Rev. David Holwick
First Baptist Church
West Lafayette, Ohio
July 28, 1985
Christians and Alcohol
Proverbs 23:29-35, NIV
Have you ever had a beer? Lots of people have. Drinking has been called the key to social success. At gatherings it loosens you up and makes you more lively. When you don't hold back, it's easier for people to get to know you.
Drinking is a sign of maturity. Once you reach high school you have to show you are independent of your parents and drinking is a powerful way to establish this. Just get three teenagers and a six-pack and you've got a party.
In Europe drinking begins at an early age but here it is reserved for adults. So the sooner you drink the faster you'll grow up. The results can be tragic.
I used to live in Fort Meade, Maryland, which is half an hour from Washington, D.C. It's a rural area not much different than Coshocton County. The kids there aren't much different either. On the weekends they like to get together. On one particular weekend in the spring of 1979, a bunch of high school students gathered at a friend's house. All of them drank and some drank too much. To cap off the evening they decided to go for a ride on a tree-covered road behind the base. Fourteen of them piled into a pick-up truck and took off. The driver was feeling pretty good and soon he was going 80-90 MPH. At a hair-pin curve he lost control. The pickup left the road and hit an oak tree head-on. The first people at the scene were horrified to find bodies hanging from the trees. The impact was so great that initially it could not be determined how many had been in the truck. Out of fourteen, ten died that night and two more died within a few weeks. Only one person was able to walk away - the teenage driver - and scattered in the woods and throughout the truck was dozens of empty beer cans.
We've all heard the statistics - 26,000 alcohol-related deaths on the highways every year (1 out of 2 involved). A quarter-of-a-million every decade. Another 25,000 every year die from alcohol-related disease.
Are you concerned about violence in the family? Alcohol is the number one contributing factor in wife-beating and child abuse. Alcohol makes you do things you wouldn't normally do - it takes away your inhibitions in a party or a fight.
One of the reasons drinking is such a problem is that it is so intertwined in our history. The early Puritans debated theology in their beer-houses. Before the canals came to our area, each farmer in Coshocton County had a still so their excess corn could be turned into whisky. There was no other way to get rid of it. Thousands of gallons of booze were made every year and not a drop left the county.
In the mid-1800's things began to change. Revivals were spreading across the nation and Christians became concerned about the low moral climate. Individual zealots took matters into their own hands. A Kansas woman named Carrie Nation waded into bars with a heavy ax and tore up anything and everyone in sight. She was sort of like people who bomb abortion clinics.
In time groups became organized, like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which has a museum in Newcomerstown. Through their agitation and lobbying the United States began Prohibition in 1919. It didn't exactly work. When it was repealed in 1933 one out of three Americans drank socially. Today the percentage of drinkers has doubled to 2 out of 3. I know that some of you drink at least on occasion. Maybe you'll never have any problems. But consider these statistics - one way or another it can touch everyone.
For every six people who begin to drink one of them will become a problem drinker. For that one person, alcohol will affect their job, their family, or their health. When they start, they are in control. But as the years go by, the alcohol will take more and more control over them.
Have you ever seen someone destroyed by alcohol? I'm not talking about closet alcoholics like we have in West Lafayette. I mean people who are totally addicted to it. In college I was a member of a ministry to Chicago's Skid Row. Every Sunday morning we went down to the Star Hotel. They called it a hotel but it was really a flop-house. For $3 a night they get a cot in a small wooden booth. Each booth had a chicken-wire roof and they stood side-by-side in a huge concrete room, like a warehouse. No matter where you go inside you smell urine and vomit. Some men had lived in such conditions for forty years, perpetually drunk. At that stage you don't drink to feel high - you drink to feel normal. Proverbs 23:29-35 is a brilliant commentary on such an existence.
What does the Bible really say about alcohol? Everyone agrees that it condemns drunkenness. In 1 Corinthians 6:10 Paul lumps drunkards with homosexuals and thieves, and says these lifestyles are incompatible with Christianity.
It's on the moderate use of alcohol that Christians disagree. Fundamentalists usually say there is no such thing as moderate use - all alcohol is sin. They say wherever the Bible mentions wine in a positive sense, it is really talking about non-alcoholic grape juice.
I can appreciate the Fundamentalists' argument but the Biblical evidence does not support it. The first miracle of Jesus' was turning water into wine - 120 gallons of it. And in John 2:10 the master of ceremonies made this comment -
"Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now."
In the letter of 1 Timothy, Paul even commands the young man to drink wine, apparently as a medicine. That same book says that deacons should not be given too much wine, instead of no wine. Nowhere in the New Testament is there a clear command for Christians to abstain from all alcohol. Even though the Bible does not forbid all drinking, I believe there are good reasons why our church constitution says:
"We pledge to abstain from the sale and use of intoxicating drinks {as beverages}."
One reason is that the surest way to avoid the abuse of alcohol is to avoid alcohol altogether. No drinker intends to become an alcoholic. It just happens to them. And while it is happening, they are always fooling themselves by saying, "I'm in control. I can stop anytime."
In Romans 14:20 it says:
"Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat [or drink] anything that causes someone else to stumble."
There are many things in our lives that can make us stumbling blocks to other people. Don't let alcohol be one of them.
Abstaining from all alcohol may go beyond the demands of the Bible but it has a strong heritage in the Bible. For example, priests were not allowed to drink wine. Nazarites, who dedicated themselves completely to God, abstained from alcohol. John the Baptist made the same vow.
Modern Baptists are one of the few denominations that still expect members to abstain from alcohol. We're actually imitating a little-known group in the Old Testament called Recabites. Jeremiah 35 tells us this family kept a simple nomadic lifestyle so they would stay close to God. An important part of their commitment was the vow not to touch alcohol. They kept their commitment and God told them he would never let them down.
Baptists have a reputation of being killjoys and we've even been known to confiscate beer from picnics. But it should not be our intent to be moral policemen for outsiders. Abstention from alcohol should be voluntary, from the heart. We want to have joy like everyone else, but the surest path to that is not through a bottle. Alcohol doesn't give gusto - it's actually a depressant. For real vitality you must turn to a different source. As Paul says in Ephesians 5:18 -
"Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit."
What is the source of your inner joy?
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Typed on April 20, 2005, by Sharon Lesko of Ledgewood Baptist Church, New Jersey
Copyright © 2024 by Rev. David Holwick
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