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.
