By John A. Huffman Jr.
Senior Pastor of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California. He is a Contributing Editor to Preaching.
Action Principle #2:
Deal honestly with the biblical theology of your sexuality.
Paul wrestles with this as he writes, “‘All things are lawful for me,’ but not all things are beneficial. ‘All things are lawful for me,’ but I will not be dominated by anything. ‘Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food,’ and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power” (
1 Cor. 6:12-14).
This is saying that you and I are more than animals. We are not just made up of body parts and nerve endings. You and I have the freedom to do things, not just the way they come naturally, but the way you and I were created by God to do things.
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Far from being negative, the apostle Paul was a proponent of freedom in Jesus Christ. Throughout his missionary journeys as he established churches, he had to struggle with legalistic Judaizers who wanted to tie up the new believers in Christ into knots of Levitical laws. Paul was a proponent of freedom in Christ. He continually articulated what was the essence of the Old Testament teachings. His theme was that God had designed us to be fully human. We are more than animals. We have the privilege of living at a much higher level of existence.
At the same time, Paul was very aware that this teaching of Christian freedom could be distorted, so he quotes a saying: “All things are lawful for me.” Then he adds a new dimension. He states, “...but not all things are beneficial.” He then rearticulates the statement, “All things are lawful for me.” But then he states, “...but I will not be dominated by anything.”
Do you catch the delicate balance of this? Freedom can be distorted into license. License can then be distorted into destruction of others and one’s own self-destruction.
One of the greatest New Testament teachings on Christian freedom is Paul’s letter to the church at Galatia. In it, Paul urges the believers to not again submit themselves to a yoke of slavery. He begs them not to step back into a religion defined by do’s and don’ts, void of a personal relationship with the Lord. He exhorts them to freedom, not to a freedom that is license. He writes, “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another” (
Gal. 5:13-15).
Paul was doing business in a first-century world in which the Greeks looked down on the body. There was a proverbial saying, “The body is a tomb.” Epictetus said, “I am a poor soul, shackled to a corpse.” The important thing was the soul, the spirit of a person. The body really didn’t matter to many of these Greeks.