📖WEB · 1 Corinthians 5:6
What does 1 Corinthians 5:6 mean?
"Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole lump?"
— 1 Corinthians 5:6 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
For I most certainly, as being absent in body but present in spirit, have already, as though I were present, judged him who has done this thing.
In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, you being gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ,
are to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole lump?
Purge out the old yeast, that you may be a new lump, even as you are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed in our place.
Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old yeast, neither with the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
I wrote to you in my letter to have no company with sexual sinners;
Explanation
1 Corinthians 5:6 comes in the middle of Paul's sharp rebuke to the church in Corinth over a specific case of sexual immorality within the congregation—a man was involved in a relationship with his father's wife, a sin so blatant that Paul says even pagans would recognize it as wrong. Rather than mourning over this and removing the man from fellowship, the Corinthian believers were "boasting," apparently priding themselves on their tolerance, spiritual sophistication, or perhaps a distorted sense of grace that let them overlook blatant sin in their midst. Paul confronts this pride directly: "Your boasting is not good." Then he asks a rhetorical question meant to jolt them into recognizing an obvious truth—everyone knew from baking bread that a small amount of yeast works its way through an entire batch of dough, causing the whole thing to rise.
Paul wrote this letter around AD 53-54 to a church he had founded, one that was gifted and articulate but also fractured by factions, pride, and moral compromise. The Corinthian believers lived in a city known for its sexual permissiveness, and it seems some in the church had absorbed a view that grace made moral boundaries unnecessary, or perhaps they simply valued unity and reputation for open-mindedness over holiness. Paul's yeast metaphor was a common image in Jewish thought, often used (as in Exodus during Passover) to represent something corrupting or contaminating that spreads unless removed.
Theologically, this verse teaches that sin is never merely
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