Sexual Immorality

Sexual Immorality

“Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never!  
Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.”  
But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit. 
Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body.  
Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own;  you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.”
             1Corinthians6:15-20.
Paul when writing to the Corinthians knew he was writing to believers surrounded by more than it’s fair share of sin. At its height Corinth had 1000 priestess prostitutes working in the temple to Aphrodite.
So widely known was the immorality in Corinth that the Greek verb “to Corinthianize” came to mean “to practice sexual immorality.”
Here Paul warns the Corinthians against sexual immorality.
“Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.”
I remember a doctor friend of mine once telling a youth group that you take a part of the person you have sex with, with you. Not just emotionally but physically.
This was at the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic when little was known about it. He was warning them to beware that they could easily get a sexually transmitted disease.
That saving themselves for marriage was the best possible thing.
It hit home to that youth group when one of their number a young girl only sixteen got pregnant to a guy she didn’t really like. A boy she’d simply had a carnal fling with.
Not only that but another this time a sixteen year old, a boy, got AIDS.
For the girl it meant that she would have in her life for many years to come, a guy that she had no real feelings for, but had fathered her child.
For the boy who’d contracted AIDS back then it was a virtual death sentence and the worse case scenario did come to be. A few years later he died. A tragic thing that didn’t have to be.
Fortunately to the credit of the youth leaders and the church leader they forgave the two and stood by them giving them as much help as they could.
They were young. They’d made a mistake and both confessed their sin and asked God’s forgiveness.  What more could they do?
As Christians living in the twenty-first century we are surrounded by sex. It is easy to get access to it. Every city in the world has it’s seamy side, not to mention the internet.
Men especially seem to fall into sexual impurity easy. Still it is avoidable.
It was not necessary for Christians in Corinth to visit the prostitutes at Aphrodite's temple. Nor is it necessary for Christians to day to pick up prostitutes or engage in any kind of sexual immorality.
As the writer of Ecclesiastes states,
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun”
              Ecclesiastes 1:9.
The temptation of sexual immorality has been around since man started living in villages and probably even before that.
The vast majority of people, Christians and none Christians do not fall into it.
It is therefore up to the individual to resist temptation and to ask God for the strength to overcome.
Think about it.