1 Thessalonians 4:5

not in the passion of lust, even as the Gentiles who know not God;

Some have expressed surprise that Paul spoke so forthrightly in this passage regarding the lustful sins of fornication and impurity; but, aside from the fact of every generation's needing such instruction, the low pagan culture of the Gentile world of that era made it especially mandatory that in the matter of sexual purity the Christians should maintain the position of honor which their sanctification required. "The moral sense of the heathen was so perverted and their natures so corrupt that they looked upon fornication as a thing indifferent."[12] Our own age with its loose standards and vaunted "new morality" is hardly any better. As Barclay put it:

The new morality is only the old morality brought up to date. There is a claimant necessity in Britain, as there was in Thessalonica, to place before men and women the uncompromising demands of Christian morality, "for God did not call us to impurity, but to consecration."[13]

[12] P. J. Gloag, The Pulpit Commentary, Vol. 21 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1950), p. 74.

[13] William Barclay, op. cit., p. 200.