What Is God's Big Deal With Sex? (1 Cor. 6:12-20)

Good morning to you as His people. I want to highlight one thing before we jump into the sermon this morning. We have available these notes for kids out on the round high top tables. They're very generic, but they're for every Sunday. If kids need something to write on, this is a way of helping our kids who are in the service engage in what's happening during the sermon. You can pick those up in the lobby.

We're in a series called No Bad Questions, which comes from my conviction that there should be no bad questions in church about faith. We should be able to ask anything, talk about anything. The Christian faith is complicated and in many ways hard to understand. There's a lot of times you walk into a church and you feel like one person like me is talking to you, and it doesn't feel like much of an opportunity to ask questions. So we've provided this way during this series for you to ask questions. You can send questions to an email address: questionsctkreilly.org. I'm trying to engage those every week on social media.

Today, the question is: What is God's big deal with sex?

And two caveats this morning. One is if you're a parent, don't worry. This sermon is decidedly PG, and you don't have anything to fear from me today. Second is I'm probably not going to talk about anything you think I'm going to talk about today. So no judgment, condemnation, drawing lines. Rather, my goal for today's sermon is to get to the question under the question. Every time people have engagements in communities of faith around sexuality, I think we often miss the main point. So today I want to ask this question, which I think is the really deep question: Who says? Who says what I get to do or not with my body? This is my own, right?

In looking at this, I'm going to distinguish over and over in this sermon a difference between what is natural and what is normal.

Now, it is our custom to read God's Word aloud together. I'm going to invite you to turn in your bulletin or look behind me. We're going to read from 1 Corinthians 6:12-20.

Would you join me as we read God's word aloud together?

Everything is permissible for me, but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible for me, but I will not be mastered by anything. Food is for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will do away with both of them. However, the body is not for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. God raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. Don't you know that your bodies are a part of Christ's body? Should I then take part of Christ's body and make it part of a prostitute? Absolutely not. Don't you know that anyone joined to a prostitute is one body with her? The two will become one flesh, but anyone joined to the Lord is one spirit with him. Flee sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the person who is sexually immoral sins against his own body. Don't you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you are bought at a price. So glorify God with your body. — 1 Corinthians 6:12-20

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

I want you to think about lions that you've seen in the zoo. There's a behavior pattern that you may not know the word for, but I'm sure you've seen it. It's the restless, endless pacing back and forth of the lions in the zoo. That's actually called zoochosis. Here's the definition: repetitive, invariant behavior patterns with no obvious goal or function which occurs in captive animals.

Despite the best efforts of the zookeepers of the world to create a natural habitat for animals in the zoo, a zoo is still a zoo. And the lion is still caged, and people come and stare at the lion, and we watch this behavior back and forth. And we know, deep down, all of us—when you look at the lion, you're like, "Something ain't right with that lion. Something's wrong with the lion."

We can understand some of why. He sleeps in an artificial cave that probably doesn't smell like a real lion cave. He has a scientifically engineered diet by some of the leading experts on lion internal biology in the country, and yet it never satisfies his desire to hunt. He's in view of people and cars and fences. He's both exposed and alone. So his anxiety, his zoochosis, is quite understandable.

The zoo exhibit was not built for the lion. A lion was not made to be in the regular habitat of smells like hot dogs and churros or to hear animals from other continents within earshot. The scientists who set up these exhibits, they're doing their absolute best. But in some ways, we could say the zoo exhibit was not built for a lion. Of course, it was. But it wasn't built for a real lion. It's built for an ideal lion that it would be happy in captivity.

And no such lion actually exists, one who's naturally at home in a cage. And no matter how good the zookeepers are at establishing a habitat—we have a great zoo here, it's actually pretty good for habitats—but it's still a creature who's not designed for that space. What's natural to the lion and what's normal for that lion are two very different things. And just about everybody who goes to a zoo can recognize this. Most of us will never see a lion in its natural habitat, but we can go to a zoo and we're like, "That lion looks like a lion, eats what a lion eats, is in a habitat that looks like the savannah in Africa," and yet this normal zoo behavior can't be natural behavior. Something's off. What's normal isn't natural.

So I want you to think about those two words because they are important words I'm going to hit over and over in this sermon: normal and natural. We think of those as the same, but they're not. And this conversation around sexuality and gender that's happening frequently in our culture—or maybe even not happening, we just are part of it—it centers around those two words: what's natural and what's normal. We tend to think, "I know what's natural and normal for me. I know what's best for me. I know what's good for me." But what if—and here's my big what if for this morning—what if, like the lion in the zoo, what is natural and what's normal are not the same? What a lion was designed to be in, what you are designed to be in, and what this lion finds himself in—in the zoo, in this artificial environment—and what we find ourselves in are actually not the same thing. That's what I want to convince you of this morning. And I've got a tall order as a pastor in front of you, in front of me.

I want to convince you that God desires our freedom and our joy. He wills and purposes this, just like the lion in the zoo where you'd prefer to see the animal running free on the savannah, acting like a real lion. What God wants for us is our own freedom, our own joy—not repression, not stifling, not regressive, not shaming—our freedom and joy. Real lions.

The Church in Corinth

Real lions. This is what this letter, 1 Corinthians, is addressing here. The Apostle Paul is writing to a group of people who lived in what was the sex capital of the Roman Empire. The name Corinthian—Corinth, that city name—actually was used as a verb regularly in the Roman Empire to refer to going crazy sexually. If you are going to Corinthianize, you're going to go nuts sexually. It captures the anything-goes kind of attitude that was all around them in Corinth. And this church leader is writing to this little baby church in Corinth and trying to help them understand what is natural, what has God designed you for, compared to what is normal in the city around you, what you think of.

And I want to give credit this morning. I'm going to reference a lot from a book called You Are Not Your Own by a writer named Alan Noble. So if you want to read more about that, I'm happy to share that with you.

Now, notice where Paul starts here. He starts with a number of quotations. In Greek, there are no quotation marks, no punctuation of any kind. Scholars have recognized over the years that Paul is quoting from some of their own writers or even some of their own mantras in their culture in Corinth. So he starts with a number of quotes from leading authors of their day, and they say things like this:

Everything is permissible for me.

And he's like, "Yeah, let me quote that one. I'm free to do whatever I want. Everything is permissible." That's what that means. Or:

Food for the stomach and stomach for the food.

In other words, "I got appetites. They're natural. I should be able to satisfy those appetites." Those words could have been written today. We're in the same kind of culture. And where we think this is so different from Bible types, this is a very similar culture to the one that we inhabit today.

And in effect, what's interesting about reading this passage is that Paul, in effect, says, "I kind of agree." He's saying, quoting from their writers and saying, "I agree with that, but let me add to it." So this is what he keeps saying. So let's look at each of these.

Everything is permissible. And Paul actually means it when he says that as well. Yes, everything is permissible. That may be shocking to hear that coming from the mouth of a pastor or that's in your Bible. But let me remind you that there's a book in the New Testament called Galatians. And in the book of Galatians—two books right after this—it tells us that a person doesn't become a Christian, can't be a Christian, by doing the law. As Christians, we are not people who are under the law in the same way a Jewish person in the Old Testament time period would be. We are under grace, under the covenant of grace. Moral conformity to God's laws and God's standards is not what makes anybody a Christian. This is the book of Galatians in a nutshell.

Faith in Christ is what makes you a Christian. That's all. Faith in Christ. I'm highlighting this point because Paul is reframing the way a lot of people think about what it means to belong to God, to know God, and particularly in the realm of sexuality.

When people think of God as sexuality, we often think of where's the line? Where is the line beyond which I shouldn't cross or I'm a bad person or I'm going to hell or I'm outside of God's will or this is really wrong? Where is the line? What's the boundary I can stay in or just barely stay in and still be okay?

But Paul's saying, that's not the point at all. That's not the point at all. What secures your place in heaven is faith in the completed work of Jesus Christ, 100%, nothing else. Nothing added to this.

And Paul can agree with them. Yeah, everything actually is permissible. There is nothing you can do or not do that takes away, that can remove, that can destroy the work of Jesus. That's perfectly done on your account. Trust in Him. That's salvation.

But he doesn't stop there. Notice everything is permissible, but he goes on and says, "But not everything is beneficial."

Sexuality is good, but sexuality is also dangerous. We live in a culture that somehow talks out of both sides of the mouth about sexuality. We have a anything goes, live and let live orientation toward this on the one hand. Your body, your business. And yet we also criminalize certain behaviors because we know they're dangerous. We know that there is good sex and there is dangerous sex. Sex is a great connector, expression of connection between two people, and yet we know all around us are people with internal invisible scars from sexual activity that hurt them.

So Paul is saying, hey, everything's permissible, but not everything is beneficial. There are things that hurt us.

Food for the stomach and stomach for the food, but God will do away with both of them.

Your body, your physical appetites will not last forever, in other words. You will, at one point, die. Your body and your soul will be separated from one another. There is more to you than your sexuality. Sex is good. Sex is not ultimate. It's part of life, but it's not all of life.

And then finally, "Everything is permissible, but I will not be mastered by anything."

This is really important. Again, it feels like it could have been written last week. Everything is permissible. But Paul is putting his finger on something that we also believe in our bones. I don't want to be dominated, mastered, or controlled by anyone or anything. Nobody wants to be dominated or managed. Nobody's going to tell me what to do.

And yet here's the one thing that Paul is showing that we are mastered by. We're mastered by this, our own so-called freedom.

Freedom: Zoo-Like vs. Real

Here's my big idea for today. What we think of freedom in our culture is zoo-like freedom. What God says is freedom is real freedom. This is with regard to sexuality.

See, we believe deep down, I belong to me. I belong to myself. I'm my own. Nobody can tell me how I live or think or what I do. That's so deep inside of us. I often call that the fortune cookie phenomenon, that we're all children born in our culture were all born as little fortune cookies, and we have to do the work of looking down deep inside of us, and just like the fortune cookie at the Chinese restaurant where you get the little piece of paper with the lotto numbers and the message, you have to look down deep inside of you and figure out who is the real you because you belong to you, and you get to figure out who is you.

But this is the thing we don't see, the terrifying burden of self ownership.

Let me just test this out with you. If you belong to only you, if you are only your own, then you are wholly and completely responsible for your life. Everyone needs a reason for living, a purpose to get up out of bed in the morning. If I belong to only me, I have to make that up. I have to figure that out. I have to come up with a self-justifying purpose for getting up out of bed in the morning, and that is a tall order. That's really hard to put that on someone. You've got to figure out purpose in your life.

Second, if I belong to myself, then I define who I am. That's the theme of every Pixar movie. You escape the repressive older generation with its traditions, and you become who you are, figuring out who is the real me. How can I find the real me and let it show and let it blossom before the world? That's really difficult. Watch our elementary and middle schoolers struggling with this, struggling with who am I? Who's the unique me in the world?

If I belong to myself, I am responsible for creating meaning in my own life. Meaning is so important. How do I know if my life has worth and value? Meaning is so elusive. It can sift through your fingers like water at the beach. It's hard to hold on to.

If I belong to myself, then I'm responsible for figuring out morality.

I have to determine what's right and wrong for me, for other people. Either some version of like, I'll do what I think is best for everybody, or how would I like to be treated. But be honest, this doesn't work out so well. Can I ask you a question? Are you really thinking about your life? Are you always interested in your best? Should you really trust yourself?

Humans are experts at self-sabotage. You know, if we were all so good at looking out for what's best for us, we would all be exercising every day and eating only the things we're supposed to be eating and saving lots of money. The jury's in on this one. We're not so good at this. And so this whole creating morality for ourselves, we end up creating a standard that nobody, even by our own standards, we don't live up to.

Finally, if I am my own, I don't owe obedience or allegiance to anybody but me. All associations, all ties, all relationships, they're all voluntary, which also means they're always up for renegotiation. And they're always up for reconsideration, which means that if you belong just to you, then you have this responsibility all the time to making sure that your relationships stay tight and close to you. That's a really heavy burden.

One of the leading voices in the "I belong to me" mantras today in America is Brené Brown. Now, I really like Brené Brown. I love what she's done on empathy, on vulnerability, so I am not knocking her. She's a great researcher. She's done a lot of encouragement and help for lots of people. And yet she has this mantra about belonging to yourself. And I think this needs to be thought about a little bit deeper because this is what she said:

True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself. Believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you could share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being part of something and standing alone in the wilderness.

That statement really needs to be considered because that is a heavy burden of finding your true self, your authentic self, and giving that to the world.

When you ask everybody in our culture, what does freedom really mean? It means no constraints. So I belong to me. That makes sense to us. But we live in the most medicated, the most psychosis-ridden society in the history of the world. This is killing us. This "I belong to me" stuff sounds like real freedom. It's a lion pin. It sounds like I belong to me, and I'm perfectly free to live in this space that I live in, and to find life, I will. But it's just like the diet the lions are given, right? Like, the diet is scientifically engineered to satisfy their hungers without the hunting, without living in a real cave. There's something so wrong. When we look at the lion, we're like, Something's right, but something's really wrong. We live in a culture where it's like, This sounds right. This is normal, but something's wrong.

Whose Are You?

So whose are you? Paul is offering up the why of Christian sexuality, the Christian theology of sexuality. Now, lots of you, many of you grew up in youth groups or churches. You know the what of Christian theology of sexuality, right? In your sleep, you could probably tell me. It's supposed to be one man, one woman, and a covenant marriage for life. That's it. Everything else on the outside of that, Paul describes here as sexual immorality. But what I think is really helpful for us is we don't get the why very much, do we? Why? Why is it this way? Why does God want it to be this way? Why is everything else immorality?

Now watch this. Paul could have, in his argument in this passage, gone to a lot of different places to make his point. He could have said, hey, giving yourself in a sexual union with somebody you're not married with—that is the prostitution system in Corinth, that is not consensual, really. It's violent. It's abusive. He could have said visiting prostitutes will lead to illegitimate children and broken marriages. He could have said something like, hey, you know what you're really hungry for is something deeper. You have an unmet longing for relationship, and you're going to all other sources for this. He doesn't say any of that. It's fascinating. Instead, he anchors the why of Christian sexual ethics in belonging. Belonging.

The main point of this passage is this little bitty phrase: you are not your own. Now, that is the craziest thing I can say to you as a pastor this morning. To stand up in this culture and say, "You are not your own"—you sound like wet is dry, and up is down, and in is out. But to say, "You are not your own," it's the very opposite of "fortune cookie, look inside."

God designed us. What is natural for us, God designed us to belong to Him. That's what is actually in the design blueprints on the inside of your soul, that you would belong to God. What's normal for us is "I belong to me."

But what's designed, what's natural, what you're designed to be, is you belong to God. What's normal, though, is I belong to me. We live in a culture where we worship people who are rebels, people who go against the tide. So what I'm describing here, it sounds crazy talk. It sounds nuts.

Of course, I could say this in a very general sense—all the people in the world, every individual you meet and see, is an image bearer made in the image of God. All of them have His fingerprints on their very souls. But that's not what Paul is talking about here. He's talking about something very specific.

He says this later in this passage: Here's why you belong to God—because you have been bought by a price. The blood of Jesus on the cross has made you His. He has made you His very own. He inhabits you. His very spirit dwells within you.

If you're paying attention at all, you should be very uncomfortable with my sermon today. You might feel uncomfortable? I hope so, right? Because this "I am not my own"—it makes us think of things like slavery, of control, of authoritarianism. We live in a culture where autonomy is sacred. Our modern myths are people like those in Pixar movies—go find your own way. But whom we belong to makes all the difference in the world and the way we live.

If we belong to ourselves, your authentic fortune cookie self, this leads to zoochosis. If we belong to God, things are really different. Let me test this one out.

If you don't belong to yourself but to God, then your personhood is a real creation of God. It's an objectively sustained reality by God. You don't have to create yourself or even find yourself. It doesn't mean you don't have a true self. It's just that you aren't burdened with having to make it up.

If you don't belong to yourself but belong to God, then God gives you meaning and purpose. What He says, the way that He guides you and leads you—that's what gives your life meaning and purpose.

If you don't belong to yourself, you're not responsible for defining morality. You don't have to figure out all of that yourself. If the self is not liquid, then you don't have to find a solidifying identity to get your shape and your definition.

One writer, Rowan Williams, he anchors this in the love of God for people. He says, "If you don't belong to yourself but to God, then you have an identity, not because you've invented one. What you don't understand or see, the bits of yourself you can't quite pull together in a convincing way, they're held in the love of God. God delights in you. God made you. He knows you inside and out. He longs to see you become the fullest expression of who you are in Him."

Anybody seen the old movie Back to the Future? Part of the storyline is Marty McFly, who goes back in time, and he's trying to put things right, and he has a Polaroid photo of his family. And as the movie progresses, the people in his family begin to fade away and disappear.

This is what's so tragic to me about living in a culture that says you are just your own. It's like having an identity that you're always trying to keep from fading away. It's shadowy. It doesn't really exist. It's always sort of in question—is it going to survive? Not so. What meaning and purpose and identity and personhood and who you are is most expressed and delighted in by the One who made you and who delights to call you His own.

Our Bodies Belong to God

Listen, this is the last point. Listen to what Paul says. These are radical statements about our bodies, what our bodies are for. He says:

Don't you know your bodies are part of Christ's body? The body is not for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. You are not your own; you are bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. — 1 Corinthians 6:15, 13, 19-20

You ever thought about that before? Your body, those teeth you brushed this morning, the lotion that skin you put lotion on—part of Christ's body. My body's for the Lord? It's not just for me.

If we belong to Him, if our bodies belong to Him, then He gets to say what we do with our bodies. He's the who says so. Now, I know how that lands. You all are like, I don't like this sermon. It sounds like your parents when you were a little kid. Why? Because I said so, right? It brings to mind a tired parent who's tired of answering questions. It's the way it is because it's what I say it is, right? And we don't like that.

But God gets to say "because I said so" because He designed you. He offered up His very self on the cross for you. He inhabits you by His Spirit. He knows you in a comprehensive way that you can never know yourself. A lifetime of looking inside, you will never know yourself or delight in yourself to anywhere near the degree that God the Father of the universe made you, knows you, delights in you.

If we belong to Him, if belonging is our natural condition and autonomy is unnatural—even if it feels normal to us—and belonging necessitates limits.

The question of to whom do we belong is not who are we, but whose are we. If we belong to ourselves, we could set our own limits. If we belong to God, He sets the limits. And that is, again, upside down world this morning, real freedom. If we don't belong to Christ, then we're not free to belong wherever and to whomever we want to. We have limits and obligations. You can't, therefore, look at your body or other people's bodies as expendable, as a tool to consume intimacy for yourself, regardless of how safe that ever appears.

Pornography is off limits because our limits are not determined by what I want but what the Lord has for me. If we belong to God, then God gets to say what's best. You don't have the freedom to view bodies on a screen of any type whenever you want without any consequence. You have to live within limits. And limits are good. We like limits on our interstates that keep cars from coming straight into us. We like limits on how our government works. We like limits on laws in our country. We don't want anybody to be able to do anything. Learning to live within limits is actually freedom.

Sexuality is a union. Belonging to Christ is practiced also for belonging to other people. We do this in two areas. We do this in marriage, and we do this in what we do here, in the body of Christ, belonging. Those who know how to belong to Christ therefore are able to know how to belong to another person in marriage or a body of Christ in a church. This is extremely important. I don't know how people honestly stay married without Jesus. Marriage is so glorious and so hard. And if I didn't know how to belong to Jesus, I don't know that I'd know how to belong to somebody else.

You become—this is the amazing thing—you become more of who you are, not less, by belonging to Christ. Christ is the only person in the universe you can give yourself to who will not use you or take from you, who will not get things wrong every once in a while, but actually, in Him, you become more of your true, authentic self that He designed you to be.

Look, I know that this is a weird sermon, but this is a big idea. This is a really big idea. If you're a Christian this morning, I want to say this to you. Belonging to Jesus is one of the most freeing things in your life, and I want to encourage you to lean in more on this. This has implications for how you live and how you die. It has implications for how you view your relationships within this community. It has roots that go all over the place. This is a big idea. The whole book of Colossians is about this.

If you're not a Christian, I'm so glad you're here this morning. I'm so glad you're listening in. And I just wish you knew how good it was. Even if you're like, I don't know if I believe in the rest of the stuff, you should want to believe this part. It is this freeing and this good to belong to Jesus.

Let's go back to my lions in the zoo illustration. Most of us have seen only zoo lions, right? That's what's normal—pacing. A lion who is free from harm, free from insecurity about the next meal. The zookeeper will always show up, free from worry about disease. There will always be the zoo to check-in, but not free. Nowhere near free.

Our culture is living in a zoo of our own construction, a habitat we designed for ourselves, and we think this is going to do it. It sounds good, but it's not working so great for us. The zoo of autonomy—of I got to be me, this fortune cookie business we're in, I did it my way, my body, my business—comes with an aftereffect that's killing us. But Jesus frees lions to run on the savannah. He offers a habitat that He designed for us, not that we designed for ourselves. It's a life of restraints. It is. It's a life of limits. You can't smell the hot dogs and the churros. You can't be around birds from other continents. But it's a life of belonging, belonging to God, free to enjoy Him and one another, free to live within our limits and embrace our true selves. Come join us. There's more room on this savannah.

In the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, amen.

Would you pray with me? Father, we thank You for Your Word. And there's nothing like Your Word, and it speaks in really hard ways into a culture that is so different and yet where we know that we're not the first people in a first society to have inside out views of sexuality. We thank You for the life that You invite us to. Lord, help us to believe that You really are this good, that you really do love us and delight in us this way, that, Lord, we really, in belonging to you, we are held in the arms of the love of the universe who made us and knows us and longs to see us become our full and complete selves in you. Lord, help us this day. We pray these things in Jesus' name, Amen.

I'm going to invite you to stand and respond to God's word in