1 Corinthians 6
1 Corinthians 6 — Commentary and Meaning
The short answer
1 Corinthians 6 tackles two problems in the Corinthian church that sound surprisingly modern: believers dragging each other into court (verses 1–8), and believers treating their bodies as private property to use however they please (verses 12–20). Holding the two halves together is one of Paul's sharpest turns in the whole letter, in verses 9–11.
There Paul lists the kinds of wrongdoing that will not "inherit God's Kingdom" — a catalog that would have described everyday life in Corinth, a port city famous for its vice. But the list is not the point. The point lands in the next breath: "Such were some of you." Were. Paul is not shaming the Corinthians so much as reminding them who they now are — "washed," "sanctified," "justified." The chapter moves from indictment to identity. The very sins that defined the city become the backdrop for what Christ has done with ordinary people.
That identity is why the body matters in the second half. Corinthian slogans like "all things are lawful for me" treated the body as morally neutral — a tool for appetite. Paul answers that the body is not a possession but a dwelling: "your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit." And a temple has an owner. "You were bought with a price," Paul writes, so "glorify God in your body."
Read this way, the famous line "you are not your own" is not a threat but a rescue. If your body belongs to the marketplace — something to sculpt, market, or spend — you are only ever as valuable as your presentation. If it belongs to God, it is already holy ground. The chapter's demand and its comfort are the same sentence: you have been claimed, washed, and moved in with.
What scholars say
James C. Howell asks what happens when the world's view of the body — something to sculpt, protect, and present — dictates how we see ourselves, and answers with Paul's counter-word that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. William Barclay reads the vice list of verses 9–11 against the wickedness of Corinth itself, hearing Paul's turn to what some of you 'used to be' as the triumphant note: the city's very iniquity became Christ's opportunity.
“You are not your own; so glorify God in your body . L ook at your body, yourself, in the mirror. The world says you are a consumer—that your body is to be sculpted, or protected; it is something you use to have fun or to get ahead, that how you look, your presentation, is everything. But if the world dictates how I see myself, I become superficial, self-indulgent, vapid. Thankfully, God whispers the truth about the body, the self that I see: your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Flannery O'Connor wrote a story imagining some girls in a convent school who have just been told by an elderly, unworldly nun that the most effective way to repel the advances of any young man in the back seat of a car is to say, "Stop, sir!”
“This was the city in which Paul lived and worked and had some of his greatest triumphs. When he was writing to the Corinthians, he made a list of all kinds of wickedness. ‘Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolators, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers – none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.’ And then comes the triumphant phrase: ‘and this is what some of you used to be’ (1 Corinthians 6:9–11). The very iniquity of Corinth was the opportunity of Christ.”
What it means for you
Most of us absorb the world's script without noticing: the body is a project, an image, an asset. 1 Corinthians 6 offers a different mirror. Before you are a consumer or a brand, you are a temple — a place where God has chosen to live. That changes how you treat your body, and just as much how you judge it.
It also changes how you read your past. Paul's "such were some of you" means no history disqualifies anyone. Whatever the old list said about you, the new sentence — washed, sanctified, claimed — is the one that now tells the truth.
1 Corinthians 6 in context
1 Corinthians is Paul's letter to a young church in a wealthy, famously immoral port city, and chapters 5–7 deal with how believers handle bodies, sex, and disputes. Chapter 5 confronts a scandal the church was tolerating; chapter 6 widens the lens to lawsuits between believers and to sexual ethics generally; chapter 7 then answers the Corinthians' own questions about marriage. Chapter 6 is the hinge: it grounds all this practical instruction in identity — who the Corinthians used to be, and whose they are now.
Passages we cover in this chapter