SPAM - First Bible Study

Here are my notes on my first individual Bible study that I did for my "presentation" in my small group.

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1 Corinthians 6:12-20
Sexual Immorality
""Everything is permissible for me" — but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible for me" — but I will not be mastered by anything. "Food for the stomach and the stomach for food" — but God will destroy them both. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also. 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."

12) As human beings with free will, we have permission to do whatever we want. but our choices don't always work out for our good.
Paul says, "I will not be mastered by anything." This relates to Jesus' teaching in John 8:34-36, where Jesus says that whoever sins is a slave to sin, or has been mastered by sin. But verse 35 says that if the Son sets us free, we will be "free indeed," or free forever, never to be enslaved to sin again.
Paul discourages the Corinthians from falling into sin again because they have been set free and should not want to be slaves again.

13) Everything was made with a purpose, but nothing material will last. "The body is not meant for sexual immorality," so we should not use our created bodies for something we were not made for. God created us to worship and glorify Him, and He sent His Son to earth to die for us so we could be with Him forever. This explains Paul's statement, "The body is... meant... for the Lord, and the Lord for the body." Why give ourselves to something material and perishable when we can give ourselves to something holy and imperishable?

14-15) We are the body of Christ. Paul argues that uniting a "believer" with a prostitute would be the same as if Jesus Himself was united with a prostitute. But God's perfect power, which raised Christ from the dead and will later raise us, can have no company with sin, so it is impossible for Jesus to become involved with a prostitute. We should not give the world the wrong image of Christ.

16) If Jesus were to sleep with a prostitute, they would become one flesh, making Jesus a sinner by taking on her sin of prostitution. He would then no longer be pure, and He would be unworthy to be offered as a sacrifice for our sins.
(The wording in this note is kind of confusing. What I meant was that, by uniting Himself with a prostitute, Jesus would become an adulterer, a sinner. And a sinner cannot pay the price for other sinners. Jesus had to be perfect in order to serve as an acceptable sacrifice for our sins. So if He were to commit adultery, His sacrifice would have been in vain. When we commit adultery, we give the world the impression that Jesus would have done the same thing. But we cannot give that impression, because if that were true, then everything we believe would be pointless. We would still be condemned.)

17) Instead, Jesus devoted His entire life on earth to doing god's will. The Holy Spirit lived in Him, and He obeyed the Spirit, making the two one. We should do the same, living in the Spirit so that we can have Christ's righteousness and salvation on Judgment Day.

18) Paul charges the Corinthians to avoid sexual immorality, saying that it is the one sin man commits against himself. To a society obsessed with self-image and acceptance, this statement hits the selfish Corinthians hard. To know that sexual immorality is a sin against one's own body is likely to cause the Corinthians to repent of their ways.
(This note refers back to my small group's meeting from the week before. We had been discussing 1 Corinthians 6:1-11, in which Paul rebukes the Corinthians for condoning and even encouraging a man for having inappropriate relations with his step-mother. Paul accused the Corinthian church of overlooking the man's sin for the sake of acceptance. Unfortunately, by doing so, the church gave the impression that such sins were acceptable, so the church drew in members by advocating what its doctrine should have been discouraging. This makes the church appear selfish and as if its only purpose were acceptance: accepting sinners and being accepted by the community.)

19) To make matters worse for the Corinthians, not only are they defiling themselves, but they are also defiling God's temple, the Holy Spirit's home. Jesus banished the traders from the temple when they turned the holy place into a merchant's haven in Mark 11:12-19. In a sense, the Corinthians are guilty the same way the traders were: they have turned God's house into something it was not meant to be. By committing sexual immorality, we not only sin against ourselves, but we defile God's house and sin against the Spirit within us.

20) God sent His Son to die for our sins. The least we can do in return is live apart from sin to make our portion of His load a little lighter. (My wording here was not quite appropriate for what I meant. Making His load "lighter" makes it sound like I meant removing our sins from Christ, but I really meant not adding any more to His load.) We should live pure lives so that the Holy Spirit has a good home to reside in in return for our redemption through Jesus' sacrifice.

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I hope this helps someone in some way. Part of the reason I started this blog was that, as I went through SPAM, I began to feel like God was calling me to do some kind of ministry through my writing. My awareness of that calling grew even more when I realized that my writing became more and more open as SPAM went on after my youth group leader encouraged me to share my writing. It was kind of strange for me because the knowledge that others would be reading my writing (whether verbatim or in summary) actually made me write more openly rather than more closed off. So pray that God would use my writing in this blog in some way to share His word and His love and bring others into His kingdom.

Until next time, God bless!

Michael

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"I want men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer, without anger or disputing." ~ 1 Timothy 2:8

"I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For to live is Christ and to die is gain." ~ Philippians 1:20-21