth commit fornication, rends his body from Christ, and maketh it the member of an harlot; for as the man and wife are one flesh by Divine ordination, Genesis 2:24, so the fornicater and the harlot are one flesh by an impure” union.
The believer must understand that in the same manner which Jesus was raised from the dead, he shall be given a glorified body at the Lord’s returns. The body is not for immorality but for union with the Lord at His coming again. It is to be kept pure.
God has wonderfully made man with digestive system in his stomach that allows food that is consumed to be assimilated to nourish up the body. And yet, its benefit is be temporal. The believer must not make the satisfying of his physical appetite the only focus of his life – Matthew 4:4 … It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
A good paraphrase is “All things are permissible to me but I will not be enslaved by any.” The Apostle Paul testifies how needful it is for the believer to exercise their God-given power to say “no” to any temptation to sin and anything that robs him of his devotion to the Lord. He will not be a slave to sin but fears God and will not be brought under its subjection. He uses the first person “I” to encourage the Corinthian Christians that he himself takes steps not to be brought under any bondage of sin, exercising his liberty in Christ. Setting the example, he urges the believers to heed his exhortation.
A good paraphrase is “All things are permissible but all things are not profitable”. “Lawful” in the sense that “it is possible, referring to moral possibility or propriety in that it is lawful, right, permissible”. The word “expedient” means “to be profitable, advantageous, to contribute or bring together for the benefit of another.”