Chapter 6

¹When one of you has a disagreement with his neighbor, does he dare to bring the matter before a heathen court, instead of laying it before his Christian brothers? ²Do you not know that the Christians are to be the judges of the world? And if the world is to come before you for judgment, are you unfit to decide the most trivial cases? ³Do you not know that we are to be the judges of angels, to say nothing of ordinary matters? ⁴If then you have ordinary matters to be settled, will you submit them for judgment to men who are nothing in the church? ⁵I ask it to shame you. Has it come to this, that there is not a single wise man among you who could settle a disagreement between one brother and another, ⁶but one Christian has to go to law with another, and before unbelievers too? ⁷Having lawsuits with one another at all means your utter failure, to begin with. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be robbed? ⁸But it is you who wrong and rob others, and your own brothers at that! ⁹Do you not know that wrongdoers will not have any share in God’s kingdom? Do not let anyone mislead you. People who are immoral or idolaters or adulterers or sensual or given to unnatural vice ¹⁰or thieves or greedy—drunkards, abusive people, robbers—will not have any share in God’s kingdom. ¹¹Some of you used to be like that; but you have washed it all away, you have been consecrated, you have become upright, by the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and through the Spirit of our God.

¹²I may do anything I please, but not everything I may do is good for me. I may do anything I please; but I am not going to let anything master me. ¹³It is true, food is meant for the stomach, and the stomach for the food, but God will put an end to both of them. But the body is not meant for immorality, but for the service of the Lord, and the Lord is for the body to serve. ¹⁴And as God raised the Lord to life, he will raise us also by his power. ¹⁵Do you not know that your bodies are parts of Christ’s body? Am I then to take away from Christ parts of his body, and make them parts of a prostitute’s? Never! ¹⁶Or do you not know that a man who has to do with a prostitute makes one body with her? For “The two,” says the Scripture, “shall become physically one.” ¹⁷But whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit. ¹⁸Fly from immorality! Any other sin a man commits is something outside his body, but the immoral man sins against his own body. ¹⁹Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the holy Spirit that is within you, which you have received from God? Besides, you are not your own; ²⁰you have been bought and paid for. Therefore, honor God with your bodies.