Perhaps one of the most obvious places where worldliness had invaded the Corinthian Church was in the area of sexual immorality. Paul states in chapter five, verse one, “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife.” The debauchereous living of the pagan world that knew no boundary was now infiltrating the body of Christ in Corinth. This is simply the fact that those at Corinth were in fact going well beyond what was written in the revealed word of God about the area of sexuality. Furthermore, the believers at Corinth were not exercising godly wisdom in their own conduct nor in the corporate conduct of the Church. Their arrogance had put them in a place where they were redefining what was proper for a believer based upon what they were accustomed to and not what God had prescribed. Paul confronts this error by asking the Church if they should rather mourn over such offenses; should they not be broken over the behavior of supposedly one of their own? The immediate response of God’s people is to remove the sexually immoral man from their midst. The problem with unrepentant sin within the body is that it, like leaven, spreads to the entirety of the body of Christ. Paul says, “Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?” The body is to clean out the old leaven of sin from the body so that other members are not affected. This does not mean however that the believer is not to engage the world. Paul goes on to say that the believer must be in the world but not of the world. The group of people that are not to be in close proximity with the world is the corporate body of Christ. The body is not to let the world into its ranks and Paul clearly says that the one who bears the “name” (ὀνομαζόμενος, present passive participle) brother; that is those who by nature are the children of God, must live in purity purging all evil from among themselves. Paul goes on to speak of yet another area of immorality within the Church at Corinth, although this time it is not sexual immorality; it is believer taking believer to court in civil suits. If the bounds of sexual immorality are relaxed, certainly the bounds on what is considered appropriate will be relaxed as well. As the believers of Corinth underwent the process of deciding civil matters, they were doing so not within the confines of the Church which Paul asserts has the necessary authority to adjudicate such issues. Rather they were turning to courts of law to decide such matters and allowing pagan standards of conduct to determine what the body would do. This is most likely due to the fact that before their conversion this is what would have been normal for the pagans of Corinth prior to conversion. None-the-less, Paul warns the Church that it is the body of Christ that should decide such matters with an emphasis of not running to civil action for every little occurrence. Instead, let the peace of Christ rule within the hearts of the believers considering others as more significant than one’s self even to the point of being defrauded to preserve the peace of the body.
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