Articles
Choose Abundant Living (2)
Choose Abundant Living 2
Mike Willis
“Wine, Women, and Song”
Everyone wants the good life, but not everyone has the same vision of what the good life consists. Many view the good life as “wine, women, and song,” which is a phrase representing the hedonistic lifestyle—a lifestyle without moral restraint. The problem with this lifestyle is its temporal (not to mention the eternal) consequences. You cannot sow your wild oats and then pray for a crop failure. Life just does not work that way.
The person who chooses the drunken lifestyle faces the potential dangers of a DUI ticket or worse a manslaughter charge because he killed someone while driving drunk. Many people do things while intoxicated that they would never do while sober. For example, a drunken person frequently starts a fight which may result in an assault and battery charge, and a criminal record that plagues the person with every job application and rental housing application. But, even this is not the worst thing that can befall the choice to get drunk. It may lead to addiction! Perhaps you have driven by skid row and seen the homeless lifestyle of those given to drunkenness. They have lost their families, friends, job, and hope!
What someone thought was abundant living turns out not to be what it was advertised as being. So, when one reads in his Bible the Lord’s commandments about intoxicating beverages, perhaps he will admit that God’s prohibitions were given for our own good, not to restrain us from having fun!
Who has woe? Who has sorrow?
Who has strife? Who has complaining?
Who has wounds without cause?
Who has redness of eyes?
Those who tarry long over wine;
those who go to try mixed wine.
Do not look at wine when it is red,
when it sparkles in the cup
and goes down smoothly.
In the end it bites like a serpent
and stings like an adder.
Your eyes will see strange things,
and your heart utter perverse things.
You will be like one who lies down in the midst of the sea,
like one who lies on the top of a mast.
“They struck me,” you will say, “but I was not hurt;
they beat me, but I did not feel it.
When shall I awake?
I must have another drink” (Prov. 23:29-35).
