Cigarettes, Whiskey, and Wild, Wild Women

 Read Proverbs 23

 

If you pick up at verse 22, you might think you had turned back the pages to the beginning of proverbs. 

Listen to your mother and father.

Get the truth.  It’s worth it.

Get wisdom, discipline, and understanding.

Parents take joy in children living God’s way.

Make your parents proud.

Stick to God’s way.  Stay out of the everything else.

What’s in the minefields of everything else?

A man named Tim Spencer wrote a song that most of you young ones probably never heard.  The Sons of the Pioneers (of which Spencer was a member), Buck Owens, and even Jim Croce sang it at one time. 

Cigareets and whuskey and wild wild women

They'll drive you crazy they'll drive you insane

Cigareets and whuskey and wild wild women

They'll drive you crazy they'll drive you insane

Once I was happy and had a good wife I had enough money to last me for life

I met with a gal and we went on a spree she taught me to smoke and drink whusky

Cigareets and whuskey...

And now I'm feeble and broken with age

The lines on my face make a well written page

 I'm leavin' this story how sad but how true

On women and whusky and what they will do

Cigareets and whuskey...

Write on the cross at the head of my grave

For women and whusky here lies a poor slave

Take warning dear stranger take warning dear friend

Then write in big letters these words at the end

Cigareets and whuskey...

They'll drive you crazy they'll drive you insane

Before I bring us back to Solomon and the Sayings of the Wise, here is a short rabbit trail on Tim Spencer. 

Tim Spencer’s life epitomized the song I just shared.

Then one day in a hotel in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, Tim opened a letter from his wife. Included was a verse of Scripture. Picking up a nearby Gideon Bible, Tim read the passage and realized he needed a change in his life. In prayer he yielded his life to the Lordship of Christ.

Tim Spencer later established a Gospel Music publishing company, Manna Music, and a few years later his college-age son, Hal, brought him a song from a student missionary conference. Tim contacted the author of the words, Stuart Hine, and published the song.

Tim Spencer introduced How Great Thou Art to the modern world. Back to the Proverbs.

Solomon didn’t sing it, but the counsel in the last few sayings of the wise that close the chapter deliver something close to the same. If you are keeping score at home, these are sayings 18 and 19.

My son, give me your heart

    and let your eyes delight in my ways,

for an adulterous woman is a deep pit,

    and a wayward wife is a narrow well.

Like a bandit she lies in wait

    and multiplies the unfaithful among men.

Who has woe? Who has sorrow?

    Who has strife? Who has complaints?

    Who has needless bruises? Who has bloodshot eyes?

Those who linger over wine,

    who go to sample bowls of mixed wine.

Do not gaze at wine when it is red,

    when it sparkles in the cup,

    when it goes down smoothly!

In the end it bites like a snake

    and poisons like a viper.

Your eyes will see strange sights,

    and your mind will imagine confusing things.

You will be like one sleeping on the high seas,

    lying on top of the rigging.

“They hit me,” you will say, “but I’m not hurt!

    They beat me, but I don’t feel it!

When will I wake up

    so I can find another drink?”

There is nothing wrong with wine.  There is nothing wrong with women, but watch out for the woman who has too much experience with men.

Watch out that you don’t crave wine—that you don’t’ live for your next drink. Think to the sayings of the recovered alcoholic:  One drink is too many and a thousand is never enough.

Sometimes the wine leads to the women that you might have steered clear of if you were sober.

The Bible does not teach that consumption of alcohol is bad or evil or even foolish.  Drunkenness—whatever point it is in your metabolism that surrenders your sound mind to foolishness—is to be avoided.

Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding where the guests already had too much to drink.  So was he promoting drunkenness? No, the use of your sound mind is still required. If you are at a party where nobody is driving home, that’s one thing.

If you go to a bar and drink too much that you don’t know to call a taxi or in today’s world an Uber, that’s another.  The Bible does not define surrendering your sound mind by blood-alcohol level. The state does.

What’s the counsel?

Don’t surrender your sound mind for pleasures of the flesh.  If you are not sure what your drinking limit is, don’t find out someplace where you have to drive home. If you know what it is, stay within it.

But know this, as your approach your limit, your sound mind does not resist as much.  Don’t desire alcoholic beverages so much that you will put good things in your life at risk.

If she is not the girl that you would bring home to mom, she’s also not the girl for tonight.  Remember, she was somebody else’s girl last night and the night before.

It seems that we get the same counsel from Solomon, from this collection of the sayings of the wise, and I would imagine from your parents as well.  Must be good stuff.

Amen.