Boycott Booze Before You Lose

It was 2 a.m. and I was dropping a fraternity brother off at his parents' home, and when something told me to drive extra slow as I was going down the street, I barely crawled up to the stoplight, and ten seconds before I got there, a drunk driver ran the light, crashing into a telephone pole right in front of me. He could have killed me if I hadn't have slowed down. I believe one of the greatest plagues on society is booze.

The beer barons and the liquor kings have killed their millions for profits through the years. Families have been ruined by booze. Marriages have been destroyed by booze.

Lives have been ended by booze. I was sitting in a restaurant next to a table of ministers and their wives from a denomination different than mine, and they were drinking wine while they waited for their pastor to show up. And the later their pastor was, the drunker they got, to the point it was embarrassing.

My Bible says to be filled with the Spirit, not be filled with booze. Well, you argue, Jesus drank wine. Yes, friend, but he made wine out of water, not California grapes.

Show me such a wine, and I'll drink it as well. The last time I drank booze I was a sophomore in college, and me and a fraternity brother went out on the town, shooting tequila. By the time we made it back to the fraternity house, I was so intoxicated that I picked a fight with a man twice my size.

They tell me I took a broom to him and questioned his masculinity, even though he was on the football team. He knocked me through a double door, and they had to pull him off of me. The next day I was pretty beaten up, and I decided if I didn't know what I was doing when I was drinking, that I better just quit altogether.

That was over 40 years ago, friends, and I still believe that booze is a bad idea. Will you do me a favor? Will you do me a favor, friend? And do yourself a favor as well, and boycott booze for the following reasons. Boycott booze before you lose your testimony.

Those ministers sitting in the restaurant sure turned off the people sitting around them as they got more intoxicated waiting for their pastor. They sure turned me off. I felt sorry for them.

Booze is not worth losing your Christian testimony over. Secondly, boycott booze before you lose your job. I'll never forget sitting in my friend's living room as a young boy when his drunken father came home from work to inform his wife he just lost his job.

They had a family of six, so it was pretty devastating. I can still see the wife's tears as she hung her head in shame for her drunken husband. Thirdly, boycott booze before you lose your family.

If your family is important to your friend, then the best thing you can do for them is to stop drinking alcohol right now. Your children don't need to have a parent teaching them to drink something that could wreck their own lives. And that leads me to the next reason to boycott booze before you lose your freedom.

I have a church friend whose son got dead drunk and got behind the wheel of a car and ran a light, killing the other driver. And that son now sits in a prison cell because he lost his freedom when he lost his senses from booze. Next, boycott booze before you lose your life.

Booze eats away at your liver. It gives you cancer and can end your life early. Oh, why drink something that is harmful to you? Common sense tells you not to do that.

And boycott booze before you lose your independence because you don't want to risk becoming an alcoholic. I had a friend who was an insurance salesman and he had a wife, but he didn't sell much insurance because you could typically find him asleep on his couch, sleeping off a drunk when he should have been working. That marriage ended in divorce, which was sad because they had a darling little son who had to grow up in a broken home.

And lastly, boycott booze before you lose your soul. My Bible declares no drunkard shall enter the kingdom of heaven. Why risk your eternal soul on the devil's brew? Boycott booze before you lose.

Let us pray.