1 When one of you has a grievance against his neighbor, does he dare to go to law before a heathen court, instead of laying the case before God's people?
2 Do you not know that God's people are to judge the world? And if the world is to be judged before you, are you unfit to try such petty cases?
3 Do you not know that we Christians are to sit in judgment on angels, to say nothing of the ordinary cases of life?
4 So if you have the ordinary cases of life for settlement, do you set up as judges the very men in the church who have no standing?
5 I ask this to make you blush with shame. Has it come to this, that there is not a single wise man among you who could settle a grievance of one brother against another,
6 but one brother has to go to law with another, and that before unbelieving judges?
7 To say no more, it is a mark of moral failure among you to have lawsuits at all with one another. Why not rather suffer being wronged? Why not suffer being robbed?
8 On the contrary, you practice wronging and robbing others, and that your brothers.
9 Do you not know that wrongdoers will not have a share in the kingdom of God? Stop being misled; people who are sexually immoral or idolaters or adulterers or sensual or guilty of unnatural sexual vice
10 or thieves or greedy graspers for more or drunkards or slanderers or swindlers will not have a share in the kingdom of God.
11 And these are just the characters some of you used to be. But now you have washed yourselves clean, you have been consecrated, you are now in right standing with God, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God.
12 Everything is permissible for me, but not everything is good for me. Everything is permissible for me, but I will not become a slave to anything.
13 Foods are intended for the stomach, and the stomach for foods, but God will finally put a stop to both of them. The body is not intended for sexual immorality but for the service of the Lord, and the Lord is for the body to serve.
14 And as God by His power raised the Lord to life, so He will raise us too.
15 Do you not know that your bodies are parts of Christ Himself? Then may I take away parts of Christ and make them parts of a prostitute? Never! Never!
16 Or, are you not aware that a man who has to do with a prostitute makes his body one with hers? For God says, "The two shall be physically one."
17 But the man who is in union with the Lord is spiritually one with Him.
18 Keep on running from sexual immorality! Any other sin that a man commits is one outside his body, but the man who commits the sexual sin is sinning against his own body.
19 Or, are you not conscious that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit that is in you, whom you have as a gift from God? Furthermore, you are not your own,
20 for you have been bought and actually paid for. So you must honor God with your bodies.