Today Paul gives us a principle to live by, and he builds it out of a slogan that was apparently going around the Corinthian church. Listen:

“‘All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. ‘All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything.” (1 Corinthians 6:12, ESV)

Those quotation marks matter. The first half of each sentence is not Paul — it is the Corinthians. They had taken the glorious truth of Christian freedom and flattened it into a catchphrase: we can do anything we want to. And Paul does something wiser than denying it. He accepts it, and then limits it twice.