Freedom Vs Responsibility Series

Freedom Vs Responsibility

1 Corinthians Series

CCCAG September 7th, 2025

Text: 1 Corinthians 6:12–19; 10:23–31 (CSB)

Introduction: The American Idea of Freedom vs. Paul’s Reality Check

If there’s one word that defines American culture, it’s freedom.

For those of us who have served, we believe in freedom up to the point of entering the military. In essence, we said “This we’ll defend, even if it costs us our lives” because we believe that humans live best when humans are free.

From our nation’s founding documents to the way we talk in everyday life, we prize the ability to make our own choices.

The American ethos is summed up in a statement or a slogan we hear people use when someone is acting in a way that we might not thing is desirable -“It’s a free country!” as if that phrase ends every argument.

The Corinthians were no different.

Their slogan was, “Everything is permissible for me.”

This was particularly said within the church in Corinth.

They believed that since Christ had set them free from the law, they were free to live however they pleased.

But Paul pushes back. Twice in this letter he quotes that phrase, and twice he follows it with, “but not everything is beneficial… but I will not be mastered by anything” (1 Cor 6:12, CSB).

Paul is teaching the church in Corinth — and us today — that our freedom in Christ is not a license to sin, nor a selfish right to indulge ourselves. True Christian liberty has limits: it must honor God, respect the body He gave us, and build up others.

So today we’re going to explore two key passages — 1 Corinthians 6:12–19 and 1 Corinthians 10:23–31 — where Paul lays out the tension between moral law and Christian liberty. And we’ll see how to live in a way that balances freedom with responsibility, liberty with love, grace with holiness.

In the first of these examples, Paul is directly addressing the Corinthian systems of worship outside of the church-

The people in Corinth were surrounded by pagan temples where ritual prostitution was part of the worship act.

That’s the background, let Let’s read the scripture- (1 Cor 6:12-20)

12 “Everything is permissible for me,” but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible for me,” but I will not be mastered by anything. 13 “Food is for the stomach and the stomach for food,” and God will do away with both of them.

However, the body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14 God raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. 15 Don’t you know that your bodies are a part of Christ’s body? So should I take a part of Christ’s body and make it part of a prostitute? Absolutely not! 16 Don’t you know that anyone joined to a prostitute is one body with her? For Scripture says, The two will become one flesh., 17 But anyone joined to the Lord is one spirit with him.

18 Flee sexual immorality! Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the person who is sexually immoral sins against his own body.

19 Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, 20 for you were bought at a price. So glorify God with your body.

Prayer

We see here that Paul uses what to us may seem to be an extreme example of the idea of freedom going too far.

But to the Corinthians, this was just a Monday. For them, going to the pagan temple and participating in the activities there was like us running to the store for eggs.

Imagine telling your wife, “Hey babe, going to the market to pick up a few things. Might stop at the temple on the way home.”

Your wife saying, “Ok honey, love you!” like it’s no big deal.

Paul uses what was common in their culture to point out that while we are free in Christ, that freedom is not an excuse to live in a way that is destructive to our body’s, souls, or spirits.

We often look at the moral law in the bible as a burden we have to shoulder and just grind through.

But what we need to realize is that God’s law is protective, not oppressive.

Even the 613 ceremonial and civil laws seen in Exodus through Deuteronomy was protective to that nation.

Take the prohibition against eating certain food. Let’s take pork for an example.

When God told Moses to institute those laws, we are talking about desert dwellers living in the Bronze age. While they did know how to salt food to help preserve it, pork spoils very quickly and carries parasites that aren’t in the animals considered “Clean” by the law. Even cooking something like pork in a sanitary way was near impossible for them. Household Sanitation was mostly nonexistent, so people’s toilet products were just put into a bowel and thrown outside somewhere.