Category: Devotions

Marriage with its comfort and satisfaction is God’s prescribed wisdom for preventing fornication. The word “fornication” describes all sorts of lawless lusts. And thus, in the marriage, both husband and wife has given the power over their own body to their better half. Any relationship outside the marriage covenant is a violation of the partner’s rights. [Matthew Henry]

Marriage is a blessed union of mutual dependence between the husband and the wife. With each carrying out their part of the commitment to support, encourage and bless one another in a lifetime of cleaving, comforting and strengthening. “Due benevolence” means demonstrating “kindness, conjugal duty, good will, consideration, thoughtfulness, unselfishness, compassion, kind-heartedness”. Let each fulfil their martial duty! [Hendricksen]

The Apostle Paul highlights the temptation to fall into the the sin of sexual immorality for believers who are single is very real. And he administers the remedy that one finds a spouse in marriage to avoid fornication. Of course, it is not the case that all single believers will face this problem. He tells us that it can happen.

The Apostle Paul speaks of those who remain single and are not married. They are not to be despised for remaining single, for not having any sexual relationship with woman. He says it is good. But it must not be construed as a more desirable spiritual state for a person. And the single man or the single woman should not be pressurised to get married.

The believer is urged to possess his body in holiness. This is his reasonable service. Our Lord paid the price to purchase his salvation, cleansing him for all his sins. The nail pierced hands are testimony of the suffering that the Lord endured. More than that is the weight of human sins that was upon Him when He bore it alone on the cross rescuing the believer from the judgment of hell fire.

The late Adrian Rogers made this insightful observation, “Do you know what a carnal person is? A carnal person is a selfish person. He is living as though he belonged to himself; and so, what he wants to do, what he wants to think, what he wants to feel, what he wants to say, what he wants to buy, where he wants to go, how he wants to act — he does. He acts as though he owns himself, when he does not. The cure for carnality is to be aware of the Savior’s purchase of you, to see the price that was paid for you.”

The believer is exhorted to flee sexual immorality. This is a command to act decisively, to move hastily from danger from fear of being ensnared. Let this be a spiritual reflex in your life. All other sins a man commits are outside his body but sexual sins harms the body. It defiles him. How so? As one writer puts it succinctly, “It wastes the bodily energies; produces feebleness, weakness, and disease; it impairs the strength, enervates the man, and shortens life.” [Barnes]

The believer is to possess his body in honour by abstaining and fleeing any form of immorality. He is joined in one spirit with the Lord. In him dwells the Spirit of Christ. When the believer commits immorality outside marriage, he sins against Christ who is joined to him.

Matthew Poole said well, “Christ is united to the person of the believer, and He is the Head of the church, which is His mystical body; so that the bodies of believers are in a sense the members of Christ, and should be used by us as the members of Christ, which we should not rend from Him: but he that doth commit fornication, rends his body from Christ, and maketh it the member of an harlot; for as the man and wife are one flesh by Divine ordination, Genesis 2:24, so the fornicater and the harlot are one flesh by an impure” union.

The believer must understand that in the same manner which Jesus was raised from the dead, he shall be given a glorified body at the Lord’s returns. The body is not for immorality but for union with the Lord at His coming again. It is to be kept pure.