"Do Not Be Deceived"

1 Corinthians 6:9–10

Preface

We're continuing our Parishioner's Pick series today — and this is the last one. If I didn't get to yours, I'm sorry. That wasn't for lack of caring; some of what was submitted has actually already been covered in sermons I've preached recently, and I'll send out links to those this week. If you'd like to talk about it personally, I would genuinely love to. Thank you all so much for trusting me with what's actually on your hearts these past few weeks.

I started this series with a sermon on grace. I told you then — I love it. I love preaching on grace.

Today's pick is not so much. It's about sin and judgment, and those are not my favorite topics to stand up here and preach. I'm an optimist by nature — I want everyone in this room to have a happy ending, and I don't love confrontation.

But this text was put in front of me, and I think it may be revealing something I need to sit with about my own preaching — what I gravitate toward and what I avoid.

So today we're going to sit with some hard language. Some of these words may land close to home — close to people you love, maybe close to your own story. I want to name this plainly up front rather than let it catch you sideways: this sermon touches on an issue that has been the subject of a great deal of debate, and in some circles attitudes toward it have shifted — homosexuality, and other sexual sins alongside it. Before I say another word, I want you to hear this clearly: my door is open. I would love to talk with you about whatever questions you may have. If this touches something complicated in your life or your family's life, I want to talk with you — not to relitigate the sermon, but because you matter to me more than any single Sunday does.

PRAYER

With that said, let's turn to 1 Corinthians 6:9–10.

Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

The Blind Spot

I've taught my kids how to drive. And if you've ever done this, you know there's a moment every single time — the moment you have to teach them about the blind spot.

You can do everything right as a new driver. Check your mirrors, check your speed, signal early. And you can still miss something, because there's a stretch of road right beside you that no mirror shows you. It's not that you're careless. It's that the blind spot isn't in your eyeline at all — that's the whole nature of it. You don't know it's empty by looking harder at what's in front of you. You have to physically turn your head and look at the one place your instincts don't naturally send you. Some cars will warn you these days. Mine won't — so I have to keep my eyes peeled myself.

And here's what I always tell my kids: the danger isn't the traffic you can see. You already know to watch for that — you're already careful there. The danger is the car sitting exactly where you're not looking, because you've never had a reason to suspect anything's there.

I think that's exactly what Paul means by "do not be deceived." Paul is essentially saying to Corinth: you have a blind spot — maybe more than one. In their own minds, all was well. Earlier in this same letter, Paul rebukes them for something specific: a man in the church was involved in sexual immorality, and instead of grieving over it and calling him to repentance, the church was bragging about how tolerant they'd become (chapter 5). That's just one example. Corinth thought they were cruising along just fine, and more than once in this letter, Paul has to pull them over and point out what they couldn't see on their own.

So Paul says it again here. "Do not be deceived" is Paul reaching over from the passenger seat and saying: turn your head. Look again. There's a lane you've stopped checking.

How Deception Actually Works

Before we look at the list itself, I want to slow down on that phrase — "do not be deceived" — because I don't think it's enough to just warn people. I want us to actually understand how deception happens, because you can't guard against a blind spot you've never learned to recognize forming.

That word — deceived — shows up often in the New Testament, especially in warnings about false teachers leading people astray. Paul reaches for it here too, and pairs it with another phrase worth noticing: "Do you not know...?"

Here's what I mean. Paul doesn't open this passage with "listen up, here's something brand new." He opens with a question: "Do you not know...?" That's important. He's not informing the Corinthians of something they'd never heard. He's confronting them with something they already knew and had quietly stopped letting matter. That tells us something about deception in general — it's rarely pure ignorance. It's usually knowledge that's gone unexamined so long it stopped functioning as knowledge at all.

So how does that happen? I think this text, and this letter, point to at least a few ways.

First — slow cultural absorption. This is the blind spot I just described. Corinth didn't wake up one morning and reject the word of God. They let the values of a wealthy, status-driven, sexually permissive trade city seep into the church so gradually that nobody had to consciously choose it.

Think about how much of what actually shapes us in a given week isn't a sermon or a Bible study — it's hours of television, the songs we hum without thinking about the lyrics, a feed that quietly learns what we linger on and gives us more of it. None of that arrives labeled "here is a worldview, evaluate it." It arrives as entertainment, as normal, as funny, as simply what everybody else is already doing. And that last phrase is doing more work on us than we usually admit. "Everybody's doing it" has talked more people into more compromises than almost any argument ever has — precisely because it doesn't feel like an argument. It feels like just how things are.

That's usually how it works for us too. Nobody decides one day to let culture replace conviction. It happens a degree at a time, the same way a room gets dark — not by someone flipping a switch, but by the sun going down slowly enough that your eyes adjust and you never notice you can barely see.

This is exactly what Paul is getting at in Romans: "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is — his good, pleasing and perfect will" (Romans 12:2). Notice the word "conform" — it's a mold, a pattern you get pressed into gradually, not a decision you make once. Paul's answer isn't "try harder to resist." It's "be transformed" — a renewed mind, one that's actually equipped to test what it's being shaped by, instead of absorbing it without noticing.

This can also be a friend. One of the other "do not be deceived" passages in this letter is 1 Corinthians 15:33: "Do not be deceived: Bad company ruins good morals." Maybe you remember a parent telling you as a kid to be careful how you chose your friends — or maybe they were the ones who noticed a change in you after you'd started spending time with someone new. We can be deceived by the culture at large, and we can be deceived just as easily by the people standing closest to us.

Second — immediate gratification. This connects to a word we already looked at — "inherit." An inheritance is something future. It's promised, not immediate. And that's exactly what makes so much of this list deceptive: greed, drunkenness, sexual sin, swindling — they all deliver something real right now. Pleasure, relief, profit, belonging. The cost, by contrast, is abstract and deferred — a kingdom you can't yet see, forfeited in a future that feels hypothetical next to a payoff sitting in front of you today.

We may be more vulnerable to this than Corinth ever was. I get irritated when my phone takes an extra few seconds to load a page. We stream a movie the moment we think of it — and it wasn't that long ago you had to drive to a video store, hope the copy you wanted was actually still on the shelf, and drive back. Before that, you simply waited for it to air on network television, on their schedule, not yours. We've trained ourselves, almost without meaning to, to expect the reward immediately and to resent any gap between wanting something and having it. That's not a neutral habit. It's exactly the soil deception grows best in — because if we can barely tolerate a slow webpage, how much harder is it to genuinely live for an inheritance we can't yet see and won't receive for who knows how long? Deception thrives wherever the reward is immediate and the loss is far off and hard to picture. Living only for the moment doesn't feel like rebellion while you're doing it. It just feels like living.

And third — redefining. This is the subtlest one, and worth naming honestly: it's not always "I know this is wrong and I'm choosing it anyway." Sometimes it's "I've decided this word doesn't actually mean what people assume it means" — reinterpreting the category itself so the conscience never even has to object.

This isn't a new temptation, and it isn't even a uniquely New Testament one. Centuries before Paul, Isaiah saw the same pattern and named it just as bluntly: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter" (Isaiah 5:20). Notice Isaiah isn't describing someone doing evil and calling it evil — that's a much simpler problem. He's describing someone flipping the labels entirely, until the categories themselves are inverted. That's the oldest trick sin has.

You can hear it in language we use without a second thought. Greed becomes ambition. Slander becomes commanding, or bluntness, or "just telling it like it is." Swindling becomes innovation, or just "working the system." Drunkenness gets relabeled social drinking. Sexual sin gets relabeled an accepted alternative. Nothing about the underlying reality changed — only the label did. And a relabeled sin stops registering as sin, because the conscience mostly only objects to words it still recognizes.

And fourth — settling for good. A few verses past our text, Paul lets the Corinthians' own logic show through. "I have the right to do anything," they said. Notice — Paul doesn't argue with that. He corrects what they built on top of it: "but not everything is beneficial." Those are two different questions. "Is this technically allowed" is not the same question as "is this actually good for me, good for my family, good for my witness, good for what I was made for."

This might be the quietest deception on the list, because it doesn't require breaking a single rule. You can live your whole life inside the boundary of "lawful" and still be settling — for acceptable instead of excellent, for what you can get away with instead of what you were bought for. Paul adds a second correction right after the first: "I will not be mastered by anything."

I raise all of this because I don't think Paul's warning is really about any one sin on this list. It's about the process that gets any of us to the place where we no longer notice a sin as a sin at all. That's worth taking seriously before we ever get to verse 9.

The List Itself

Ten items — or nine, depending on the translation — and the range is worth sitting with, because it's easy to isolate one or two and miss the sweep: sexual immorality, idolatry, adultery, men who have sex with men, theft, greed, drunkenness, slander, swindling.

Notice what's sitting next to what. Sexual sin is bracketed by greed and slander. Idolatry sits beside swindling. Paul isn't building a hierarchy where one category of sin is uniquely disqualifying and the others are minor footnotes. He's naming patterns of life — ways of living oriented away from God and toward self — that are incompatible with belonging to God's kingdom. Grammatically and structurally, this is one list, one breath, equal weight. He doesn't rank them.

The first term, "sexually immoral" — porneia in the Greek — is actually the broadest word in the list. It's not narrowly about one act; across this letter alone Paul uses it to cover incest (chapter 5), sex with prostitutes (chapter 6), and sexual activity outside marriage generally (chapter 7). It's the umbrella category. Adultery and the reference to men who have sex with men, named right after it, are specific instances Paul wants to make sure nobody assumes are exceptions to the general principle. This is a list built to close loopholes, not open them.

Where This Touches Some of You Directly

I need to slow down here, because I told you at the start that some of these words might land close to home — and this is likely the word for some of you.

Paul, in the middle of this list, names men who have sex with men. I'm not going to pretend that word isn't in the text, and I'm not going to soften it into something it doesn't say. As a church, we hold — and I hold — that scripture's vision for marriage, from Genesis forward, is one man and one woman, for life. That's not a position I arrived at lightly, and it's not one I'm changing today.

I've spent real time on this — read extensively across different perspectives, listened to podcasts and interviews from people who land in different places than I do — because I don't think a conviction worth holding is one you're afraid to test.

I know there are people in this room this touches directly — maybe your own story, maybe someone you love, maybe your own son or daughter. I'm not going to pretend that's simple, and I don't want you to think I've never sat with how hard it is. If you want to talk — really talk, not argue — my door is open this week.

I hold my conviction. I also hold you. I don't think those have to cancel each other out, even on the mornings when it feels like they might.

Our Blind Spots

Here's the uncomfortable possibility I want to sit with, out loud: maybe the sexual references in this text are not our blind spot. Maybe some of these others are. Maybe we've gotten very good at being alert to the sins our culture argues about loudly, and very bad at noticing the sins our culture has quietly trained us not to notice at all — because that culture is not "out there" in some hostile secular world, it's the culture of comfort, upward mobility, and financial self-interest most of us live inside without a second thought.

That's not me letting anyone off the hook on the rest of the list. It's me asking us to hear "do not be deceived" as aimed at the whole room, on every item — not a phrase we get to apply confidently to other people's struggles while exempting our own.

"Slanderers" deserves a second look, because the English undersells it. The ESV translates the word "revilers" — those who use harsh and abusive language to mock, scoff at, or tear down another person (Akin, 2023). That's a step past gossip. It's cruelty aimed directly at someone, in words meant to wound. And it's worth asking ourselves how much of that we let pass simply because we've given it a better name. We don't call it abuse. We call it commanding. We call it bluntness. We call it "just telling it like it is." Paul doesn't let the label do the work that the act itself should be judged by.

Now here's where I want to push us, together, before we go any further.

If I asked this room to name which item on Paul's list feels most urgent, most dangerous, most in need of a sermon — I think most of us would point somewhere near the middle of verse 9. That's where our attention naturally goes. That's where the cultural battle lines feel drawn right now, so that's where we brace for impact.

But look at verse 10 again: thieves, the greedy, drunkards, slanderers, swindlers. Paul doesn't rank these. He doesn't say "these first few are the real problem, and I'm tacking a few minor ones on at the end for completeness." One breath. Equal weight.

And if that's true — if greed genuinely sits in the same sentence, disqualifying in the same way — then I have to ask this room a harder question than the one we usually ask: how many of us have built a financial life, a career, a set of spending habits, a relationship with money, that we would never for a second call "greed" — because greed, in our culture, isn't a word we apply to ourselves. It's a word for someone richer, someone more obviously grasping, someone else. We've done with greed exactly what Corinth did with sexual permissiveness: let the culture around us set the definition, until the word stopped applying to anyone we actually know.

Swindling — same problem, quieter form. None of us picture ourselves as swindlers. But how many of us have been less than fully honest in a business deal, padded an expense report, taken credit for work we didn't do, negotiated in a way we knew was misleading because "that's just how business works"? Paul doesn't grade sins by how uncomfortable they make us to discuss in church. Culture does that grading. Paul just lists them together and says: none of these — none — describe a life oriented toward God's kingdom.

Here's the point. We all have blind spots. That's critical to hear, because the stakes here are not small. We can be deceived, genuinely and sincerely, and Paul is telling us plainly what's at risk: a person living in that kind of deceit — blind to their own sin, never bothering to look over their shoulder and check — this is exactly the kind of person Paul says will not inherit the kingdom of God.

The Turn

I told you when we started — I don't love preaching this kind of sermon. I love preaching grace. And some of you have been sitting there this whole time, maybe a little tense, maybe bracing yourself, waiting for the "but" — waiting for me to eventually get to the part where I talk about grace, because you know that's where I always go, and you've been wondering when it's coming.

Here's the thing. It's not just where I always go. It's where Paul always goes.

Look at what he does. He builds this list — ten items, unsparing, no exceptions carved out, no asterisks. He says "do not be deceived" — twice as forceful in the Greek as it sounds in English, almost "stop fooling yourselves." And then, without so much as a paragraph break, without slowing down, he writes verse 11:

And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:11, NIV)

He falls back on grace. And I think that's essential for us to notice, because we can't afford to lose either side of this. If all we ever hear is sin, sin, sin, we walk away feeling burdened — guilty beyond reason, like we could never really be right with God. But if all we ever hear is grace, grace, grace, we can get a little too comfortable. We stop watching for the blind spots. We drift, slowly, into patterns of sin we never meant to fall into — until one day we look up and wonder if our name is even still on the will.

Paul seems to sense that discouragement coming, right here in this passage, so he stops and reminds them: sin, as real and as ugly as it is, has already been dealt with.

Past tense. Were.

Paul isn't writing this list to people outside the church, wagging his finger at a world he's not part of. He's writing it to people sitting in the pews at Corinth — some of whom used to be swindlers. Some of whom used to worship idols. Some of whom used to live in exactly the sexual patterns he just named. He's not describing outsiders. He's describing the church's own history, out loud, in front of them.

And then he doesn't stop at "were." He keeps going: "But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God."

Three verbs. All in the passive voice — which matters, because passive voice means something was done to them, not something they achieved. They didn't wash themselves clean enough to qualify. They didn't sanctify their own résumé until it was presentable. Grace did that. Grace reached exactly the people on that list, while they were still on it, and made them family.

So here's what I want you to hear, and I want to be as clear about this as I possibly can: "do not be deceived" cuts two directions, not one.

It means: don't deceive yourself into thinking a life given over to any of this costs you nothing. That's the direction we usually hear.

But it also means: don't deceive yourself into thinking that if you see yourself somewhere on this list — right now, today, not in some past tense you've already resolved — that means you're done. That the door's closed. That grace has some list of exceptions and your name's on it.

Let's not write off the people we've decided are deceived. The gospel isn't only a message of judgment — it's a message of truth and light, both together.

If you're sitting here this morning and something on that list landed close — maybe it's a struggle you carry quietly, maybe it's your own story, maybe it's your child's story and you've been aching through this entire sermon — I need you to hear verse 11 as loudly as you heard verse 9 and 10. Such were some of you. Were. The washing comes first. The welcome comes first. Paul doesn't say "get sanctified, then I'll tell you about grace." He tells people who are still living it exactly what grace has already done and is still doing.

That's not me softening the text to make everyone comfortable. That's the text. Paul is as serious about verse 11 as he is about verse 9 — I just usually only preach half of what he actually said.

Not Your Own

Paul doesn't stop at verse 11. If you keep reading, he spends the rest of the chapter answering an obvious question: okay — if grace did all that, washed and sanctified and justified me, what happens to my body now?

Later in this same chapter, Paul goes on to talk more about sexual sin, and he challenges the Corinthians to consider something remarkable: their bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit. That changes the whole shape of the question. It's not so much "I can't do this because it's wrong." It becomes something bigger: how can I glorify God with my finances, my body, my language, my relationships? I am a temple of God, moving through my everyday spaces, carrying His glory with me wherever I go.

And he includes one phrase in particular that's essential to sit with.

Bought with a price. That's not abstract. That's the cross, named plainly. And it's the same logic we already saw in verse 11 — those three passive verbs, washed, sanctified, justified, something done to them, not achieved by them — now landing on the most concrete, physical part of their lives: the actual body they get up in every morning. Grace isn't a status that floats somewhere above your daily life while your body goes on belonging to whoever or whatever wants it. The temple language says God moved in. Your body became the address where His presence lives.

Closing

We need to take a careful look before we crash. Corinth thought all was well. They'd let their culture form them more than the word of God had formed them — and the terrifying thing is how easy that is for all of us, in whatever direction our own culture happens to be pulling. That's what "do not be deceived" is for. Not to make you afraid. To turn your head toward the lane you stopped checking.

The good news is you're not driving alone. The same Spirit that washed and sanctified the Corinthians is the same Spirit that keeps turning our heads toward what we'd rather not see — not to condemn us, but so we arrive home safely.

PRAYER

Let's pray. God, reveal our blind spots. Show me where I have been deceived, because I do not want to miss out on that inheritance.

Amen.

Reference: D. L. Akin, "Why Christians Should Not Sue Christians in Civil Court (1 Corinthians 6:1–11)," in Exalting Jesus in 1 Corinthians, ed. D. Platt, D. L. Akin, and T. Merida (B&H Publishing Group, 2023), 119.