What You Have Done With Your Body
"Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?" — 1 Corinthians 6:19
The Category That Comes Up Most
In case after case in these lessons, one category surfaces more than any other.
A woman healthy her entire life until she slept with her boyfriend three weeks before graduation, then sick for twenty years. A man whose hip pain traced back to being sexually active in high school. A woman who contracted her husband's disease after his death, connected to their having slept together before marriage.
This is not because sexual sin is uniquely wicked. It is because of what Scripture says it does structurally.
Why This One Is Different
Paul makes an argument here that he makes nowhere else.
"Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body." (1 Corinthians 6:18)
He is drawing a category distinction. Whatever he means precisely, he is saying this one operates differently from the others.
And then he explains why, quoting Genesis:
"Do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, 'The two will become one flesh.'" (v. 16)
Something is formed. Not merely an act performed and completed, but a joining that persists. That is the basis of what later lessons will call an unholy soul tie — and it explains why sexual sin so often shows up decades later in a life that has been clean ever since.
"Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price." (vv. 19-20)
Beyond the Sexual
The category is broader than sex, though sex is where it concentrates.
What you have taken into your body. Substances used to escape. Drunkenness. Anything used to numb.
What you have done to your body. Deliberate harm. Starving it, purging it, cutting it, driving it past every limit as a form of self-punishment.
What you have done with your body to others. Violence. Force. Using another person's body as an instrument.
What was done to your body without your consent. This one is different, and it will be treated with the care it deserves in the lessons on soul ties. What was done to you is not your sin. But it may still have formed something that needs breaking, and you can be free of it.
Point to Ponder
Every other sin is committed and finished. Scripture says this one forms something that stays.
Verse to Remember
"Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?" — 1 Corinthians 6:19
Question to Consider
What have I done with my body, or to my body, that I have never brought to God?
Today's Practice
This will be the hardest list you make. Do it anyway, and do it privately.
Sexual partners. Every one, by name where you know it. If you do not know a name, write whatever identifies the occasion to you. This list is between you and God and no one else — and destroy it afterward if that is what makes it possible to be complete.
Sexual activity beyond partners. Pornography. Fantasy. Anything done alone. Anything involving another person's body without their full consent.
What you have taken in. Substances. Drunkenness. What you used them to escape.
What you have done to yourself. Self-harm in any form, including the forms that look like discipline.
For each, repent specifically:
"Father, I did ________ with the body You gave me. It was wrong. I am sorry. I turn from it and I ask You to cleanse it and to break anything it formed."
Then, when you reach the lessons on soul ties, come back to this page. You will need it.
Prayer
Father, I have used this body as though it were only mine. I have given it away, damaged it, numbed it, and used it against other people.
I bring all of it to You now — the names, the acts, the things I have never said out loud to anyone.
Forgive me. Cleanse this body. Break whatever was formed through what I did.
And where things were done to me that I did not choose, meet me there too. I know You are not blaming me for those. Set me free from them anyway. In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Keep this list private, and make it complete. Then destroy the paper if you need to.