Get Off the Booze

“Become sober minded as you ought, and stop sinning; for some have no knowledge of God.  I speak this to your shame.”  1 Corinthians 15:34

Become Sober Minded – Most of the world is drunk.  Billions of people are walking around every day staggering under the influence.  And, by the way, so are you if you haven’t put off the old ways of thinking.  That’s the point of this combination of Greek words:  eknepsate dikaios.  It means “wake up from your drunken stupor and take on a righteous mind.”  The imagery is quite explicit.  Haul yourself out of the gutter.  Go away from the bar.  Dump the bottles down the drain.  Stop associating with the party crowd.  Every alcoholic knows.  If you don’t cut it off clean, you’ll never get a clear head.

Sin gets the buzz on.  It diminishes your moral capacity.  It clouds your spiritual sensitivity.  It makes your ego dizzy.  Things get out of focus.  Drink enough of it and you will be visibly impaired.  But there’s one big difference between alcohol and sin.  Human beings have no sin tolerance at all.  Even one drop alters our perception of reality.

Every day I witness the amazing subtly of sinful stupor.  I see perfectly good men and women acting in incredibly stupid spiritual ways because they haven’t sobered up yet.  I know.  I’m one of them.  I stumbled from one drunken sin binge to another, believing all the while that I understood the theology of grace.  I worked in churches, paid tithes, helped the poor while my skin reeked with the smell of hypocrisy.  I was the closet sin-aholic.  I drank sin in secret.

But it’s worse than that.  I thought the death of Christ meant I should have a good life.  I acted as though my money was my own.  I made choices that protected my best interests.  I aimed for prestige and power.  I wanted recognition.  I wasn’t a tyrant or a materialistic egomaniac.  No, I looked very much like a good American Christian.  Successful.  Image conscious.  Influential.  Drunk on myself.  Stashing a private bottle under the bank account pillows or behind the degrees on the wall.  I never knew what “servant of all” meant.  My head was full of the world’s best vintages.

It’s hard to wake up, realizing that most of your life you’ve been in a fog.  It’s hard to start taking the words of the Bible exactly as they come.  It’s hard not to filter God’s message with those old wine flavors.  It’s hard to drink the water of life and not long to taste Chateaunuef-du-Pape.  It takes time to get the after-effects out of the system.  Then one day it dawns on you.   His words really are true.  You can live them.