1 Corinthians 6:20 · World English Bible
1 Corinthians 6:20 Meaning For You Were Bought with a Price
for you were bought with a price. Therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.
What does 1 Corinthians 6:20 mean?
A person carries around a self that was purchased at great cost, and the price already paid settles the question of worth. Nobody pays dearly for what is worthless.
From the Cybernetics reading below.
1 Corinthians 6:20 through 2 lenses
The same verse, read by 2 traditions.
Cybernetics
Self-Help
CYBERNETICS
Cybernetics
A person carries around a self that was purchased at great cost, and the price already paid settles the question of worth. Nobody pays dearly for what is worthless. So the body a man drags through his day, the mind he lives inside, these are not cheap secondhand goods to be neglected or run down in shame. They belong to something larger and were valued that highly at the start.
When the self-image takes in that estimate, the whole system changes its posture. Shoulders lift, the mental picture brightens, and a person begins to treat his own flesh and spirit the way an owner treats what he prized enough to buy. Honoring the source shows up in how carefully the machinery is kept. The worth was set before he ever earned it.
Cybernetics lensGo deeper in the app
SELF-HELP
Self-Help
What a person believes they belong to decides what they will do with their own body.
Price sets value in the mind, value sets how a thing gets handled, and how it gets handled across years is what a person becomes. A body bought at cost stops being private property to be spent however Tuesday's mood suggests.
Belonging to God is the label; care is what stays consistent with it, and glorifying him in the body follows from ownership rather than from rules stacked on top. This is why shame reforms nobody for long. Shame declares the body worthless and then demands it be treated well, and behaviour follows the valuation. Get that wrong and every rule laid over it comes off the moment nobody is watching.
Self-Help lensGo deeper in the app
Cybernetics lens
Live 1 Corinthians 6:20 today
- Catch one of those throwaway lines you use about yourself, useless, stupid, too old, and say the accurate version instead. You are correcting a bad price tag, not boasting.
- Say something true and specific about someone's worth today, to their face or in a message. Most people have never once heard it said plainly.
- When you have messed something up at work, own it in one sentence and move on without the self-punishment tour. Shame is not payment, and nothing is owed.
What would change in how you carry yourself if your worth were already settled?
The same truth in other traditions
Sufism · Rumi
You were not made cheaply, he insisted. You are carrying something priceless and spend your days acting like a beggar outside your own house.
Judaism · Mishnah
The teaching is that saving a single life is like saving a whole world, because each person is irreplaceable rather than one of many. The worth is assigned, not earned.
Stoicism · Epictetus
He asked people how long they would keep valuing themselves so cheaply. Decide your worth, he said, because if you do not, everyone else will price you lower.
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