Property Of Jesus

To read these two verses well, it helps me to remember who Paul was writing to. Corinth was a busy Greek port, full of traders and sailors and people passing through, and the church there was a young one that Paul himself had helped to start (Acts 18). By the time he writes this letter he has heard reports and answered written questions, and a good deal of it is him sorting out real disputes: quarrels over which leader to follow, lawsuits between believers, confusion about sex and marriage and food. So 6:19-20 is not a quiet meditation dropped from the sky. It lands at the end of a blunt argument about how these Christians were using their bodies, in a setting where the body was often treated as nobody’s business but your own. Paul is writing to ordinary, muddled, recently converted people who had carried their old assumptions into the new faith. That is partly why I take heart from it. He is not addressing spiritual athletes. He is writing to a church that kept getting it wrong, and he still calls each of them a temple.

There is a phrase here I think we read too quickly: ‘you were bought with a price.’ The verb behind it is ordinary marketplace language, the sort of word used for buying goods in the open square. Corinth knew that world intimately. To be bought was a concrete, public transaction, not a mood. So when Paul says you are not your own because you were bought with a price, he is reaching for an image his readers could see down at the harbour on any given day. What strikes me is the order of the logic. He does not begin with rules and then look for reasons to back them up. He begins with an ownership that has already happened, a price already paid, and the way I live follows on from that. Notice too that he opens with ‘don’t you know?’ It is a gentle rebuke. The truth was already theirs; they had simply stopped living as if it were so. I recognise that in myself. I rarely need new information. I need to remember what I already belong to.

The word ‘temple’ carries real weight, and it ties this passage into a long story. For Israel, God’s presence had a fixed address: first the tabernacle in the wilderness, then the temple in Jerusalem, with an innermost room so holy that only the high priest went in, and only once a year. Everything about that arrangement said: God is here, and you come near with great care. The existing reflection notes that the presence has moved address, and what I want to add is how far it moved. Paul does not only relocate God’s presence into the church as a whole, the way he does in 1 Corinthians 3:16. Here he narrows it right down to the single body. Hold the two halves together and it is a staggering claim. The glory that once filled a guarded sanctuary now indwells ordinary people who belong to Christ. It runs straight back to Jesus, who spoke of his own body as a temple (John 2:21) and whose death tore the old curtain. The dwelling place of God is no longer down a corridor you are barred from entering. By the Spirit, it is the person reading this.

I want to be honest about how this actually bites, because it is easy to keep it abstract. Glorifying God in the body is not only about the dramatic moral failures we tend to file it under. It reaches the tired evening when I numb myself with whatever is nearest. It reaches how I speak to my wife when I am short-tempered, and what I do with my exhaustion, and how I treat a body that is ageing and will not do what it once did. Paul ties body and spirit together at the close, and I find that refusal to split them deeply realistic. I cannot honour God in some inner spiritual room while treating the rest of me as off the clock. Romans 12:1 makes the same move when it asks us to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, a worship that is physical and daily. And Galatians 2:20, where Paul says he no longer lives but Christ lives in him, keeps me from hearing all this as grim duty. The One who bought me is not a distant landlord doing an inspection. He has moved in, and that changes the whole feel of the obligation.

What rescues this passage from becoming a stick I beat myself with is the direction of it all. I did not buy my way to God; I was bought. The first move is entirely his, and the price was not silver but the blood of Christ. So when I fail to glorify God in my body, and I do, the answer is not to try harder to earn back a presence I was never able to earn in the first place. It is to remember whose I am and turn round. In years of sitting with people who carry shame about what they have done with their bodies, the thing I keep coming back to is that Paul never tells us to scrub the temple clean before God will enter it. The order runs the other way. The Spirit is given first, and holy living grows out of that gift. There is no shame in coming to this late. The surprising news of these two verses is not a demand to make ourselves fit for a guest. It is that the guest is already inside, and means to stay.

The phrase ‘you are not your own’ tends to land on modern ears as a loss. We are taught to prize being self-made, self-owned, answerable to nobody, and anything that dents that sounds like a cage. I have felt that flinch myself. But sit with it a moment and the opposite shows through. To own myself outright is also to carry myself alone, to be the only one finally responsible for keeping me afloat, and that is a heavier load than we admit. Paul is not first closing a door on freedom. He is telling people they are wanted, claimed, paid for at enormous cost by Someone who looked at them and decided they were worth it. Long before this letter, God was already telling his people they were his (Isaiah 43:1). Being owned by a kind owner is not a smaller life; it is a safer one. And once that settles, honouring God with my body stops feeling like a rule pressed on me from outside. It becomes the natural shape of belonging to him. You tend the home you live in. You look after the body that is no longer just yours, because the One it belongs to is good, and is glad to have you.

Walk into almost any gym in Britain and you will find ‘your body is a temple’ on a mug, a vest, a tub of protein. It has slipped its moorings completely and become a slogan for clean eating, no Paul required. That would be a harmless borrowing if the same shrinkage did not keep happening inside church. I have heard these two verses reached for on modesty, on tattoos, on what a teenage girl wore to youth group, as though Paul’s concern here were upkeep and appearance. He is not handing anyone a health code. He names an ownership, and behaviour follows from that, never the other way round.

The uglier misuse sits closer to the surface of chapter six itself. Because Paul is closing a paragraph about sexual sin, I have watched these words swung at particular people as a verdict, stripped clean of the belonging that is what makes any demand bearable at all. Whatever this verse asks of anyone, it asks it of someone already bought and already indwelt. Keep only the command and you have built something Paul never built.

Here is the thing I missed for years. Paul does not say ‘you were bought with a price’ only once in this letter. He says it again a chapter later, and there he draws almost the opposite conclusion: because of that purchase, do not let people own you (1 Corinthians 7:23). Same price, different edge. In 6:20 the claim presses against my grip on myself. In 7:23 it presses against everyone else’s grip on me.

That second use has done more for me pastorally than the first ever did. Think of someone in your church who is being quietly owned: by a boss who treats their body as a machine, by a relative who has decided what they are for, by a shame that whispers their body is public property because of what was once done to it. For them, ‘you are not your own’ is not a tightening of the screws. It is a transfer of deeds. Someone else holds the receipt now, and he is not the one who has been using them.

So if you teach 6:19-20, read 7:23 alongside it. It stops this verse hardening into a leash.

I would happily put these two verses into a baptism, spoken over someone as they come up dripping out of the water: you are not your own, and look what you now belong to. They sit well at communion, where ‘bought with a price’ meets bread and cup and stops being an abstraction. I have seen them do honest work in a difficult members’ meeting too, when a church has to talk plainly about how people are treating one another.

I would not reach for them first with someone recovering from an eating disorder, or sitting with a survivor of abuse, or anyone whose body has already been taken from them without asking. ‘You are not your own’ is meant as rescue. Said into the wrong silence, it can sound like one more voice laying claim to a body that was never allowed to be theirs. That is not a reason to bin the verse. It is a reason to get to the purchase long before the demand, and to know whose body you are speaking over before you open your mouth.

For years I treated 19-20 as a couplet you could lift clean out of the chapter without losing anything. Then I made myself read the run-up slowly, and it changed how loudly the ending lands. A few lines earlier Paul picks up a line the Corinthians were evidently using on themselves, that everything is permitted for them, and rather than flatly denying it he turns it twice: not everything is helpful, and he will not be brought under the power of anything (1 Corinthians 6:12). Then comes the argument that must have felt clever at the time. Food is for the stomach and the stomach for food, so why not file the body’s other appetites in the same drawer, as plumbing, no more morally freighted than hunger. Paul will not have it. The body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and then, in the same breath, the Lord for the body (1 Corinthians 6:13). That second half is the bit I keep re-reading. He could have said the body belongs to the Lord and stopped. He says the Lord is also for the body, on its side, in its corner. Then he does the thing I still find startling: he goes to the resurrection, and says the God who raised the Lord will raise us as well (1 Corinthians 6:14). Not our better parts. Us. Then Genesis, the two becoming one flesh, set against something closer still: joined to the Lord, one spirit (1 Corinthians 6:16 to 17). So by the time you reach ‘you are not your own’, you have already been told your body has a future past the grave, that what you do with it joins you to things, and that you are joined to him. Nineteen and twenty are not the opening move. They are where all of it lands.

Here is something I let sit at the back of my mind for years before I made myself look straight at it. The verb Paul uses is plain enough, the ordinary word for buying. What gives it teeth is what that world bought. Slavery ran through the whole Roman empire, unremarkable, everywhere, and a trading city like Corinth would have been thick with people who were legally somebody’s property: households split up, human beings valued the way you would value cargo. I cannot hand you a receipt for Corinth’s own arrangements and I will not pretend I can, but nobody in that church needed the picture explained to them. And Paul takes the vocabulary of a real and brutal institution and uses it approvingly, warmly, for what Christ has done to you. That should unsettle us a little, not only move us. Because a chapter on, writing to believers who were themselves enslaved, his counsel is quieter than I want it to be: do not let it trouble you, and if you can gain your freedom, take it (1 Corinthians 7:21, where translators still argue over exactly what he is telling them to use). He does not call for the thing to be pulled down. He borrows its language for liberation and leaves the institution roughly where he found it. I have no tidy resolution for that and I would rather say so than manufacture one. What I can say is that the picture landed as good news among people who owned nothing, including themselves, and that the church took shamefully long to see the obvious: one human being owning another is precisely the wrong this metaphor was always exposing.

If my body is a temple now, what is it when it packs up? Paul gives a whole chapter of this same letter to that, and what strikes me is what he refuses to say. He never once answers with a soul slipping free of the wreckage. He works instead through pairs, weakness against power, decay against a life past decaying, a natural body going into the ground and a spiritual body coming up (1 Corinthians 15:42 to 44). Read that beside 6:19-20 and the temple language stops being only a picture for how to behave this week. It turns into a claim about matter. This body, the joints that grumble in the cold, the eyesight quietly going, the scar you never explain to strangers, is not packaging the real you eventually steps out of. Paul’s own image is a seed put in the earth (1 Corinthians 15:37): what comes up is not what went in, and it is not a different thing either. That steadies me at a graveside in a way ‘temple’ on its own has never managed, because ‘temple’ by itself can drift towards meaning keep the place tidy while you are billeted here. Put chapter fifteen next to it and the weight shifts. The Spirit who moved in is not a lodger marking time until eviction. I will be honest that I do not know what a spiritual body is. Paul does not really tell us, and I distrust anyone who sounds certain. But whatever gets raised, he is at work on it now, in this one, today.

I have had to find a way to put this to children, and it took me a long while to get it wrong less often. Lead a seven-year-old with ‘you are not your own’ and what they hear is that somebody else gets to decide everything about them, including the things nobody but them should ever decide. That is not a small misfire. That is the exact opposite of the verse, and a child who learns it that way has been handed something that could hurt them badly later. So I start at the other end, with the temple half rather than the ownership half. Someone who loves you very much lives inside you, and has done since before you can remember, and is not moving out. That is nothing like a rule about tidying your room. It is closer to knowing your favourite person has come to stay for good, so you look after the house they live in, not to avoid being told off, but because you want it to be a good house for them. The harder honesty arrives with children whose bodies do not work the way other children’s do, or who are in pain, or simply different, and I will not tell them every body gets mended. What I say instead is that this is a loved home now, as it is, not on condition it improves. And I never let ‘not your own’ slide into meaning that other people, adults included, have any say over a child’s body that belongs to that child and to God alone. Belonging to a kind owner has never been anyone else’s licence to help themselves.

There are mornings I find this verse hard to hold, and not for doctrinal reasons. It is that the body in question has stopped cooperating: a diagnosis that will not shift, pain with no end date, a disability prayer has not touched, a mind that misfires however carefully you try to steady it. ‘Your body is a temple’ can sound on those days like a joke told kindly, as though God moved into a house that promptly began falling down and nobody ever came about the guttering. I used to reach for the Jerusalem temple as my answer here, all that history of damage and rebuilding, until I admitted it does not work: that building was destroyed in the end, and Ezekiel had already stood and watched the glory walk out of it (Ezekiel 10). Paul gives me something better, and worse. The same man who calls your body a temple says elsewhere that the outer self is wasting away while the inner is renewed daily (2 Corinthians 4:16), and calls the whole arrangement treasure in clay pots (2 Corinthians 4:7), and tells us plainly that he begged God three times to take a thorn out of his flesh and was refused, and given grace instead (2 Corinthians 12:7 to 9). Three times. Turned down. He never got the body he asked for. He got the presence anyway. So I do not think 6:19-20 promises a body that works. It promises someone who moved in and has not left, whatever a surveyor would write about the structure. I have sat with people whose bodies were failing in ways nobody would say out loud, and the truest thing I had was never that healing was on its way, because I do not know that. It was that he does not inspect the premises before deciding to stay. I wish I had something firmer. I have watched that one do more quiet work in a hospital corridor than any amount of explaining why.

• Where in my body and my habits am I still quietly living as though I belong only to myself?
• If the Holy Spirit genuinely lives in me, what one ordinary part of my day might I begin to treat differently this week?
• Do I hear ‘you are not your own’ as a threat or as good news, and what does my answer tell me about how I see God?
• What would tomorrow look like if I lived as someone already bought, rather than someone still trying to earn it?

If you would like to keep going, you could read more of Paul’s letter at 1 Corinthians, or browse verses gathered by topic to find one that meets you where you are today.