Flee sexual immorality

This column represents the thoughts and opinions of The Rev. Carl Roth. This is NOT the opinion of the Elgin Courier.

St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:18-20, “Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So, glorify God in your body.”

Imagine taking a walk through your neighborhood and coming upon a huge grizzly bear. Faced with such a menacing foe, you have two options: to flee or to surrender. Which will it be? If you surrender to his captivity, he will tear you to pieces and gobble you right up. Your only hope for survival is to flee.

God has told Christians not just to avoid certain things, but flee them. In the New Testament, St. Paul tells Christians to flee such things as “youthful passions” (2 Timothy 2:22) and “the love of money” (1 Timothy 6:1011) as well as idolatry (1 Corinthians 10:14). These are things that Christians must not become enslaved to, but must simply “Flee.”

In 1 Corinthians 6:18-20, St. Paul also tells Christians, “Flee from sexual immorality.” If you surrender to the vicious claws of sexual immorality, you surrender your life into hostile jaws and teeth that will destroy you, body and soul. You become a slave to evil, as St. Peter says, “Whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved” (2 Peter 2:19). The grizzly bear of sexual immorality is a powerful and deadly captor.

But the moral foundations of our country, and our Western culture in general, have been severely weakened over the past century. You can see the radical shift in the popular discussion of sexuality, in 50 years we have gone from sex being a taboo subject in public to being unavoidable in public, as we are constantly exposed to it on magazine racks, in newspapers, billboards, the evening news and even television shows aimed at children. That is not to say that older generations got everything right — they made discussion of sex taboo to the point that many children were brought up without understanding what the Bible teaches about sexuality; people thought they were supposed to “flee from sex,” not just “flee from sexual immorality.” God’s gift of sexuality is good, like all of his gifts, and is a great blessing inside a marriage, so we should speak highly of it and give thanks for it, which hasn’t always been done in the Christian church. But whatever flaws there were 50 years ago in church and society, at least there was a social pressure against lewdness and premarital sex that is just no longer present.

There used to be more laws in place, too. Adultery, fornication, no-fault divorce and pornography — just to name a few sins against the sixth commandment — were illegal in most states not too long ago. So how can we expect our nation’s people to know what a moral life is, when gross immorality is legal? This is easy to answer concerning Christians, our morals are guided by God’s word in the Bible, a much higher bar than civil law.

But today we face a great challenge, because many people who claim to be Christians condone sexual immorality. They say, “kids will be kids, everybody’s doing it,” etc. — but this is caused by a gross misunderstanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A Christian is set free from sin not to keep on sinning against God’s Law but to start living according to his Law by the power of the Spirit. This includes strict adherence to the sixth commandment. “Flee sexual immorality.” St. Paul says. We should run for our lives when we are tempted toward immoral sexual acts, or toward pornography, or toward the lewdness that we pipe into our television sets and smartphones, or toward anything that inflames our lusts. We should flee from these things as we would flee from a building where a bomb threat has just been announced. We must always be on the watch, lest we fall into temptation.

But what about when even Christians have fallen into such sins? What hope is there for us, who have committed countless sins against God in thought, word, and deed and are all equally deserving of condemnation? The glory of being a Christian is that we can actually find some good news in the midst of a world devastated by the effects of rampant sexual immorality. St. Paul puts it this way, “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.” It is good news that you are not your own; you do not belong to yourself. For if you are your own, if you truly belong to yourself, then you will cease to be when you die. Death shows us that we are not truly our own, but we are dependent.

But we are not in the hands a malicious or indifferent deity who cares nothing for you, nor a god who desires to punish you for the sins of your past. You belong to a God who has purchased you at incredible cost to himself. “You were bought with a price,” and that price was the holy, precious blood and innocent suffering and death of your Lord Jesus Christ, God the son in the flesh. St. Peter wrote, “you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot” (1 Peter 1:18-19). All sexual immorality is a “futile way,” but the blood of Christ covers all of our guilt and places us into the way of eternal life.

Jesus redeemed us with His blood — that is, he purchased us out of slavery to sin and the devil — so that when our bodies die, we still will live, as St. Paul, “God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power” (1 Corinthians 6:14). He has already raised us up in our baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, as Paul says, you have “been buried with [Christ] in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead” (Colossians 2:12).

“You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So, glorify God in your body.” So, flee sexual immorality, flee all immorality and “seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Colossians 3:12). Focus on “the things that are above,” namely, Christ’s word and sacraments in the church, where you receive forgiveness for all of your sins. Amen.