Faith in Focus #12

A reflection from Connection Church and other spiritual events from the week

Faith in Focus is a weekly reflection on what God has been teaching me throughout the week regarding my faith. Whether it’s personal interactions, reading, or the Sunday sermon, God speaks through it all, and I hope this helps you focus on His mission.

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Based on the sermon by Jonathan Land, Connection Church Sioux Falls, January 18, 2026.

In 1 Corinthians 6:12–20, Paul dismantles the cultural slogans of Corinth, and ours, exposing how sexual freedom can quietly become spiritual slavery. His solution is surprisingly unheroic and relentlessly practical: don’t fight, don’t negotiate. Flee.

Jonathan opened the sermon with an unexpected assurance: this conversation would be less graphic than a walk through the local mall.

That line landed because it exposed a quiet truth most of us already know but rarely name. Our culture is not sexually restrained; it is saturated. Advertisements, billboards, streaming shows, social media feeds, desire is constantly being curated, monetized, and normalized. What once would have shocked now barely registers. Sin, after all, corrupts not only behavior but perception. It dulls the nerves. And that desensitization is dangerous.

Because when sin becomes “normal,” it stops looking like rebellion and starts looking like freedom.

Paul writes 1 Corinthians 6:12–20 into a world not unlike ours. A city fluent in sexual expression, philosophical slogans, and personal autonomy. Corinth did not blush. And Paul does not flinch. He presses the issue not because he is prudish, but because he is pastoral. He knows that what we do with our bodies is never merely physical. It is always theological.

The World Behind the Text

Corinth was a port city, wealthy, transient, pluralistic, and permissive. It was famous for commerce and infamous for its sexual ethics. Temples, prostitutes, philosophers, and slogans all competed for allegiance. Into that mix, the Corinthian Christians had imported Jesus, but not yet allowed him to reorder everything else.

Paul quotes the sayings circulating among them:

“All things are lawful for me.”
“Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food.”

These weren’t pagan slogans alone; they were Christianized distortions of Christian freedom. The Corinthians had taken a real gospel truth, freedom from the law, and stretched it beyond recognition. Paul doesn’t deny the premise. He corrects the conclusion.

“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful.
“All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything (1 Cor. 6:12, ESV).

Freedom, Paul insists, is not measured by permission but by mastery. Whatever controls you owns you.

That distinction matters because the gospel does not merely forgive sin. It liberates us from slavery. And Corinth was confusing license with liberty.

Walking the Passage

Paul’s argument in this passage unfolds like a tightening vice.

First, he reframes the body.

“The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body” (v. 13).

That sentence quietly overturns both ancient and modern assumptions. In Greek thought, the body was disposable; in modern thought, it is autonomous. Paul rejects both. The body matters because God made it, God redeemed it, and God intends to raise it.

Sex, Paul reminds them, was created for good. Scripture affirms this from the beginning. After the flood, God renews his command:

“Be fruitful and multiply; increase greatly on the earth” (Gen. 9:7).

Sex was designed to bring life, physical, covenantal, communal. But sin corrodes design. What God gives as a gift, sin twists into a weapon. What was meant to unite becomes something that fractures. Relationships collapse, marriages dissolve, people are reduced to objects, and desire becomes demand.

Sin doesn’t just break rules. It makes us resent the rules as if they were meant for cruelty.

Paul then moves deeper, uncomfortably deeper.

“Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” (v. 15)

This is not metaphorical flourish. Paul means it literally. Union with Christ is not spiritual abstraction; it is embodied reality. What you do with your body, you do as someone joined to Jesus.

And then comes the line that ends all negotiation:

“You are not your own” (v. 19).

That sentence detonates modern assumptions. Autonomy collapses. Ownership is transferred. The body is not a private playground but a sacred dwelling.

A Fair Counter-Reading

Some readers argue that Paul’s language reflects ancient purity concerns rather than enduring moral truths. Others suggest that sexual ethics should evolve alongside cultural norms, especially since Paul’s context differed from ours.

These readings rightly caution against flattening Scripture into simplistic rulebooks. But they fail to account for Paul’s grounding logic. His argument is not rooted in cultural taboos but in creation, redemption, and resurrection. The body matters because God made it, Christ purchased it, and the Spirit inhabits it.

Paul’s concern is not control, it is coherence. A gospel that saves souls but ignores bodies is not the gospel Paul preached.

The Turn

So how do you fight sexual sin?

Are we to put on the full armor of God? Or pray without ceasing? No, of this type of sin the Bible is clear time and time again.

Flee.

Why? Because sexual sin is different.

“Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (v. 18).

This sin doesn’t merely confront you; it pursues you. It chases. It follows patterns of proximity, habit, imagination, and access. Which is why Paul doesn’t call for bravery, he calls for distance.

This is illustrated at the beginning with Joseph in Genesis 39. When Potiphar’s wife grabbed him, Joseph didn’t reason, rebuke, or pray longer. He left his cloak and fled.

Holiness, sometimes, looks like speed.

Song of the week: Shoulders - For King & Country

Some songs fade after a few listens. Others linger, returning again and again with fresh meaning. This one has become the kind I could play every hour on the hour without losing its impact. A steady reminder of the quiet, sustaining way God carries His people.

At its core is a simple but powerful truth. God does not merely walk beside us in our burdens, He shoulders them. The message echoes Jesus’ words in Matthew 11:30, “My yoke is easy and my burden light.” In biblical terms, a yoke was a wooden beam placed across the shoulders of two animals, designed to distribute weight and make labor easier. Jesus’ promise reframes that image, the weight we struggle to carry is taken up by Him.

For King & Country captures that reality with striking clarity in the chorus: “You carry my weakness, my sickness, my brokenness all on Your shoulders…..You are my rest, my rescue.” The lyrics don’t romanticize hardship, it redirects it, pointing to a Savior who absorbs the strain so His people don’t have to bear it alone.

That truth is what gives the song its staying power. It isn’t just comforting, it’s reorienting. If Christ carries everything, then the burden is no longer ours to manage, only ours to release. And in that exchange, weight for rest, effort for grace, the promise of a light yoke finally makes sense.

Carry It Into the Week

Jonathan made one final, clarifying point: this principle doesn’t apply only to sexual sin.

Insert any sin into the sentence and it still holds.

Sin feels like freedom until you try to stop.

Addiction always masquerades as choice. “I can quit whenever I want,” we say. But the moment quitting becomes difficult, the truth emerges. What we thought we controlled has been controlling us all along.

Paul closes the passage with the gospel’s decisive reframe:

“For you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (v. 20).

Freedom is not self-ownership. It is Christ-ownership. Jesus did not shed his blood to make us autonomous; he shed it to make us whole.

Which means fleeing sin is not running FROM joy, it is running TOWARD it.

So flee.
Flee toward Christ.
And you will find that his arms were open long before you turned around.

Week in Reflection

The past week was marked by a wide range of emotions as my family was finally able to lay my uncle to rest following his passing over Thanksgiving weekend. Bringing that season to a close provided a sense of needed closure and was deeply cathartic, though it also proved physically and emotionally exhausting.

Between the visitation on Friday, the funeral on Saturday, and moving directly into church on Sunday, the schedule left little room to recharge. Like many, I have a limited social and emotional capacity on any given day, and the weekend demanded all of it. Still, by God’s grace, I made it through and was able to reconnect in meaningful ways with people I had not seen in a long time.

In the midst of it all, God also provided the courage and strength for me to stand during the funeral and read Scripture, specifically 1 Corinthians 15:51–57, a passage that points clearly to the hope of resurrection in Jesus. Though the week was heavy with grief, it was also marked by grace, making it, in its own way, another blessing.

And remember, God loves you and so do I.