Overcoming Addiction: Proverbs

The Book of Proverbs was written to be kind of like a collection of fatherly advice from our Father in Heaven to his children here on Earth. This is God’s fatherly wisdom guiding us through the land mines and pitfalls of our life here in this fallen and broken world where everything is not simple and everything is not clear and everything is not easy, and there is danger and deception and difficulty around every corner.

Like a good human father, our Father in heaven wants to speak into our lives and teach us what he knows and share his wisdom for how to not only survive in this world, but also thrive in this world.

And we are spending these next several months trekking through God’s wisdom for us in the Proverbs so that we can apply his wise fatherly counsel to every part of our lives together.

And we are continuing on that same track this morning as we dive into what the Proverbs have to say about something that has affected probably every single one of us in this room on some level.

We are going to talk about addiction.

We are going to talk about intoxication.

We are going to talk about things that can rule us, things that take over our lives, things that can hijack us from the inside out.

And we are going to talk about how to break free of our addictions and stay free from our addictions, because the calling God has placed on our lives this morning as His People is that God has called us to sobriety.

As followers of Jesus and citizens of God’s kingdom and children of the Father, we are called to glorify Him by living a life of sobriety.

We are called to reflect his wisdom and goodness through our life of sobriety, we are called to honor his image that he has stamped upon us through our sobriety, he has called us to flee far and flee fast from anything that ravages our souls and drains our bodies and steals away our ability to think clearly and carefully, and to make wise and responsible decisions, and to act in a loving and generous and peaceable way.

He has called us to be a sober minded people, and that means that He has called us to be a sober people.

And because that is true, that radically changes our relationship with literally any substance that can be intoxicating.

And we are going to spend this morning diving deep into exactly what that looks like.

But we have a lot of ground to cover and not a whole lot of time, and so I am going to quit wasting time, and I’m going to dive straight in, and we are going to trek through what God’s word has to say about our calling to be a sober people.

Sound good?

Are you ready?

Okay, here we go.

Intoxication Is a Destructive Force

I want to start off by laying down just a handful of statistics. Maybe they’ll shock you, or maybe they’ll be obvious, but I want to paint the reality of the situation as clearly as I possibly can. I think it’s unbelievably important for us to go into this understanding as clearly as possible that intoxication is a destructive force.

It is not a neutral thing.

Now, our culture glorifies intoxication.

Doesn’t it?

If you go to Hobby Lobby, half the decorations that they sell for you to put on your wall say something like, “It’s Wine O’clock!” or “Don’t talk to me, I’m not drunk enough yet!” and things like that.

Every TV show and movie that we watch, the protagonist has to have, like, an opioid addiction while they’re trying to solve the mystery of who kidnapped that girl, or they have to be a high functioning alcoholic as they make their way up the ladder in the business world, or something along those lines.

Almost every song on the radio is about getting through the work week so that you can get totally sloshed over the weekend.

Right?

We have been radically conditioned to associate fun with intoxication.

We’ve been socially engineered to associate happiness with being plastered.

We’ve actually been taught to see sobriety as a kind of burden that we have to bear throughout the work day so that we can get to the night time when we can drink our disappointment and boredom and pain and unhappiness away.

So we have been sold this very warped view of the world from almost every corner of our culture.

But the reality is that intoxication is a destructive force that eats everything.

I’ll prove it to you.

As of the most recent study, there are at least 400 million people aged 15 and older throughout the world who suffer from substance abuse issues.

Not 18 and older. 15 and older.

Here’s another one: Roughly 10% of Americans aged 12 and over have a substance abuse problem.

Not just 10% of adults. Ten percent of all Americans over the age of 12 have a substance abuse problem. They’re not old enough to go into a Pirates of the Caribbean movie without a parent accompanying them, but they’re addicted to some potentially dangerous intoxicating substance.

Here’s another one: Each year, roughly 178,000 people die of complications related to alcohol abuse. That is more than the number of people who died in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War combined—every single year.

And it’s actually getting worse: Death by alcohol abuse increased by 26% from 2019 to 2020.

Deaths by drug overdose increased by roughly 30% beginning in 2020.

Here’s another one: Every year roughly 13.5 million people are caught drunk driving—and within that 13.5 million people, roughly 14,000 people end up dead from drunk driving accidents.

But for me, the most astonishing statistic is the fact that alcohol abuse drastically increases rates of domestic violence.

Those of you who’ve had an alcoholic ex probably know this already, but alcohol abuse astronomically raises your likelihood of committing domestic violence.

There are 90,000 alcohol induced domestic violence deaths every year.

Intoxication is a destructive force that eats everything, destroys lives, ruins futures, rips families apart, steals our peace, and creates chaos in every corner where it’s tolerated.

And that shouldn’t surprise us, because God warned us about all of this.

Know what I’m talking about?

Proverbs chapter 20 says:

“Wine is a mocker, and beer is a brawler. Whoever is led astray by them is not wise.”

—Proverbs 20:1, WEB

Proverbs 23 says:

“Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has strife? Who has complaining? Who has wounds without cause? Who has redness of eyes? Those who stay long at the wine; those who go to seek out mixed wine. Don’t look at the wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup, when it goes down smoothly. At the last it bites like a snake, and poisons like a viper. Your eyes will see strange things, and your mind will imagine confusing things. Yes, you will be as he who lies down in the middle of the sea, or as he who lies on top of the rigging: ‘They hit me,’ you will say, ‘and I was not hurt. They beat me, and I don’t feel it. When will I wake up? I can do it again. I can find another.’”

—Proverbs 23:29–35, WEB

Addiction and intoxication are a destructive force that eats everything.

For Most People, Sobriety Means Practicing Moderation

And because all of that is true, God’s Word gives us some very important ground rules to live by.

But what I’m about to say will probably surprise you.

Because God’s word does something very strange when it talks about addiction and intoxication.

Because what it does is, it gives us two very different sets of rules for two very different kinds of people.

Know what I’m talking about?

There’s one calling that God places on about 90% of us—and there’s another calling that He places on the other 10%.

We’re gonna talk about both of them together now.

Sound good?

Are you ready?

Here we go.

To the overwhelming majority of us, God’s calling on us is to practice something called moderation.

This is number one:

For 90% of us, living a life of sobriety means practicing moderation.

Now, to understand what I’m talking about here, we have to lay down a little bit of context.

Specifically, we have to understand that God’s word actually has a positive view of alcohol.

Do you know what I’m talking about?

The Bible is not a Prohibitionist book.

And our God is not a Prohibitionist God.

No. Despite all the potential risks that can come with alcohol, God’s word actually says that alcohol is a gift from God.

I’m gonna say that again, because the traditional Baptists aren’t mad enough at me yet:

God’s word tells us that alcohol is a gift from God.

What am I talking about?

Here’s what I’m talking about.

Proverbs 3 says:

“Honor Yahweh with your substance, with the first fruits of all your increase: so your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will overflow with new wine.”

—Proverbs 3:9–10, WEB

And Psalm 104 says:

“He causes the grass to grow for the livestock, and plants for man to cultivate, that he may produce food out of the earth: wine that makes glad the heart of man, oil to make his face to shine, and bread that strengthens man’s heart.”

—Psalm 104:14–15, WEB

Did you hear that?

God’s word says that wine is not a curse to be rejected and prohibited but a blessing to be enjoyed. It says that alcohol is a gift from the Lord to humanity designed to do—what?

Designed to “make glad the heart of man.”

Now, for those of you who have never consumed a drop of alcohol, let me explain what this is talking about.

This is not talking about drunkenness.

When you get drunk, your heart does not get glad.

No. When you get drunk, you get really depressed, and you dial your ex’s phone number and say really stupid stuff on their voicemail.

So this is not talking about drunkenness.

No. This is talking about what happens when you have a small amount of alcohol in a safe and responsible environment.

When you get together with your friends and have, like, one or two drinks, what happens?

You start having a pretty good time. Everything starts to feel lighter. Your worries stop feeling quite as heavy as they did an hour ago.

God created alcohol so that we as humans could get with some friends, have a couple of drinks, and have our hearts gladdened in the process.

And because that is true, we get one of the most famous stories in the entirety of Scripture. We get the story of Jesus at the wedding in John chapter 2.

Remember that one?

What happens is that Jesus is attending a wedding, and he’s there with his mother, Mary.

Back in the day, weddings lasted roughly seven days.

I don’t even like it when a wedding lasts seven hours. After like two or three hours, I’m out. I’m gonna bounce. I love you, but I want to not be here anymore.

So if I’m ever at your wedding and I leave at like the two or three hour mark, don’t be offended, it’s just because I don’t want to be anywhere for longer than three hours.

But they’re at this seven day long wedding, and somewhere along the line, disaster strikes.

They ran out of wine.

Now I don’t want to be at any long wedding ceremony, but I really don’t want to be at a long wedding ceremony where there’s not even a bar.

But they run out of wine, so there’s nothing for people to drink.

And so, what does Jesus do?

He goes into the back, he has them fill their wine vats with water, and then he miraculously turns the water into wine.

Just to be clear: Jesus purposefully turns something that isn’t alcohol into alcohol, so that a bunch of people who drank so much that the wedding ran out of alcohol could drink even more alcohol.

Why would He do that?

It’s because alcohol is a blessing from the Lord, and he wanted to bless the people at this wedding.

God’s word says that this alcoholic beverage called wine is a gift from the Lord, not a curse.

Moderation Means Staying Well Short of Drunkenness

But it’s a gift that we have to enjoy in moderation, not in excess.

And that means that we need to define the word “moderation,” don’t we?

So: What does it mean to practice moderation when it comes to God’s gift of alcohol?

It’s actually very simple.

I think Paul puts it perfectly in Ephesians 5. He says:

“Don’t be drunken with wine, in which is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit.”

—Ephesians 5:18, WEB

The prophet Isaiah puts it even more aggressively. He says:

“Woe to those who rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; who stay late into the night, until wine inflames them!… Woe to those who are mighty to drink wine, and champions at mixing strong drink.”

—Isaiah 5:11, 22, WEB

In 2024 terms, he’s saying, “There’s a lot of things you should be known for, but being able to put away an entire 24 pack of Natty Light is not one of them.”

As God’s people, we are called to glorify Him by being in control of ourselves, by being in control of our actions, by being in control of our thoughts, by being in control of our impulses.

The term God’s word gives to this is moderation.

And so moderation is gonna look a little bit different for each person, but at the very core, moderation means that you do not drink more than you can handle.

Moderation means that you stop yourself long before you get drunk.

It means that you know how many beers or how many glasses of wine or how many shots it takes you to start losing your good judgment—and you stop drinking way before you get there.

Moderation means that if you can’t walk straight, you’ve drank too much and you need to stop right now.

If you’re a little bit dizzy on the way to the bathroom, you’ve had too many and you need to stop now.

If you’re having a hard time remembering the details of the story you’re telling the rest of your drinking buddies, then you’ve crossed the threshold and it’s time to call it quits and pay your tab and wait till you’ve come back to planet earth before getting in your car and driving anywhere.

That’s moderation.

And you are not gonna like what I am about to say—but the less you like this, the more you need to hear it:

Your limit is way earlier than you think it is.

Know what I’m talking about?

Your limit is way earlier than you think it is.

However many drinks you think you can have before you cross over into the danger zone, you should probably cut that number in half, and that needs to be your limit.

Because the reality is that by the time you realize you’ve had one too many drinks, what you’ve actually had is three too many drinks.

Do you know what I’m talking about, or are you still in denial?

Your limit is way earlier than you think it is.

And because that is true, wisdom means setting a limit that is way below your danger zone and then sticking to it religiously.

And so, those of you who’ve been to my house for dinner or who’ve been out to Tar Banks Brewing Company or Three Lions Pub or wherever with me know that I have a very clear and concrete limit for myself that I never go past.

When I was 21 years old, my friends and I would regularly buy a giant case of beer, and each of us would put away six or seven or eight beers in one night if we were staying home. I don’t do that anymore.

Nowadays, I hold myself to a two drink limit per day.

Does that seem low to you?

It should, because it is.

Could I safely drink more? Yeah, easily. But two beers in a day is a perfect limit for me because I am never gonna enter the danger zone when that is the limit I set for myself.

Right?

Even though I could very easily have three, or even four without getting anywhere near drunkenness or even tipsiness, sticking with two guarantees that my head is never going to leave my shoulders.

Now, for some of you, your limit may be higher than that. For some of you, it may be lower.

You don’t have to follow my exact policy, but what you need to do is figure out your policy.

Because moderation is all about setting good, wise, responsible limits.

And when we do that, what we find is that these limits don’t destroy our enjoyment, they actually enhance it.

You know what I’m talking about?

The same God who gave us alcohol as a blessing for us to enjoy also gave us wise ground rules for how to enjoy this gift—and these ground rules actually enhance his blessing rather than diminishing it.

Like, you know what I never do? I never throw up because I had too much alcohol. I never vomit $45 worth of whiskey into a toilet. I never black out because I had so much in my bloodstream that my short term memory stopped working.

And when I started setting limits for myself, I learned that I get the exact same enjoyment out of two beers that I would have gotten out of seven.

Moderation doesn’t diminish our enjoyment of God’s gift of alcohol, it enhances it.

Moderation Glorifies God

And it does more than that:

Because moderation doesn’t just bless us, it glorifies God.

Know what I’m talking about?

We glorify the Lord when we drink responsibly instead of recklessly.

When we learn how to thread that needle so that we can enjoy his blessing of alcohol without impairing our judgment, we are actually reflecting his wisdom.

When we carelessly allow ourselves to become intoxicated, we are dishonoring the name of the Lord who purchased us.

But when we wisely and responsibly control ourselves so that we never drink more than we can safely handle, we are actually glorifying the Lord by displaying the wisdom that he has worked so tirelessly to build within us.

And so, for some of us here in this room this morning, what we need to do right now is repent of the way that we have abused alcohol in the past.

For some of us, what we need to do is repent of the way that we have been careless with our drinking.

Some of us need to repent of the way that we have failed to hold ourselves to God’s standard for sobriety.

And instead, we need to commit ourselves to embracing good limits.

To learning moderation.

And to glorifying the Lord by learning to be moderate, responsible, and wise in our drinking.

That’s number one:

For 90% of us, living a life of sobriety means practicing moderation.

For Some People, Sobriety Requires Complete Abstinence

And then there’s the other 10%.

And if you are part of this other 10%, then God’s word places a completely different calling on your life.

Because for some of you, living a life of sobriety is gonna have to mean cutting alcohol completely out of your life.

I’m gonna say that again:

For some of us, living a life of sobriety requires cutting alcohol completely out of our life.

Peter says in Second Peter 2:

“For a man is brought into bondage by whoever overcomes him.”

—2 Peter 2:19, WEB

And some of us here in this room this morning are slaves to our addiction.

It is true that alcohol is a blessing from the Lord, and that when we consume it moderately and responsibly and wisely, it gladdens our hearts and it blesses us—but there are some people who cannot do those things.

There are some of you in this room who cannot drink moderately because you can’t stop at one or two. You have to have seven or eleven or fifteen.

There are some of you who cannot drink responsibly because you can’t control how much you drink or how often you drink, or what setting you drink in.

There are some of you who cannot drink wisely because one sip sends you immediately into a spiral of foolishness.

And it is not because of a defect in your character.

I want to be clear about that right now:

There are some of you who cannot drink moderately or responsibly or wisely, but it has absolutely nothing to do with your character—it has to do with your biology.

Some people are biologically wired to be addicted to certain things.

One person has his first beer, says “That’s pretty good,” and spends the rest of his life having a beer with the guys every once in a while—and another person takes one sip and then spends twenty years drunk every waking hour of his life, because he has a compulsive and uncontrollable need to drink more and more and more, because he’s biologically predisposed towards alcoholism.

I am describing some of you.

I don’t know which of you I’m describing.

But in a room of roughly 50 people, at least one of you probably inherited the alcoholic gene.

And if that’s you, then none of this stuff we talked about in that first point applies to you, because the only wise option for your situation is to cut alcohol out of your life completely.

And that sucks.

Let’s not sugar coat it.

You were born with genetics that mean you cannot enjoy God’s good blessing that is alcohol.

The Fall has robbed you of this gift that God created to give you.

You were born with an illness, and the only treatment for that illness is to keep yourself away from alcohol entirely.

For some of us, living a life of sobriety requires cutting alcohol completely out of our life.

Accept the Help God Provides

And in order to do that, you might have to do some really uncomfortable things for a very long time.

You know what I’m talking about?

Case in point:

There was a woman who found our church through Facebook, who for the past few years would call me every couple of months in the middle of a crisis.

She was a married woman with a few kids, and every few months she would relapse back into alcoholism, call me up drunk and crying about how she’s destroying her life, and she’s destroying her kids’ lives, and she’s destroying her marriage, and every time I would talk to her, and I would pray with her, and I would try to get her to agree to check in to some kind of rehab facility.

And every single time, she would say the same thing. She would say, “I can’t do that because I cannot go three months without seeing my kids.”

Eventually our conversation would end, and a few months would go by, and then I would get another call from her, again drunk and crying, talking about the way that she is ruining her life, ruining her kids’ lives, ruining her marriage, and once again I would say, “Let’s get you into a rehab program so that you can get your life back. I will pick you up and drive you there right now, you just say the word.”

And every single time she would say, “I can’t do that, because I cannot go months without seeing my kids.”

And this would happen again and again and again, year after year after year.

But eventually it came to a breaking point, where she called me on New Year’s Eve of this past year, and we spent almost the entire day going back and forth and back and forth, I had the police sent out to her house because she was suicidal, but she refused to go to the hospital and be involuntarily committed, her husband decided he was done with her, she told me that her kids were afraid of her and wouldn’t talk to her anymore, and she asked me if I would come pick her up and take her somewhere other than her house.

And I told her, “I will come pick you up right now, but if I do, I’m taking you to a rehab center.”

And she immediately hung up and wouldn’t answer any of my calls after that.

I have no idea what happened to her after that, or if she’s even still alive.

I couldn’t help her, because she didn’t want to be helped.

Every step of the way, the door to recovery was opened for her, but every single time she chose not to walk through it.

Every single time she had a new excuse.

She wasn’t willing to be separated from her kids for a few months, so she ended up probably losing them forever.

Do Not Ignore the Hand God Is Reaching Out to You

Do not be like her.

Do not let your addiction continue to fester.

If you are in this room this morning and you have spent months or years or even decades ravaged by alcoholism or addiction or substance abuse, you are here on purpose.

I didn’t orchestrate it, and you didn’t orchestrate it, but God orchestrated it so that you would be in this room right now, so that He could get in your face through me and tell you to stop messing around, stop running.

God brought you here this morning so that your addiction could be broken.

But that is not going to happen by me saying some magic words right now.

That is not going to happen by you just walking down the aisle and making some kind of pledge to quit whatever intoxicating substance you’re addicted to cold turkey.

This is not gonna happen alone.

You need help.

So God brought you to a place that literally exists to help.

God brought you here this morning to empower you to begin living a life of sobriety.

And so, for some of you, sobriety is going to look like moderation.

But for some of you, sobriety is going to look like cutting alcohol completely out of your life.

And whichever your situation is, we want to help you do exactly that.

And so what we’re going to do is, we’re going to put a QR code up on the screen.

And I want you to scan that QR code and send a text to the number that comes up.

And say, “I need help breaking my addiction.”

If you don’t want to scan that QR code, we can do it just a little differently.

Because after this service is over, after we sing and I make some announcements and all that, I am going to walk into that back room through those two doors to my left and my right, and I’m going to wait there.

And you can come see me, and we can go to my office and talk, and you can say, “I need help breaking free from my addiction.”

And I will help you get connected to a recovery group.

I will help you get connected to an addiction counselor.

I will drive you to the rehab facility if I need to.

Because God has called us to glorify Him by breaking free of our addictions.

Breaking free of intoxication.

And living out a life of sobriety that reflects His goodness and His wisdom and His glory.

And so when we break the chains of addiction before a watching world, God gets glory.

And God is at work to glorify Himself this morning by setting you free once and for all.

Do not ignore the hand that He is reaching out to you.