# Bought *You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.* By [Reborn Jem](https://paragraph.com/@rebornjem) · 2026-08-22 christianity, daily devotional, bible study, 1 corinthians, holy spirit, lời chúa --- 1 Corinthians 6:16-20 (NIV) --------------------------- 16 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." 17 But whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit. 18 Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. 19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. Do You Not Know --------------- Paul asks that question twice in five verses. That is not a throwaway phrase. He is writing to Christians in Corinth who were very sure of how much they already understood. They had slogans. Earlier in this same chapter Paul quotes one of them back at them: "I have the right to do anything." It sounds like freedom. In practice it had become a permission slip. Grace had covered them, so the body could do as it pleased, because the body was just the body. Notice what Paul does not do. He does not open by telling them to stop. He opens by asking whether they actually know what they are doing. That is a different kind of question. It assumes the problem is not only weak willpower. The problem is a wrong picture of what a body is. Most of the time that is our problem too. We do not fail because we forgot the rule. We fail because somewhere underneath we believe the rule is arbitrary. Paul spends the next five verses taking that assumption apart. The Two Will Become One Flesh ----------------------------- "Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body?" Paul picks the hardest, ugliest case on purpose. In Corinth this was ordinary life, woven into the temples and the trade routes. Nobody thought twice about it. The assumption was simple: it is a transaction. Two bodies meet, money changes hands, and nothing follows anyone home. Paul says that is not what happened. And he proves it from Genesis, of all places. "The two will become one flesh." That line was written about marriage — a man leaving his father and mother, a covenant, a whole life joined to another. Paul takes that sentence and applies it to the very encounter the Corinthians were certain meant nothing. That is the claim, and it is worth sitting with. There is no such thing as sex that only touches the body. Something joins. You can intend a transaction and still walk away joined. You can tell yourself it was nothing and be telling the truth about what you meant and completely wrong about what happened. So God is not restricting a neutral appetite here. He is describing something that binds, and warning us not to bind ourselves to what we cannot carry. United With the Lord -------------------- "But whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit." One verse later, Paul sets a second union right beside the first. He wants us to see they are the same kind of thing — not the same act, but the same category. Real joining. Something that holds. This is where the Corinthian view of the body falls apart. They thought the spirit belonged to God and the body was left over — private, temporary, outside the deal. Paul will not allow the split. If you are joined to Christ in spirit, and your body is not a separate compartment, then what you do with your body is done by someone who is joined to Christ. You are not a soul carrying a body around. You are a person. When Christ took you, He took all of you. Flee ---- "Flee from sexual immorality." There is exactly one command in this passage and that is it. Flee. Not resist. Not manage. Not set some boundaries and see how it goes. Run. Joseph is the picture. Potiphar's wife takes hold of his cloak, and he leaves the cloak in her hand and gets out of the house. He does not stay and win the argument. He does not explain himself. He loses the coat and keeps the man. There is a reason Paul says flee here and not elsewhere. Some temptations you can stand and face down. This one you usually cannot, because the longer you stay in the room, the more the room sets the terms. Willpower is not the strong tool we think it is. Distance is. Which means the real decision gets made hours before the moment of temptation — in what we open, where we go, who we are alone with. "All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body." Paul is not ranking sins here, as if this one were worse than cruelty or greed. He is saying it works differently. Most sins we commit with the body against something out there. This one turns inward. The instrument and the casualty are the same thing. A Temple With Someone Living In It ---------------------------------- "Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?" For centuries, God's presence among His people had an address. A tent, then a building on a hill in Jerusalem, with an inner room nobody entered casually. Everything about how Israel handled that space said the same thing: what lives here changes what you may do here. Paul says that address moved. It is you. And he says bodies, plural, and temples — this is not only the church gathered on a Sunday. It is personal. Your hands, your eyes, your evenings, the room you are sitting in right now. Then a phrase that is easy to skim: "whom you have received from God." The Spirit was given. You did not earn Him by being clean enough to house Him. He came, and He came first. The holiness of the temple follows from the presence, not the other way round. And then four words that cut through everything else: "You are not your own." Every argument for doing whatever we like with our bodies rests on one unspoken assumption — that they are ours. My body, my business. Paul does not argue with the conclusion. He removes the premise. Bought at a Price ----------------- "you were bought at a price." Paul does not name the price. He does not have to. His readers knew what it cost, and so do we. A cross, and a body broken on it. We hear ownership and instinctively hear loss. Something taken. But many of the people first reading this letter were slaves, and some had been bought by someone who then set them free. The word carried that memory. To be bought was not always to be trapped; sometimes it was the moment every other claim on you was cancelled. That is what happened. You are not your own — and the alternative was never freedom. It was belonging to the appetite, the habit, the thing you cannot put down. Christ did not take your body from you. He bought it back. "Therefore honor God with your bodies." Therefore. The command lands last, and it lands as a conclusion rather than a demand. Not: behave, and perhaps God will accept you. But: you have been bought, the Spirit already lives here, so live like it is true. Honour is a warm word. You honour what you value. Paul is not asking us to despise the body or to be afraid of it. He is asking us to treat it as what it is — bought, indwelt, His. Walk On ------- Most of us do not need to be told this is wrong. We already know. What we need is to stop arguing with the moment and start moving the decision earlier. So the honest question is not "am I strong enough?" It is: where do I need to leave the room? What is the door I keep standing near, telling myself I can handle it? Name that one thing today, and put distance between you and it — not tonight when it is hard, but now while it is easy. And underneath that, a gentler question. Do you actually believe your body was bought? Because if you do not, every rule about it will feel like God taking something from you. And if you do, it changes what shame does. A bought thing is a valued thing. The One who paid did not do it to shame you afterwards. You are not your own. On the days that sounds like a loss, remember who was willing to pay, and what it means that He wanted you enough to. All glory to God — forever and ever. Amen. 🤍 If this reflection spoke to you, consider subscribing to follow along my journey of faith, meditation, and rebuilding — one day at a time. Your support truly means more than you know. ❤️ --- *Originally published on [Reborn Jem](https://paragraph.com/@rebornjem/bought)*