Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul continues with the teachings of the previous chapter, which focused mostly on avoiding sexual immorality. Ah, the beauty of marriage in a sexually corrupt world. It can be so challenging. Let’s check in and hear the big ideas of this chapter. 1 Corinthians chapter 7: Clearing up moral confusion.

Recently, confusion over morality questions has reached a point in America I would have never imagined when I was a young adult. If you are, say, 20 or even 30 years old at this point, you may not even know there was a time not that long ago that was very different, where sexual and morality questions had generally agreed upon answers in society. Back in chapter 6, in verses we didn’t focus directly on, Paul wrote this to the Corinthians: Don’t you know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Don’t be deceived, because neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. Such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus.

The question that Paul asked those early Christians living in the morally bankrupt city of Corinth in the middle of the first century, Don’t you realize that those whose lives are marked by these kinds of unrighteous things? And then he lists, among other things, fornicators, adulterers, effeminate, and homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of God, meaning will not be in heaven one day. That very same question, if asked today of people in Western culture, would probably find a similar percentage of people who would say, No, I didn’t know that, or more likely, No, and I don’t agree with that. In other words, the apostles’ pronouncements about sexual behaviors God doesn’t accept will probably seem about as odd to many modern Americans or Europeans as they did to those in ancient Corinth. Why?

Because these things have become about as common now as they were in that decadent city of Corinth. They are common. Things that were clearly seen as wrong only a generation ago or so, and some of them honestly rarely even talked about, have somehow become accepted as normal in a short period of time. Fornication—that’s a general term meaning sexual activity outside of God’s boundary of marriage. Adultery means having a sexual relationship with anyone other than your marital spouse. Effeminate refers to men dressing and acting like women for perverse reasons like transvestitism.

And homosexual means obviously male-on-male or female-on-female sexual activity. All of these things are common in American society now, just as they were in Corinth then, and all of them are sinful if the Bible is God’s Word. And as you know, I definitely believe that it is, and I hope that you do as well. First Corinthians was written not only to address things Paul had had reported to him by Chloe or members of her family, but also to answer an apparent list of questions she brought from that congregation. I think Chloe and members of her family had traveled from Corinth to Ephesus, where Paul was when he wrote this, with these questions the congregation wanted answers to, and then while she was there gave him her personal report about other things going on which shouldn’t have been going on. Some of which we’ve already discussed.

That’s why Paul begins chapter 7 with the line, Now concerning the things about which you wrote me. He’s turning now to their questions. The challenging thing is, we have Paul’s answers in this letter we call 1 Corinthians, but we don’t have their questions. So, like literary detectives, we’ll have to figure out the likely questions, and many of them seem to have to do with sexual and relationship issues. It sounds to me like one of their questions was about the value of celibacy. Since there was so much immorality in their city and in their own lives prior to becoming Christians, this is what Paul means by, Such were some of you.

Maybe many were reasoning, you know, sex is just too complicated and kind of dirty of a thing, too problematic, and we should swear off it for, you know, higher purposes in our lives. After all, Paul was single. Timothy and Luke, apparently, who were part of his team, were apparently single. So this may also have added to the impression that it was just better, or more godly, to live a celibate lifestyle. Paul’s answer to that was, Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it’s good for a man not to touch a woman. But because of immorality, each man is to have his own wife, and each woman is to have her own husband.

In other words, if you can actually live a celibate life successfully, more power to you. It has some advantages, but realize it’s a very hard commitment to keep for most people. It’s preferable to get married rather than to struggle with sexual temptations all the time. He goes on to say, I wish that all men were even as myself. However, each man has his own gifts from God, one in this manner and another in that. Paul considered it a special gift from God that he was able to remain celibate, suggesting he knew that that was not true for most.

Paul could never have had a successful marriage leading the kind of life he lived. Can you imagine if he had been? If so, when Barnabas and the other leaders of the church at Antioch came to him and said, You know, we believe the Holy Spirit has chosen you and Barnabas to take the gospel to the Gentiles, to the cities of the empire. Oh, really? Paul would have replied. Yes, Barnabas chimes in.

The plan is to first evangelize Cyprus for a while and then Galatia for several months, and if all goes well after that, taking even more ambitious journeys to Asia, across to Macedonia and Greece, possibly Rome. And how long would that last? Paul would say. Maybe years. Oh my, I’d have to ask my wife. I’m not sure she’s going to go along with all of that, Paul would have had to say.

No, probably not. If Paul had been married, early Christian history would have looked a lot different. The expansion of the faith would probably have happened a lot slower. Paul’s energy and singular focus is what made him the man for the job, the chosen instrument. So God apparently enabled him to be fine without a wife, without a sex life, it sounds like. He was okay with that, being single, being celibate on purpose, so that he could do the extreme things his special calling required of him.

But he fully knew this was not the case for most people. Few people are going to be equipped to be happy in that situation. By the way, I’m guessing that this is one of the passages the Roman Catholic Church uses to explain their insistence on celibate priests and nuns. But the problem, of course, is, as Paul concedes here, his situation is not the norm. I probably don’t have to tell you how many stories there are about Roman Catholic priests who’ve gotten into trouble one way or another because they’re forced to pretend they are the Apostle Paul and live a celibate lifestyle when in fact they’re not. Nowhere does the New Testament teach that church leaders must be celibate.

On the contrary, in the pastoral epistles, which we’ll get to, Paul assumes just the opposite. He says that leaders of a church should be husbands of one wife. And to Timothy later he wrote, The Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons. They will forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving. Forbidding people to get married is strange and unnatural. Paul was not forbidding anyone to get married.

He was saying he knew God had enabled him to remain single and live morally, and that that was a gift for him because it enabled him to pursue his very demanding ministry life, a lifestyle most people would not have been able to do and was certainly not compatible with married family life. But on the contrary, he said, For most of you, because of the constant sexual temptations, the danger of immorality, each one of you should have their own husband or wife. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion, as he later put it. In conjunction with that, and this might surprise you, Paul next wrote, The husband must fulfill his duty to his wife and likewise also the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does, and likewise also, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.

Stop depriving one another except for mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer, or something like that. That’s what he’s telling them here. He says if you don’t, and you keep depriving yourselves of sex, Satan is going to tempt you because we are all, we’re all tempted in those ways, and we all lack self-control when it comes to these things. So it sounds like in the Corinthian church, some people who were married, perhaps imagining that being celibate was holier, a higher way to live, were pulling away from their marital partners. Don’t do that, Paul says. In fact, once you’re married, your body doesn’t even exclusively belong to you anymore.

It belongs to your partner as well. You became one flesh. That’s what marriage is. I think the most surprising part of his answer about this is the Christian view Paul is expressing is that women have the same rights in this respect as men. In the Greek and Roman culture, that was certainly not the case. Many men had multiple sex partners, and they were still married, cavorting with prostitutes.

They had wives and concubines who were their slaves on the side. Wives were not properly honored most of the time. But in Christianity, Paul is stressing, you should only have your own husband and your own wife as a sexual partner, and women had the same right to expect to be treated in such a way as to fully enjoy that relationship as their husbands. Women were not to be used. Both partners are to do their best to respect, understand, and satisfy their spouses, and sex, he says, should never be turned into a weapon in your relationship. You know what he means by that.

These ideas were pretty revolutionary, especially for women. If you decide to forego normal sexual relationships for a time for some higher purpose, he says, this must be by mutual consent, he instructs. Both of you have to agree to that or you’re going to find yourself being tempted. In other words, in a married couple’s sex life, they should keep striving to make it mutually satisfactory, focused on pleasing each other, building intimacy, because that’s the glue that binds you together and wards off sexual temptation from others. Speaking of revolutionary, for many in our sexually loose society today, the whole idea of getting married and living in a monogamous relationship itself probably seems revolutionary in so old-fashioned. To commit yourself to that?

Since the 1960s, the sexual revolution has been spreading the message through magazines, movies, pop culture, that sex without strings attached is the way to go. If it feels good, do it, right? Whether it was the Playboy philosophy from one direction or the feminist philosophy from the other direction, the idea of traditional marriage, one man for one woman for a lifetime, has been treated as if it’s unrealistically restrictive, boring, and just passé. Well, this might surprise you too. After a couple generations of that philosophy permeating our society, some fascinating data is now available from those who study this stuff. And guess what?

Let me quote here from the Journal of Psychology Today. They say, a great deal of research now shows that compared to people who are single, cohabiting, that is living with someone they’re not married to, or separated and divorced, those who are married generally report greater happiness, more emotional contentment, more spiritual fulfillment, and get this, improved sexual satisfaction. This has now been shown in numerous studies. Why would that be? Well, the article goes on to say, marriage confers many non-sexual benefits that spill over into the erotic realm and increase sexual satisfaction. So being deeply connected to someone on non-sexual levels, the exclusive commitment you feel, the feelings of intimacy, the trust you’ve built, being truly a life partner with someone, these things make sex more complete and more rewarding.

Hmm. I guess God is right about this after all, as usual. The Apostle Paul in our passage goes on then to discuss another question he must have gotten from the Corinthians. In verses 10 to 13 he writes, But to the married I give instructions, not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not leave her husband, but if she does leave, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband, and that the husband should not divorce his wife. But to the rest, I say, not the Lord, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever and she consents to live with him, he must not divorce her, and a woman who has an unbelieving husband and he consents to live with her, she must not send her husband away. So he got questions from them obviously about separation and divorce.

Divorce was even easier in that society, if you can believe that, than it is in ours. No-fault divorce, something that came into existence in my lifetime, has been adopted in all 50 states now. Wow, what a wrongheaded legal concept. It took root in the ’60s and ’70s as part of the sexual revolution. But by changing the laws, making divorce as easy to do as simply saying, We have irreconcilable differences, Your Honor, the whole idea of the sacredness and the permanence of marriage was undercut in American society. Predictably, divorce rates skyrocketed over the next few decades.

And how has that affected the stability of our culture? And how has that impacted the emotional and psychological welfare of our children? Again, God’s ways are always better. Paul instructs the Corinthians to view marriage as God designed it: one man, one woman committed together for their lifetime. God speaking through the Old Testament prophet Malachi bluntly declared, I hate divorce. Malachi 2:16.

Jesus said on the subject, In marriage, a man and woman are no longer two, but become one. And what God joins together, let no man separate. Although some of your leaders permitted divorce, Jesus said, it was never meant to be that way from the beginning. It’s Matthew chapter 19, verses 5 through 8. For believers in particular, marriage is a covenant sealed by vows before God. Vows like, I will love and be faithful to you until death separates us, for better or for worse, and so on, right?

So Paul says, Do not leave your spouse. But if you do, remain unmarried and work toward a reconciliation. Sometimes separation is needed for a time, but for Christians the purpose should be to resolve the problems so that you can reconcile and have a healthier and more satisfying relationship. I need to add this, though. In the bigger picture, the Bible is not unrealistic. The New Testament allows for, not recommends, but allows for two exceptions.

If someone commits adultery, a marriage can be dissolved by divorce. Jesus himself made that rule in Matthew 19. Again, the Bible does not suggest we should do that, but rather, as Paul admits, even if separation may be in order, we should seek toward reconciliation. However, if one party continues to be unfaithful or immoral, the other would be within their rights to seek a divorce. But believers who want to please God should take that route only as a very last resort. To divorce a spouse without a serious moral cause is very clearly adultery.

Jesus was crystal clear about that. Then here in our chapter, the Apostle Paul explains another possible exception that has come up. He says, if a believer is in a marriage to an unbeliever, and the unbeliever is okay with that, the believer should not seek to get out of that marriage. But if the unbelieving spouse says, I need to get away from this Jesus freak. He’s no longer the person I married, and they abandon the marriage, the believer is not bound indefinitely. That’s what Paul means at verse 15 in our chapter when he says, If the unbelieving one leaves, let them leave.

The brother or sister would not be under bondage in such a case, for God has called us to peace. Notice, this is not something a Christian should initiate, but it can happen to us. Sometimes when a person becomes a Christian, they so thoroughly change that their unbelieving spouse just doesn’t want to stay married to them. I’ve seen that very thing happen. I remember one such scenario where a guy I knew got saved and so thoroughly changed his life that his wife thought he lost it and at first felt he needed to be committed to a mental hospital. Yet Paul says here, if you can, stay together, because you don’t know your spouse might come to Christ in the future.

You might influence them to become a believer, he means. And also, it’s to your children’s benefit to stay married. And I might add, not just their spiritual benefit, but their emotional benefit too. Never underestimate the effects of a broken family on children. But again, the scripture is realistic. You can’t prevent someone from leaving and divorcing you in Athens or Corinth, Greece in the 50s A.D. or in Athens, Georgia right now.

And if that unfortunately happens to you as a believer, Paul says you’re not eternally bound to that marriage, meaning if your unbelieving spouse initiates divorce and ends your marriage, you’re free from that covenant in God’s eyes, which would mean free to marry again if you want to, but to a believer this time. Even though the point is not made in this section, it’s made by Paul to this church later, and since we’re on the topic, I should underscore this. Second Corinthians chapter 6, verse 14 instructs Christians not to be unequally yoked together with a non-believer. This no doubt applies more widely to other kinds of relationships as well, like business partnerships, for example. But it certainly applies to marriage.

Don’t create a potential mess for yourself by marrying an unbeliever, hoping that they will come to Christ down the road sometime, or just because you’ve convinced yourself, I can’t live without them. The comparison Paul makes is of yoking two different kinds of animals together and expecting them to plow as a team, expecting that that’s going to work out. If you’re a serious Christian and your spouse is not, there are going to be issues, and conflicts are going to arise because you will have different values. And as a Christian, competing obligations in your life. That is, do I please my spouse here, or do I know what pleases the Lord? Don’t set yourself up for that.

Don’t set yourself up for such difficulties. Listen to what God says about this stuff. My son just got married this summer, and I said at their ceremony, the most important reason I feel like it’s a good match and it will probably beat the odds and be a very successful marriage is because they are both not only believers, but believers who seriously want to please the Lord. That gives them a lot in common at the deepest level of their relationship, something deeper to hold them together if and when differences and challenges arise. So the bottom line about marriage and divorce is that marriage is a serious covenant and it’s for a lifetime. God hates divorce.

Remember that, because it’s ugly, painful consequences. When divorce occurs, it’s like trying to take apart two stickers that are glued together, sticky side to sticky side, and they’ve been glued together for quite a time now. You know what? You just can’t get them apart cleanly. You’ll be ripping and tearing them. There’s going to be damage for everyone involved.

At the end of this chapter, Paul underscores one other situation when he writes, A wife is bound as long as her husband lives, but if her husband is dead, then she’s free to be remarried if she wishes, but only in the Lord, again meaning to another believer. In other words, marriage is for a lifetime. That’s God’s ideal for us. That’s in our best interest, certainly our children’s best interest, and the best interest of the stability even of our society. Christians should be doing our best to model these things to our very sexually and morally confused culture. It’s one way that we can be a light in this world.

This is Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul. Marriage, temptation, celibacy, immorality, is it better to be married or not? Should married Christians have sex? Well, Paul provided clear and sometimes surprising answers to these questions and so many more. But we should be looking at all of this beyond just the physical, because the fact of the matter is it’s all about love.

Marriage is a gift from God, and it’s an opportunity for greater intimacy for a man and a woman, for the purpose of serving God. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.