St Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 that foods are relatively unimportant. We are permitted to eat most anything, but we shouldn’t be enslaved to anything. But more important than food is sexual purity because the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit – your body will be raised by Christ at the resurrection. Therefore you need now to keep your body pure so that it can be raised from the dead – can be united with the Holy Spirit and with Christ. But if you practice sexual immorality – something you do with your body – you make your body unfit for the resurrection from the dead. You have killed your body through sin. We aren’t trying to escape the body because it is unimportant, rather we are trying to make it holy through a Christian way of life.
All things are lawful for me, but all things are not helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. Foods for the stomach and the stomach for foods, but God will destroy both it and them.
Now the body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God both raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His power. 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 harlot? Certainly not! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For “the two,” He says, “shall become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.
Biblical Scholar Michael Gorman comments:
“The first topic of the countercultural life addressed by Paul is sexuality, specifically abstention from any kind of “sexual immorality” (NIV; NAB, “immoraility”; Gk. pornea, which includes but is broader than NRSV’s “fornication”). Paul’s basic point is that the call of God is to be different from the Gentiles “who do not know god” (4:5) by being pure rather than lustful (4:5, 7). Here Paul continues the general biblical and Jewish tradition of criticizing pagan sexual immorality and stressing that one of the primary distinctives of those in covenant relationship with God is sexual holiness (see Lev. 18:1-3, 24-30). Jews claimed to be, and were known as, those who did not engage in such pagan practices as sex outside marriage, homosexual relations, abortion, infanticide, and the exposure of unwanted newborns. The earliest believers in Jesus followed suit, and Paul follows the Levitical example in treating this matter with the utmost gravity (4:6, 8). (Apostle of the Crucified Lord, p 158)
Fraternized 