# 23 Bible Verses About Sexual Immorality Source: https://christianpure.com/learn/bible-verses-sexual-immorality/ Publisher: Christian Pure (https://christianpure.com/) Published: 2025-11-09 Updated: 2026-09-25 The Bible places sex within marriage and calls sexual immorality a sin against God and against one's own body. Jesus carries "You shall not commit adultery" (Exodus 20:14) to lustful intent (Matthew 5:27-28), Paul says to "flee from sexual immorality" (1 Corinthians 6:18-20), and Hebrews 13:4 asks that marriage be held in honor. In the New Testament, "sexual immorality" usually translates the Greek *porneia*, which Strong's Exhaustive Concordance defines as "harlotry (including adultery and incest); figuratively, idolatry" and renders "fornication". It is the word in 1 Corinthians 6:18, 1 Thessalonians 4:3 and the Jerusalem council's letter in Acts 15:29, and in all three the King James Version has "fornication": where the ESV reads "Flee from sexual immorality," the KJV reads "Flee fornication." ## Sex within marriage ### Genesis 2:24 > "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." **Reflection:** The verse follows the man's words on first seeing the woman: "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." It says that a man leaves his father and mother, holds fast to his wife, and the two become one flesh. Jesus quotes it in Matthew 19:5 when asked about divorce, adding, "What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate," and Paul cites it again in 1 Corinthians 6:16, where he argues that whoever unites with a prostitute is one body with her. ### Proverbs 5:18-19 > "Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love." **Reflection:** A father is speaking to his son in a chapter that mostly warns against the forbidden woman, whose "feet go down to death" (Proverbs 5:5). Three verses earlier he tells the son to "drink water from your own cistern" (5:15), and in the next verse he asks, "Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman?" The delight he commends is in the wife of the son's youth. ### 1 Corinthians 7:2 > "But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband." **Reflection:** Here Paul replies to a letter from Corinth that had praised abstaining from sexual relations altogether (7:1). He answers that each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband, and in the next verses that neither should deprive the other unless both agree to it for a season of prayer. Verse 6 reads, "Now as a concession, not a command, I say this," and verse 7, "I wish that all were as I myself am." ### Hebrews 13:4 > "Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous." **Reflection:** The verse sits in a closing list of instructions, between remembering prisoners and keeping free from the love of money. It asks that marriage be honored "among all" and names two groups who face God's judgment: those who are sexually immoral and those who commit adultery. ## Adultery and the desires of the heart ### Genesis 39:9 > "He is not greater in this house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except you, because you are his wife. How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?" **Reflection:** Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, had bought Joseph and put all he owned under him (39:1-6). Joseph's answer to Potiphar's wife speaks first of that trust, since only she had been held back from him, and then of God: the act would be "this great wickedness" and a sin against God. She kept pressing him, and at last he ran from the house and left his garment in her grip, which she then used to accuse him (39:12-18). ### Exodus 20:14 > "You shall not commit adultery." **Reflection:** One of the Ten Commandments, spoken from Sinai. Three verses later, Exodus 20:17 forbids coveting a neighbor's wife, so the commandments address the desire as well as the act. ### Proverbs 6:25-26 > "Do not desire her beauty in your heart, and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes; for the price of a prostitute is only a loaf of bread, but a married woman hunts down a precious life." **Reflection:** "Her" is the evil woman of 6:24, the adulteress with the smooth tongue, from whom the father's commandment is meant to preserve his son. The son is not to desire her beauty in his heart or let her eyelashes capture him. Verse 26 compares what each costs. A prostitute can be had for a loaf of bread, while another man's wife puts a man's very life at stake. ### Proverbs 6:32 > "He who commits adultery lacks sense; he who does it destroys himself." **Reflection:** Between verse 26 and this one, the father asks whether a man can hold fire against his chest and not burn his clothes, and answers that no one who touches his neighbor's wife goes unpunished (6:27-29). After verse 32 he lists what the adulterer receives: "wounds and dishonor," and a husband whose jealousy will accept no compensation. ### Matthew 5:27-28 > "You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart." **Reflection:** Jesus cites the commandment of Exodus 20:14 in the Sermon on the Mount and then applies it to the look that intends lust. The following verses speak of tearing out the right eye and cutting off the right hand rather than having the whole body thrown into hell. Verses 31-32 then turn to divorce, and verse 32 gives an exception "on the ground of sexual immorality." ### Mark 7:21-23 > "For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person." **Reflection:** Jesus had told the crowd that nothing entering a person from outside can defile him. In the house the disciples asked him about the saying (7:17), and he explained that food enters the stomach, not the heart; Mark comments that in this he declared all foods clean (7:19). He then lists what comes out of the heart, and sexual immorality and adultery both appear in the list. ### Romans 1:24 > "Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves." **Reflection:** The "therefore" refers to the verse before, where people "exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images." Paul describes God giving them up to impurity as a consequence of that exchange, and verse 25 repeats the reason: they "worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator." ## The body in Paul's argument ### 1 Corinthians 6:13 > "'Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food'—and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body." **Reflection:** Paul takes up a Corinthian slogan about food and the stomach and answers that the body belongs to the Lord. His reason comes in verse 14: God, who raised the Lord, will raise believers too by his power. ### 1 Corinthians 6:18 > "Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body." **Reflection:** The command comes right after Paul's words about the prostitute and the one flesh of Genesis 2:24. He treats sexual immorality differently from every other sin, as a sin against the person's own body. ### 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 > "Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body." **Reflection:** These verses close Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 6. The Spirit lives in the believer's body, the believer has been purchased at a cost, and so the body belongs to God. The same chapter has already said that bodies are "members of Christ" (6:15). ### 1 Thessalonians 4:3-5 > "For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God." **Reflection:** Paul calls abstaining from sexual immorality "the will of God, your sanctification." Verse 6 adds that such sin wrongs a brother, and verse 8 says that rejecting the instruction is rejecting God himself, the giver of the Holy Spirit. ## In Paul's lists of what to put away ### Galatians 5:19-21 > "Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God." **Reflection:** Paul names sexual immorality among the works of the flesh and follows the list with the fruit of the Spirit, whose last item is self-control, and in verse 24 describes those in Christ as having crucified the flesh along with its passions. ### Colossians 3:5 > "Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry." **Reflection:** The "therefore" points back to 3:1, where the Colossians are told to seek the things above because they were raised with Christ. Sexual immorality is listed among the earthly things to be put to death, and verse 7 reminds them that they once lived in these ways. ### Ephesians 5:3 > "But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints." **Reflection:** The verse before calls the Ephesians to walk in love, following Christ, who gave himself up for them. Sexual immorality is not even to be named among them, and two verses later Paul says the sexually immoral person is without inheritance in Christ's kingdom. ### Romans 13:13-14 > "Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires." **Reflection:** Paul writes that "the night is far gone; the day is at hand" (13:12) and asks the Romans to live as people already in daylight. Sexual immorality and sensuality stand beside drunkenness and quarreling, and the remedy he gives is to put on Christ and make no provision for the flesh. ## The church, the Gentiles and the forgiven ### Acts 15:28-29 > "For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell." **Reflection:** Men from Judea had told Gentile believers in Antioch that they could not be saved without circumcision (15:1). The meeting in Jerusalem decided otherwise, and its letter (15:23) held the Gentile churches to four things only: abstaining from food offered to idols, from blood, from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. ### 1 Corinthians 5:1 > "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." **Reflection:** Paul writes about a case the Corinthians had tolerated: a man living with his father's wife. He rebukes the church for being arrogant rather than mourning, and tells it, "Let him who has done this be removed from among you" (5:2). ### 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 > "Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. 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." **Reflection:** Paul's list of the unrighteous who will not inherit God's kingdom names the sexually immoral and, separately, adulterers. Verse 11 then says, "And such were some of you," and names what changed: they were washed, sanctified and justified in the name of Jesus and by the Spirit. ### John 8:10-11 > "Jesus stood up and said to her, 'Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?' She said, 'No one, Lord.' And Jesus said, 'Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.'" **Reflection:** The scribes and Pharisees had brought Jesus a woman caught in the act of adultery and, as a test, pointed to the law of Moses on stoning (8:3-6). He speaks these words once her accusers have gone away one by one. He does not condemn her, and he tells her to sin no more. 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