Verse explainer
Paul isn't urging self-care — he's telling believers their bodies belong to God, which is a call to holiness, not wellness.
What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?
BSBDo you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own;
The plain meaning
Paul has spent verses 15–18 arguing that sexual immorality is uniquely self-destructive because the body is not merely a shell — it is the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. The question "know ye not?" (repeated four times in this chapter) signals that Paul is recalling something already taught, not introducing a novelty. The logic runs tight: the Spirit takes up residence in the believer at conversion (v. 19a); that makes the body a sacred space, analogous to Solomon's temple where the divine presence dwelt; therefore to join that body to a prostitute (v. 15) is not merely a private moral slip but a desecration of a sanctuary. The closing clause — "ye are not your own" — is the hinge. Ownership has transferred. Verse 20 completes the thought: "ye are bought with a price," the language of manumission and redemption. The point is not that Christians should take better care of their health; it is that they no longer hold title to their own bodies and may not dispose of them as they please.
The common misreading
What the commentators say
Clarke presses the temple analogy hard: just as the tabernacle and Solomon's temple were set apart from every common or profane use and dedicated wholly to God, so the believer's body is holy and all its members owe their service to God alone. He reads 'ye are not your own' as removing any claim of self-disposal — the believer has no right to direct the body toward what he personally judges lawful if God has already claimed it.
Gill ties the verse to the earlier charge in chapter 3 that the whole church is God's temple, and narrows it here to each believer's individual body. The Spirit received at regeneration takes possession of the whole person — soul and body — as his temple. Gill's conclusion is blunt: because the Spirit indwells the body as his sanctuary, to defile it through fornication is an abomination against a sacred dwelling, not merely a lapse of personal morality.
JFB draws out the ownership logic using the analogy of ancient slavery: a slave's person belonged wholly to the master, not to himself. Purchase was a recognized mode of acquiring a slave, and Christ has purchased the believer from sin's ownership (v. 20). To act as though the body is still one's own — giving it to sexual immorality — is to treat a redeemed person as if the transaction never occurred. JFB also notes that assigning the Holy Spirit a temple is an implicit claim to his deity, since only God can hold a temple.
The word behind it
The inner shrine or sanctuary of a temple — not the outer courts (hieron) but the sacred chamber where the divine presence actually dwelt. Paul uses naos deliberately: he is saying the body is the holy of holies, not merely religious real estate. This single word rules out any reading that makes the verse merely about respecting one's health; it anchors the argument in holiness, presence, and the catastrophic wrongness of desecrating a sanctuary.
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