📖WEB · 1 Corinthians 5:9
What does 1 Corinthians 5:9 mean?
"I wrote to you in my letter to have no company with sexual sinners;"
— 1 Corinthians 5:9 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
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;
yet not at all meaning with the sexual sinners of this world, or with the covetous and extortionists, or with idolaters; for then you would have to leave the world.
But as it is, I wrote to you not to associate with anyone who is called a brother who is a sexual sinner, or covetous, or an idolater, or a slanderer, or a drunkard, or an extortionist. Don’t even eat with such a person.
For what do I have to do with also judging those who are outside? Don’t you judge those who are within?
Explanation
1 Corinthians 5:9 is a brief but important verse in which Paul refers back to an earlier piece of correspondence he had sent to the church in Corinth. In plain language, Paul is reminding the Corinthians that he had already instructed them, in a previous letter, not to closely associate with people living in sexual immorality. This verse functions almost as a footnote or clarification, because Paul immediately goes on in the following verses (5:10-11) to explain that he did not mean believers should avoid all contact with immoral people in the wider world—which would be impossible—but rather that they should not tolerate unrepentant sexual sin within the church community itself.
To understand the context, it helps to know that 1 Corinthians is not the first letter Paul wrote to this church. Paul had founded the Corinthian church during his missionary travels, and after leaving, he continued to correspond with them as issues arose. This verse reveals that there was an earlier letter—sometimes called the "previous letter" or informally the "lost letter" to the Corinthians—that has not survived and is not part of our New Testament. What we know of its contents comes only through Paul's references to it here. In this section of 1 Corinthians (chapter 5), Paul is addressing a serious moral scandal in the church: a man was involved in a sexual relationship with his father's wife, and shockingly, the church was proud of their tolerance rather than grieved by the sin. Paul confronts this directly, calling for the church to remove the unrepentant man from their fellowship.
Theologically, this verse and its surroun
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