Study Desk

Actually, then, it is already a defeat for you, that you have lawsuits with one another. Why not rather suffer the wrong? Why not rather be defrauded?

Do you not know that your bodies are parts of Christ? Shall I then take away the parts of Christ and make them parts of a prostitute? Far from it!

Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her? For He says, "THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH."

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

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?

For you have been bought for a price: therefore glorify God in your body.

Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman.

Stop depriving one another, except by agreement for a time so that you may devote yourselves to prayer, and come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

Were you called as a slave? Do not let it concern you. But if you are also able to become free, take advantage of that.

For the one who was called in the Lord as a slave, is the Lord's freed person; likewise the one who was called as free, is Christ's slave.

You were bought for a price; do not become slaves of people.

I think, then, that this is good in view of the present distress, that it is good for a man to remain as he is.

Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be released. Are you released from a wife? Do not seek a wife.

But if you marry, you have not sinned; and if a virgin marries, she has not sinned. Yet such people as yourselves will have trouble in this life, and I am trying to spare you.

I say this for your own benefit, not to put a restraint on you, but to promote what is appropriate and to secure undistracted devotion to the Lord.

A wife is bound as long as her husband lives; but if her husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord.

But take care that this freedom of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.

Do we not have a right to eat and drink?

Do we not have a right to take along a believing wife, even as the rest of the apostles and the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas?

Who at any time serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat its fruit? Or who tends a flock and does not consume some of the milk of the flock?