Good and Given
1 Corinthians 7:1-2 - Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.
In 1747 a movement began in England that would take the pursuit of holiness in an unusually radical direction. The Shakers, as they came to be called, eventually decided that sex itself was the root of all human sin. So they gave it up entirely. All of it. They forbade marriage, separated the men from the women, and used different doors and different staircases. They were sincere, hardworking people, famous for their craftsmanship and for the hymn, Simple Gifts. And because they refused marriage and children, the only way for them to grow was by convincing other people to join. At their height, they numbered thousands. Today, at the last active Shaker community in Maine, there are three.
That instinct, that the truly holy thing is to treat sex and marriage as beneath the serious Christian, is much older than the Shakers. Paul ran straight into it in Corinth. The believers there had sent him a letter, and one of the lines he quotes back to them is this: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” In a city drowning in sexual sin, some in the church had swung hard the other way and decided the holiest marriage was one with no intimacy at all. Some were apparently withholding themselves from their own husbands and wives to prove how spiritual they had become. But Paul, who was himself single and content, doesn’t applaud them. He gently corrects them: marriage, and the intimacy inside it, is God's good provision, not a compromise for weaker Christians.
See, we don’t usually think of over-strictness as a spiritual danger; we think of it as playing it safe. But there is a kind of pride and legalism that can hide inside our attempts to be holier than God actually asked us to be. It quietly assumes His design wasn’t quite pure enough, that we can improve on the Creator by adding rules He never gave. We may never swear off marriage, but most of us have felt this reflex: the suspicion that anything we enjoy this much must be a little bit sinful, the sense that God is mainly interested in what we give up, the quiet assumption that our extra rules prove how serious we are. Underneath it all is a belief we would never say out loud, that His good gifts somehow need our correction.
But God never asked us to earn our way to Him by austerity. Holiness was never about escaping the body or punishing ourselves into His favor. He is the one who made your body, who called the whole of creation good, who invented marriage and intimacy and delight and then looked at it all and was pleased. And in Christ he has already made you clean, not by anything you gave up, but by everything his Son gave up for you. The pressure to attempt to be holier than God is off.
So receive the gift! If God gave you marriage, receive it as good, without the guilty sense that you’re supposed to be above such things. If God has given you singleness, as he gave Paul, receive that as good too, which is exactly where Paul goes next. Either way, the body you live in is not a problem to be overcome, but a gift to be stewarded, from a God far kinder than our man-made rules make Him out to be.
Today: Take one thing about the body or about marriage that you’ve quietly treated as slightly unspiritual, and deliberately thank God for it as the good gift it is. Maybe it is appetite, or affection, or rest, or pleasure, or your own physical self. Name it and thank the God who made it and called it good. If you’re married, show it. Sometime today, offer your spouse a small, unhurried act of affection with no agenda attached, as a way of honoring the gift God gave you in them.
Prayer: “Thank you, Father, that You made this body and called it good, and that You are kinder than my rules. Teach me to receive Your gifts with joy instead of suspicion. I don’t have to earn You; You Son already did. In His name, Amen.”
-PK