Bought, and Raised

1 Corinthians 6:20  “for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

In the year 1218, a man named Peter Nolasco founded a religious order in Barcelona. Along the Mediterranean coast, Christians were being captured and sold into slavery by the thousands, and his order existed for one purpose: to buy them back. They begged and raised money to pay ransoms, then sailed into hostile ports to purchase human beings out of chains and set them free. And they took an incredible vow. If the ransom money ran short, a friar could offer himself in the captive’s place, trading his own freedom, his own body, to buy another person out of slavery. They did it in deliberate imitation of Someone. They promised to give their own lives, if they had to, as Christ gave his for us.

That picture, of someone paying to buy a person out of slavery, is exactly the one Paul reaches for to explain what happened to you. “You were bought with a price,” he says. The word he uses was ordinary slave-market language, the term for a person purchased at auction. You weren’t bought with silver or gold but with the precious blood of Christ. What those friars were willing to do, trade themselves to free a captive, Jesus actually did. He became it, stepping into our place and paying with His own life to buy us out.

Now let that settle into the place where you keep your sense of your value and worth. We spend so much of our lives quietly wondering if we matter, constantly measuring ourselves against people who seem to matter more. The cross is God’s answer to that question. If you want to know what your life is worth to Him, look at what He was willing to pay for it! Not a sum of money. His only Son.

Now, as a result, “you are not your own.” And when understood in light of the cross, this isn’t a loss at all. Consider what belonging only to yourself would actually mean: your body would be yours alone to manage, yours alone to fix, yours alone to lose, and you would face every bit of it by yourself. It sounds like freedom, but it’s really a kind of abandonment. “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price” means Someone wanted you so fiercely that He paid His own blood to make you His. Which means you’re not a throwaway the world could lose without noticing. You are wanted. You belong now to the One who paid everything to keep you!

So where Paul lands, and where our whole week has been heading, in this single phrase: “so glorify God in your body.” To glorify God with your body is the song of someone who has been set free. This is the joy of a Joyful Worshipper: a person whose gratitude spills out through their actual hands and feet and voice. Your body has been destined by the Father, joined to the Son, filled by the Spirit, and bought with blood. So use it to worship! Let these redeemed bodies live, and love, and give like Jesus, because that is the truest thank-you we could ever offer the One who bought us!

Be encouraged this morning, saint! You were a slave at auction once, and you’re not anymore. You were bought at the highest price ever paid, by the One who wanted you most! That is why we neither despise these bodies nor worship them; we give them back, gladly, to the One who made and bought them. So glorify God in your body today, out of sheer wonder that you were bought at all and will be raised at last. And when we gather this morning, bring this body — the aging and ordinary and dearly bought one you live in — and worship Him with it, shoulder to shoulder with a whole room of people on their way to being raised.

Prayer: “I can hardly take it in, Lord, that You looked at me in my chains and paid Your own blood to make me Yours. Steady me with the sureness of the resurrection, and let it reshape how I live in this body in the meantime. Take my whole person and let every part of me glorify You, until the day You raise us and we are more ourselves than we have ever been. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

Q & A

Our text this week stirred up some questions. Here are honest answers, held with confidence where Scripture is clear and with humility where it stays quiet.

Is sexual sin really worse than other sins? And what about the ones already in my past?

Paul does single it out, at least as it relates to its earthly consequences: other sins are committed outside the body, he says, but this one is a sin against your own body (6:18). It reaches somewhere deep and can leave a mark that aches for a long time, which is why he tells us to flee it rather than negotiate with it. But hear the other half just as clearly. A few verses earlier Paul listed exactly these sins and then told the Corinthians, “and such were some of you. But you were washed” (6:11). Some of the holiest people in that church had a past that matched the list line for line. There is no sin so deep that the blood which bought you cannot reach it. If it is behind you, it is washed. If it still has a grip on you, that same grace is strong enough to break it.

What does it actually look like to “glorify God in your body”?

It looks like hands that serve someone who cannot pay you back, a voice that blesses instead of tearing down, and a body kept for the One it belongs to. It looks like showing up to worship rather than staying home, maybe kneeling when you pray, spending your actual strength and time and attention for the good of other people. It looks like treating it as worthy of healthy foods and exercise. It even looks like rest, seeing your body as something entrusted to you instead of a machine to run into the ground. Your body was made to be an instrument of worship, and glorifying God with it simply means playing the instrument.

What if I have misused my body, or honestly cannot stand it? Does that change how God sees it?

Not in the slightest. God’s regard for your body doesn’t rest on how you have treated it or on how you feel when you catch your reflection. He made it, He owns it, He lives in it, He bought it with His Son, and He means to raise it in glory, and none of that shifts with your regrets or your mirror. Many of us carry a long and unkind history with our own bodies. You’re welcome to bring even that back to Him, the misuse and the ache and the disappointment, and hand it to the One who has never once looked at you with anything but love.

Isn't the body just a shell we leave behind when we die?

This is a very common assumption in the church, but Scripture never treats the body as disposable. God formed it, called it good, took one himself in Jesus, and has promised to raise it. Salvation was never about escaping the body, but God redeeming the whole person, body and all.

Do we get brand-new bodies, or these same bodies? Doesn't “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom” mean new ones?

Both continuous and transformed. Paul’s picture is a seed: what is buried and what rises are the same life, yet the plant is gloriously more than the bare kernel (1 Corinthians 15:37-38). When he says “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (15:50), he doesn’t mean the resurrection body is non-physical. “Flesh and blood” was a common way of naming us in our present weak, mortal, perishable state, which cannot last as it is. So it must be changed: “this perishable body must put on the imperishable” (15:53). It is the same body, transformed and glorified, and not traded in for a different one.

What will the resurrection body actually be like?

Our clearest preview is Jesus himself. His tomb was empty, He could be touched and even ate in front of his friends, and yet His risen body was gloriously changed. Paul promises ours will be raised imperishable, glorious, and powerful, and he calls it a “spiritual body,” meaning a body fully alive to God and carried along by His Spirit, not a body made of mist (15:42-44). It will be whole, radiant, and free at last of decay, weakness, and death. Scripture simply says we will be “like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21).

Will we all be the same age? What about babies, children, or the very old?

Scripture doesn’t spell this out, so we hold it humbly and with wonder. What we are promised is wholeness: bodies free of every weakness, defect, disease, and mark of age. Many wise believers across the centuries have understood that to mean each of us will be raised in the fullness of life, no longer frail or incomplete, but perfectly ourselves. The child who died young and the saint who died at ninety, both raised whole and radiant.

What if there is nothing left of the body, after fire, cremation, or decay?

Let this one rest easy. The God who made you from dust, out of nothing, isn’t limited in the least by what becomes of your remains. Resurrection doesn’t depend on the original atoms being preserved. Your continuity is held by God’s knowledge and power, not by physical particles. Cremation, decay, tragedy, none of it is any obstacle at all to the God who raises the dead. He will not lose a single one of His children.

Where are believers now, in between death and the resurrection?

With Christ. When a believer dies, the soul goes to be with the Lord right away. Paul calls it being “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8), and Jesus told the dying thief, “today you will be with me in paradise.” But this not yet the whole story. The final hope is the day Christ returns, raises the body, and joins soul and body together for good.

-PK