Dual Panel1WHEN any of you has a grievance against another, aren't you ashamed to bring the matter to be settled before a pagan court instead of before the church?
2Don't you know that Christians will one day judge the world? And if you are to judge the world do you consider yourselves incapable of settling such infinitely smaller matters?
3Don't you also know that we shall judge the very angels themselveshow much more then matters of this world only!
4In any case, if you find you have to judge matters of this world, why choose as judges those who count for nothing in the church?
5I say this deliberately to rouse your sense of shame. Are you really unable to find among your number one man with enough sense to decide a dispute between one and another of you,
6or must one brother resort to law against another and that before those who have no faith in Christ!
7It is surely obvious that something must be seriously wrong in your church for you to be having lawsuits at all. Why not [let] yourself be wronged or cheated?
8Instead of that you cheat and wrong your own brothers.
9Have you forgotten that the kingdom of God will never belong to the wicked? Don't be under any illusionneither the impure, the idolater, or the adulterer; neither the effeminate, the pervert
10or the thief; neither the swindler, the drunkard, the foulmouthed the rapacious shall have any share in the kingdom of God.
11[And such were some of you!] But you have cleansed yourselves from all that, you have been made whole in spirit, you have been justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and in the Spirit of our God.
12As a Christian I may do anything, but that does not mean that everything is good for me. I may do everything, but I must not be a slave of anything.
13Food was meant for the stomach and the stomach for food; but God has no permanent purpose for either. But you cannot say that our physical body was made for sexual promiscuity; it was made for the Lord, and in the Lord is the answer to its needs;
14The God who raised the Lord from the dead will also raise us mortal men by his power.
15Have you not realised that your bodies are integral parts of Christ himself? Am I then to take parts of Christ and join them to a prostitute? Never!
16Don't you realize that when a man joins himself to a prostitute he makes with her a physical unity? For, God says, "the two shall be one flesh".
17On the other hand the man who joins himself to the Lord is one with him in spirit.
18Avoid sexual looseness like the plague! Every other sin that a man commits is done outside his own body, but this is an offence against his own body.
19Have you forgotten that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and is God's gift to you, and that you are not the owner of your own body?
20You have been bought, and at a price! Therefore bring glory to God in your body.