Already Joined
1 Corinthians 6:15-17 - “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Or 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.’ But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.”
For a long time the culture has insisted that sex can be a casual thing. An appetite you satisfy and walk away from, no strings, no aftermath. But it turns out your body never got the message. When two people are physically intimate, the brain releases a flood of oxytocin (the same chemical that binds a nursing mother to her newborn) along with vasopressin, which researchers link to long-term, faithful attachment. At the same moment, the reward system fires with dopamine and quietly tags that person as the source of the pleasure, wiring you toward them. Scientists who study human bonding have measured it: couples in love carry noticeably higher oxytocin than people who are unattached. These are attachment chemicals, and they bond you to the person you’re with, whether you meant to bond or not. Your Creator built the body so that sex is never merely physical.
Paul made the same point 2,000 years earlier, with no lab and no brain scan. The Corinthians were treating sex the way they treated food, as just an appetite to satisfy. So a visit to one of the temple prostitutes down the street meant nothing to them. Paul was horrified! Do you not know, he asks, that when you join your body to someone, you become “one flesh” with them? He reaches all the way back to the very first marriage, to Adam and Eve, where God took two people and made them one. Sex was the sign and seal of that union. And it still works that way, every time, even in an encounter both people swore was meaningless. There is no such thing as casual sex. Not in the world God actually made.
But Paul’s deepest objection isn’t really about biology. Listen to the question underneath: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” The word he uses means body parts. When you came to Christ, you were joined to Him so completely that your body became part of His. So Paul asks the unthinkable out loud: shall I take a part of Christ and fuse it to a prostitute? And he answers with the strongest word of horror in the Greek language: never! The problem wasn’t only that sexual sin wounds you, though it does. It’s that a Christian drags the Lord himself into a union He never blessed.
And then Paul says that “he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.” There’s a union greater than marriage, deeper than the closest bond two bodies could ever form, and if you belong to Christ, you already have it. This union is a union of spirit. When you were saved, God didn’t merely forgive you from across a distance. He fused your life to the life of His Son, so that the Spirit of Christ now lives within you. The most intimate relationship in the universe is not one you’re still out looking for. It’s one you already have.
So much of what pulls at us in temptation is a hunger for closeness. To be wanted, to be fully known and still held. Sexual sin promises exactly that and then hands over a counterfeit — a moment of fusion with someone we’re not bound to — that leaves us emptier than before. It stirs a real hunger for attachment and then refuses to feed it, which is part of why researchers keep finding uncommitted intimacy tangled up with loneliness, rather than cured of it. But in Christ, you are already fully known. You are already held. When temptation comes, the strongest guard you have is a relationship you already possess: you are one spirit with the risen Christ, and nothing the moment could offer will ever run deeper than that.
This is why Paul guards the body so fiercely. God isn’t squeamish about sex. He invented it! He guards your body because He knows what you’re worth and what you’re joined to. Your body is a member of Christ, indwelt by His Spirit, bound to Him more deeply than to anyone you will ever meet. You are not your own, you are not alone, and you never were! And that is the truth every temptation is counting on you to forget.
Today: There’s an old spiritual discipline called recollection: the simple habit of pausing to remember who you are and Whose you are, tuning your heart and mind to the presence of God. Pick a short phrase, something like, “I am one spirit with Christ.” When a temptation rises, simply recall the phrase and let it remind you of what is already true. Let the remembering be your defense.
Prayer: “I stand amazed, Lord, that You would join Yourself to someone like me. There’s no closer bond in all the world, and You handed it to me as a gift. Thank You that I don’t have to go hunting for the intimacy I ache for, because in You I am already fully known and fully held. Guard me in the moments I forget. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
-PK