Cleansing God’s Community

 1 Peter 1:13-16                   1 Corinthians 5:1–13 & 6:1-11 & 6:12-20

Cleansing God’s Community

One of the most frightening things that can happen to a church is not that it becomes small…or that it becomes poor…or even that it becomes unpopular. No, the most frightening thing that can happen to a church is when it loses the ability to blush. 

When sin no longer grieves us, when compromise no longer shocks us, when holiness becomes negotiable, and when obedience is treated as extreme, the church has already begun to rot from within.

That is precisely the situation in Corinth. 

The Corinthians were proud of their spirituality. They boasted in wisdom, gifts, freedom, and knowledge. Yet while they congratulated themselves on being enlightened, educated, and mature, gross immorality had settled comfortably into the church itself.

And Paul does not tip-toe around the issue nor does he soften the language of rebuke. He does not hide behind ambiguity. He does not fear offending the culture. Because when the holiness of God and the purity of Christ’s church are at stake, silence becomes betrayal.

These two passages from 1 Corinthians confront three great corruptions threatening the church:

1. Tolerated immorality within the church body.

2. Worldly legal systems being used by believers against other believers.

3. Sexual rebellion against God’s original creation design.

And behind all three stands one central truth: The church belongs to God, and therefore the church must reflect the holiness of God.

Paul opens with shocking words: “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you of a kind not even tolerated among the pagans!”

Now, the word Paul uses here is porneia…a broad term referring to sexual activity outside God’s ordained covenant of marriage. In this particular case, a man is involved sexually with his father’s wife, something explicitly condemned in the Law of God. (Leviticus 18:8)

But what is astonishing is not only the sin itself. It is the church’s response…or to be more precise, their lack of response. Not only did they do nothing to prevent this sin, but they also seemed to have accepted it.

In addressing this unthinkable and unacceptable reality in the church of God in Corinth, Paul says: “And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn?”

And that, dearest beloved brethren, is the true scandal.

The church was proud when it should have been ashamed.

As Paul rightly alludes to, even the pagan world recognised incest as shameful. Greek mythology itself treated such relationships as catastrophic violations that brought pollution and judgement upon entire cities. Roman law prohibited incest. Yet this church…people who claimed to follow a holy God…had become more tolerant of sin than the surrounding culture.

Dearest beloved brethren, this remains one of the great dangers of modern Christianity. We live in a culture that increasingly treats sexual autonomy as sacred. The highest moral good today is not holiness but self-expression. 

The world says: “Your body belongs to you.” “Your desires define you.” “Love is love.” “What consenting adults do privately is nobody’s business.”

But Scripture never speaks that way.

The body of believers belongs to God. We are his holy Temple…as I said last week, we are sacred space…we do not belong to ourselves. We belong to God.

And therefore the church cannot bless what God forbids simply because the culture celebrates it.

There are churches today that proudly affirm what Scripture clearly condemns. Churches that apologise for biblical teaching. Churches that treat holiness as intolerance. Churches that fear social rejection more than divine judgement. Churches that boast that they are “all inclusive”.

Paul would say to such churches exactly what he said to Corinth: “Your boasting is not good.”

So Paul commands the church to remove the unrepentant man from fellowship. Now, that may sound harsh to modern ears because modern Christianity often confuses love with permissiveness, but biblical love is not the removal of moral boundaries.

Biblical love seeks restoration through truth and therefore Paul says: “Hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.”

This is not a call for violence like stoning or flogging or burning at the stake. Nor is this vengeance or cruelty. No, this is the removal of the man from the covenant protection and fellowship of the church so that he might be awakened to the consequences of sin and be led to true repentance.

You see, Church discipline is restorative and healing more than it is punitive.

While it most certainly says: “You cannot persist in rebellion while claiming fellowship with Christ” it also says that the goal of Church discipline is that the sinner might be saved….“that his spirit may be saved.”

Divine discipline is driven by divine mercy and divine love.

Indeed a church that never disciplines serious unrepentant sin does not love sinners. Rather it abandons them to self-deception.

However, it is equally true that the church as a body is in danger if habitual, serious, and unconfessed sin is either tolerated or even condoned. To illustrate this Paul uses the image of leaven. “A little leaven,” he says, “leavens the whole lump.”

You see, sin has a tendency to spread. Unchecked compromise never remains isolated. What one generation tolerates quietly, the next generation celebrates publicly.

That is true in families as it is true in nations. And it is also true in churches.

Like leaven, unchecked corruption in the church cannot be contained. Indeed, unchecked corruption is contrary to what we ought to be as the Church.

Why? Because the Church is meant to be an unleavened people, because we are a Passover people. “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.” Here Paul reaches back to the Exodus. At Passover, Israel removed leaven from the house as an image of repentance, sanctification and renewal, because their holy God had redeemed them from slavery and brought them to himself.

In the same way, Christians are redeemed people. Christ has delivered us from slavery to sin. Therefore the old leaven must be removed. We have been saved from sin and therefore we must show our saved status by living lives that mirror the one who saved us…if we don’t, we deny our own confession.

However, at this point, Paul offers a corrective. This disassociation or disfellowship is only applicable within the confines of the covenant community. Indeed, if we disassociate from those of the world, how will they hear or see the Gospel? Besides, Jesus associated with sinners, tax-collectors, prostitutes, outcastes and the like because they needed a Saviour. So, Paul teaches us to let God judge those outside the Church…Church discipline is for those in the Church. “For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside?” Pauls asks. “Do you not judge those who are inside? But those who are outside God judges.”

And so, Paul now turns to lawsuits among believers.

Apparently, Christians in Corinth were dragging one another before pagan courts and Paul is horrified. “Do you not know,” he asks, “that ultimately the Church will judge the world? “So, if you have judgements concerning this life, why do you seek judges who have nothing to do with the Church?” 

You see, the Church is meant to display a completely different kingdom. The world operates through power, pride, self-interest, and revenge. The kingdom of Christ operates through obedience, humility, holiness, mercy, self-sacrifice, forgiveness, reconciliation, and truth.

And here Paul says something astonishing: “Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded?”

The modern world cannot understand those kinds of statements. Our culture is obsessed with rights. My rights. My body, my choice. My way or no way.

But Christians follow a crucified Messiah. Jesus was wronged. Jesus was slandered. Jesus was falsely condemned. Jesus suffered injustice without retaliation.

And Peter tells us: “When (Jesus) suffered, he did not threaten but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.” (1 Peter 2:23)

The Corinthians wanted revenge through lawsuits. Paul wanted holiness through obedience to the law of Christ.

There is a profound difference.

The courts of the day were presided over by the unrighteous…those who neither knew God nor upheld his moral code of ethics. These are people Paul says that will not inherit the Kingdom. So why seek “right” from the unrighteous? 

Paul gives us one of the clearest moral warnings in this letter. “Do not be deceived…”

These words matter because people are often deceived even those who call themselves believers. Many imagine they can persist in their own ways and yet still inherit the kingdom of God, but Paul says otherwise.

And he lists a number of examples of things that disqualify us from the kingdom: sexual immorality, idolatry, adultery, greed, drunkenness, theft, same-sex practices, slander or gossip, and swindling.

Now this is by no means an exhaustive list, but I do want you to notice something important: Paul does not single out one sin as though others are less serious. Sexual sin – sexual immorality, adultery, and same-sex practices – these are not the only damning sins. Greed is listed here. Drunkenness is here. Stealing. Slander or gossip. And cheating. Paul includes them all as behaviours that may disqualify those who practice them from inheriting the kingdom of God. 

And herein lies a very important lesson. The church must never become selective in its outrage against sin by making one sin worse than another…damning one while overlooking ther other.

But neither may the church erase nor ignore what Scripture plainly says.

For instance, same-sex practices have become an unmentionable or taboo subject in many churches today, but in this list here, Paul explicitly includes both participants in same-sex acts among those practices that may bar someone from inheriting the kingdom. 

However, it is important to note in terms of Church discipline or judgement that his previous rule about the acts of those outside the covenant community applies here. What unbelievers do is beyond the judgement of the Church. God will judge them as he sees fit. What we ought to be focussed on is sin within the Church that must be addressed and dealt with.

And please note that Paul is not referring to temptation here. Rather he is describing settled, habitual, unrepentant practices and an identity formation rooted in rebellion against God’s created order. And this matters because modern culture insists that affirming behaviours contrary to what Scripture teaches is compassion.

But the church cannot redefine holiness in order to gain cultural approval.

If God created humanity male and female, if marriage between one man and one woman is rooted in creation itself, if Christ affirmed that design, then the church has no authority to rewrite what God established.

But here is the glory of the gospel: Paul says, “And such were some of you.” “Were”, but not “are.”

The church of God in Corinth, like most churches in the Greco-Roman world, included former idolaters, former adulterers, former sexually immoral people, former thieves, former homosexual practitioners, former drunkards.

You see, in the face of human depravity, the Gospel proclaims human transformation.

Paul says: “You were washed. You were sanctified. You were justified.”

The gospel does not merely speak of forgiveness. It speaks of a new creation…it speaks of a new people.

And because of this, Paul now confronts the Corinthians’ distorted theology of freedom.

Apparently, some were saying: “All things are lawful for me.”

In other words: If I’m saved by grace through faith, what I do with my body no longer matters…I’m going to discard this body anyway…this is an anti-body ideology based on some Greek philosophical thought.

But Paul answers with devastating clarity. “I will not be dominated by anything.”

You see, Christian freedom is not freedom to sin. It is freedom from slavery to sin.

While the modern world defines freedom as the absence of restraint, the Bible defines freedom as joyful obedience to God. A train is most free on the train tracks. A fish is most free in water. Human beings are most free when living according to the purpose for which they were created.

And Paul says here that the body was created “for the Lord.”

And that changes everything. Your body matters to God because God created it and because God indwells it and because God will raise it. The body…your body and what you do with your body is important.

Christianity is not anti-body. The resurrection proves the opposite. We are not destined to be disembodied spirits. Our bodies are to be raised and glorified.

 But at this point, Paul says something profoundly important: He says sexual sin is never merely physical. Sexual union is never merely biological.

Quoting from Genesis Paul reminds us that “the two shall become one flesh.” You see, God designed sexual union as covenantal, spiritual, and personal.

While the modern world treats sex recreationally, Scripture never does because sex joins persons.

That is why sexual sin wounds so deeply.

It takes something designed for covenant faithfulness and tears it from its created purpose.

Paul therefore says: “Flee sexual immorality.” Not manage it. Not negotiate with it. Not flirt with it. Now, flee from it.

Joseph fled Potiphar’s wife because some temptations are not meant to be debated but escaped.

And then Paul reaches the climax of the chapter: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?”

Now, think about how staggering that is. The God who created all things and sustains all things…the God who once manifested his presence in the Tabernacle…the God who filled Solomon’s Temple…this God now dwells in believers. This God now dwells in you.

And therefore Paul says: “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.” And that price was the blood of Christ. The cross forever destroys the myth of personal autonomy. You are not self-owned. If you belong to Christ, your body belongs to Christ. Your sexuality belongs to Christ. Your desires belong to Christ. Your relationships belong to Christ. Your private life belongs to Christ. Everything belongs to Christ.

In short, we are to be a holy people in an unholy world because we belong to a holy God.

Corinth was a sexually confused, morally compromised, spiritually arrogant city. And the church was in danger of becoming indistinguishable from it.

Now we live in a world that is slowly becoming very much like the Greco-Roman world of Paul’s day…a world that celebrates what God condemns and mocks what God calls holy. But the solution to this dilemma is not retreat from the world nor is it surrender to the world.

The solution is faithful holiness within the world. We must endeavour to live lives that show that while we might be in the world, but we are not of the world.

The Church must once again become a people who tremble at God’s Word more than public opinion. A people who love sinners enough to tell them the truth. A people who understand that grace is not permission for rebellion. A people who remember that Christ died not merely to forgive us, but to make us holy and to conform us to his image…to make us like him. And perhaps above all, a people who remember this: “You are not your own.”

That is either ludicrous or glorious.

If Christ is not your Lord, it is ludicrous.

But if he is your Saviour, then it is glorious beyond words. Because the One who owns you is the One who died for you. The One who commands holiness is the One who purchased you on the cross. The One who calls you to purity is the One who gives you his Holy Spirit.

And therefore the final command of this passage becomes the calling of every believer in Jesus: “Glorify God in your body.”

Shall we pray?

© Johannes W H van der Bijl 2026