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As a listener of Radical Personal Finance, I know a few things about you. 00:00:34.680 |
I know that you have a desire to build wealth in all of its forms, to live a rich life now and build a plan for financial freedom, as the tagline of the show talks about. 00:00:52.680 |
After all, you're making time in your busy day to listen to this. 00:00:57.680 |
Well, today I'm going to try to share with you some ideas and some wisdom that will help you to avoid poverty. 00:01:07.680 |
Because here is the proverb that we will talk about today. 00:01:13.680 |
"Be not among drunkards or among gluttonous eaters of meat, for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and slumber will clothe them with rags." 00:01:46.680 |
Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, insight, encouragement, and wisdom to live a rich life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. 00:02:00.680 |
Today we tackle the subject of drunkenness and talk about how it can have an incredibly deleterious effect on your bank balance. 00:02:18.680 |
Back in episode 279 of Radical Personal Finance, towards the end of the show, I was talking a little bit about my frustration with modern society. 00:02:27.680 |
And I was using the example of modern business conferences, specifically the conference that I just returned from, FinCon, which was fresh in my mind. 00:02:36.680 |
Now, my comments at that time were not specifically associated just with FinCon. 00:02:41.680 |
They were inclusive of all modern business conferences. 00:02:46.680 |
But I had just returned from FinCon, and so I was freshly aware of what had happened there. 00:02:53.680 |
Well, later on, I had a listener to the show who connected with me on Facebook and said, "Joshua, hey, what did you mean by those comments on drunkenness? 00:03:00.680 |
What were you referring to? Were you talking about people running up and down the hall wildly or just people hanging out, having a few drinks with their friends? 00:03:10.680 |
And my answer to him was, actually, he gave me this rather great list of all of the negative effects of drunkenness, the behavior that often occurs in conjunction with drunkenness. 00:03:20.680 |
And my answer to him, however, was none of the above, because what I was talking about was not anything specific that I oversaw or that I heard or anything that I had observed personally in terms of the behavior of people. 00:03:37.680 |
My comments were specifically focused on how we have a tendency in modern society to treat drunkenness as something that ranges from neutral to positive. 00:03:53.680 |
And we have a tendency to embrace it and to raise it up as something that can be enjoyed. 00:04:03.680 |
I believe that drunkenness is not something to be enjoyed. It's something that will have incredibly damaging financial and moral effects in your life. 00:04:15.680 |
And thus, we should face it square and head on. 00:04:21.680 |
As I said, I wasn't referring to any one person. 00:04:27.680 |
And besides, what other people do with their lives and their time is none of my business. 00:04:33.680 |
I don't go out looking to mess with other people. 00:04:37.680 |
And so, as such, when most people are out enjoying the clubs and the bars and the parties and whatnot, I'm usually in my bed. 00:04:45.680 |
I have found that over the time, my circadian rhythms and my sleep cycles work better for me to get to bed early and get up early. 00:04:53.680 |
So thus, I live by Ben Franklin's maxim, "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." 00:04:59.680 |
So I don't generally – I'm the first to leave an evening party, and I don't generally participate in a lot of those events. 00:05:10.680 |
But what I did observe, and I observe often, is that especially in the United States of America – and for those of you who are international listeners, I apologize. 00:05:18.680 |
I know many of you have a much healthier relationship. 00:05:22.680 |
Some of you have a much less healthy relationship, but some of your cultures have a much healthier relationship with alcohol than the U.S. American culture does. 00:05:29.680 |
Because in the U.S. American culture, drunkenness is celebrated and is promoted. 00:05:34.680 |
And here is what had bothered me at the conference. 00:05:37.680 |
It was specifically the way that speakers were introducing themselves, and they were using the topic of drunkenness, referring, "Hey, what a great party. Wow." 00:05:46.680 |
And it goes like this, "What a great party we had last night. Man, I saw a few of you tying a few ones on." 00:05:51.680 |
Or, "Wow, you rolled out of bed this morning. I can't believe it." 00:05:55.680 |
Or, "I'm here, and obviously the attendance here this morning is not as good as it can be." 00:06:00.680 |
Now, in and of themselves, most of these statements are innocuous, and all of us have made statements like that. 00:06:10.680 |
It's obvious that these are just simply rhetorical devices that the speaker is using to try to build rapport with their audience. 00:06:17.680 |
Anytime you're engaging with a new audience, especially in a public speaking capacity, you have to build rapport. 00:06:23.680 |
You have to do this in personal, interpersonal interaction. 00:06:26.680 |
The first thing, the skill of a good conversationalist is to find common ground, find rapport, and then build from there through excellent listening. 00:06:35.680 |
And as a public speaker, you have to do it even more so. 00:06:38.680 |
And so public speakers will have a tool bag that they go to to try to find areas of common ground that they can use to build on to engage with their audience. 00:06:48.680 |
And this is just simply one of those pieces of common ground. 00:06:54.680 |
But these statements are reflective of a view that we hold on the subject of drunkenness. 00:07:05.680 |
We expect it. We expect it at business conferences. 00:07:10.680 |
And this is not, again, not specific to FinCon. 00:07:13.680 |
Many business conferences for many people serve as a time away from home where they can fill their lives with debauchery, including drunkenness and other aspects of immorality. 00:07:26.680 |
But in our culture, we've grown to treat this lightly. 00:07:31.680 |
We've grown to treat this as though it's something to be tolerated and/or celebrated. 00:07:40.680 |
It has very damaging effects in your life, very financially damaging effects in your life. 00:07:49.680 |
It has very damaging effects on your family, and it has very damaging effects on society. 00:07:56.680 |
Now, some of these things will be self-evident, and some of them won't be. 00:08:00.680 |
And yes, obviously, with a show like this, I will come across in this show as preaching, and I am. 00:08:10.680 |
But the subject of a show like this is moral in nature, and it has a tremendous influence on your wealth. 00:08:23.680 |
Let me read to you again the proverb that I began with. 00:08:26.680 |
It says this, "Be not among drunkards or among gluttonous eaters of meat, for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and slumber will clothe them with rags." 00:08:42.680 |
There are a number of proverbs that follow this theme. 00:08:56.680 |
Now, I'm reading these proverbs to you out of the Book of Proverbs from the Christian Bible. 00:09:03.680 |
The Book of Proverbs, if you're unfamiliar with the background of the Bible, is a collection of wise sayings that was primarily assembled by King Solomon. 00:09:12.680 |
Proverbs basically just mean things that are generally true, wise sayings. 00:09:17.680 |
The Book of Proverbs is not a prophetic book. 00:09:19.680 |
It's not a direct communication from God with a prophetic voice saying, "Thus saith the Lord." 00:09:25.680 |
Proverbs are not promises, so I don't think it's appropriate in biblical interpretation to say, "Well, it says this in the Book of Proverbs, so thus this is a promise of God that will always be true." 00:09:44.680 |
King Solomon, if you're unfamiliar with your history, King Solomon lived during the Bronze Age. 00:09:49.680 |
He was the son of King David, the famous king of the Jews, that the Jews exalt and honor appropriately so. 00:09:57.680 |
And King Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived. 00:10:00.680 |
He received his wisdom as a supernatural gift from God when he asked for it. 00:10:05.680 |
When he was ascending to the throne of his father David, he asked for wisdom. 00:10:10.680 |
When God gave him an opportunity to ask him for anything, he asked for wisdom. 00:10:13.680 |
God gave him wisdom and he blessed him with everything else. 00:10:16.680 |
The scripture records and history records that people came from all around the world to seek Solomon for his wisdom. 00:10:23.680 |
So over the years, he wrote the Book of Proverbs and collected these sayings. 00:10:36.680 |
There's an entire chapter that comes from the Egyptian culture. 00:10:42.680 |
Solomon, one of his wives was the daughter of a pharaoh. 00:10:45.680 |
It's a saying of proverbs that are generally true. 00:10:50.680 |
But there's a consistent focus, and there's many proverbs, I'll read a couple of them, about drunkenness. 00:10:55.680 |
Solomon was a man who was incredibly rich and incredibly wise. 00:10:59.680 |
When you read proverbs, we're reading what he had to say on the subject. 00:11:03.680 |
He says this, "Whoever loves pleasure will be a poor man. 00:11:12.680 |
Now, I would imagine that if you think of your own experience, you might be able to relate to a saying like that. 00:11:21.680 |
You might be able to relate to the idea that somebody who is a lover of pleasure and wine, and I won't go into oil. 00:11:32.680 |
I'm more sophisticated with wine, that they very well might find that their love of the good life supersedes their ability to accumulate wealth. 00:11:46.680 |
Now, especially when you get to the extreme, think of the person in your life that you know who is most dedicated to a lifestyle of drunkenness. 00:12:00.680 |
There have been a couple of people who very much enjoyed drunkenness who were rich, but the vast majority of the people who are most engaged in drunkenness have come to poverty. 00:12:19.680 |
I'm going to talk about this on an individual level, a family level, and a social level. 00:12:23.680 |
I'm going to talk about this with regard to short-term, medium-term, and long-term impacts. 00:12:27.680 |
Let's talk about some of the costs of excessive drinking. 00:12:34.680 |
Have you ever sat down and run the tab to see how much alcohol costs? 00:12:43.680 |
It's expensive whether you do it yourself in your home. 00:12:50.680 |
A simple glass of wine at most of the restaurants where I live is going to be about 10 bucks, if not more. 00:13:01.680 |
You wind up spending a lot of money on a substance that is expensive. 00:13:07.680 |
It's expensive because of the cost of making it, especially fine alcohol. 00:13:12.680 |
It takes many years to produce 20-year scotch or a well-aged wine. 00:13:22.680 |
It's also expensive because of the taxation, one of the most heavily taxed products. 00:13:28.680 |
If you drink to excess and devote yourself to drunkenness, you will find yourself spending a lot of money buying drinks. 00:13:41.680 |
It's also expensive because of the things that go along with alcohol. 00:13:44.680 |
Most of the time, alcohol is an accompaniment to other things that are generally costly. 00:13:53.680 |
Alcohol leads, at least in many of the drunk friends that I've known over the years, alcohol leads to liberal spending. 00:14:02.680 |
It leads to liberal spending of, "Let's go do shots." 00:14:06.680 |
"Eight bucks a pop. Great. Now all of a sudden we're coming out $100 for the night instead of $40." 00:14:16.680 |
It leads to buying the round of drinks for the entire table. 00:14:26.680 |
If I think back to my days of my drunken friends back in college and I just think about the bar tabs that broke college students would run up, it's absolutely incredible. 00:14:42.680 |
Even those who get into the good stuff, who are very dedicated to the finest wines, the finest whiskeys, the price tag on that stuff is tremendous. 00:14:55.680 |
That's one way that's relatively obvious that excessive dedication to alcohol can quickly drain your pocketbook. 00:15:06.680 |
What about the medium-term impacts on a personal level? 00:15:09.680 |
A different proverb says this, "Wine is a mocker. Strong drink a brawler. And whoever is led astray by it is not wise." 00:15:19.680 |
Again, "Wine is a mocker. Strong drink a brawler. And whoever is led astray by it is not wise." 00:15:31.680 |
When you think about some of the medium-term effects of drunkenness, I think about some of the things that drunkenness can lead to. 00:15:41.680 |
It leads to fights. It leads to being thrown out of places. It leads to hurting relationships. 00:15:52.680 |
If you want to mess up your financial life, consume an excess amount of alcohol such that it impedes your judgment, get in a car, get pulled over, and have a breathalyzer run on you, 00:16:05.680 |
you will destroy your financial life for the next few years. 00:16:09.680 |
Minimum a DUI first time is $10,000. Minimum. 00:16:16.680 |
Second time it just goes up. I've watched a few friends go through this process, and the damage is extensive. 00:16:25.680 |
There's all the initial costs, yes. There's all the initial costs of the court fees and all of that stuff. 00:16:30.680 |
There's the initial cost of getting the stuff put on your car so you can blow in the blower. 00:16:35.680 |
There's all the cost to your social life of having the blower on your car so that you can deal with that and so you can actually be able to drive. 00:16:43.680 |
There's the cost. I had one friend who wasn't able to drive for a year on his second DUI, couldn't drive for a year. 00:16:49.680 |
Well, he had to Uber every day to work. The money adds up quickly. 00:16:54.680 |
And then there's even the long-term effects of such a decision where it impacts your job prospects. 00:16:59.680 |
It impacts the types of things that you can do in the future. 00:17:03.680 |
It can lead to felony DUI, or God forbid, some of the things that come with DUI manslaughter. 00:17:12.680 |
Things like that. You have an accident. You hurt somebody else's family. 00:17:17.680 |
The results are extensive. So what would prudence do in a situation like that? 00:17:24.680 |
I think prudence would be pull back from the edge and don't ever drink to the point where your judgment is impaired. 00:17:34.680 |
A mistake made can be made in a moment, but good judgment will keep you from many of those mistakes. 00:17:49.680 |
The long-term personal effects of alcohol, especially with regard to health, can be tremendous. 00:17:58.680 |
I have a friend of mine who is in his early 50s, 51 years old. 00:18:11.680 |
He can barely function. And it's just incredibly sad because all of his life choices are damaged. 00:18:18.680 |
He has to stay working in a job that he doesn't particularly like because he needs the health insurance. 00:18:24.680 |
Because he's had to have a kidney transplant. Because his liver is not functioning very well. 00:18:30.680 |
In case he has to go on dialysis. He can't do much because of his physical condition. 00:18:36.680 |
So thus he continues in a cycle of depression, cycle of inactivity, grossly overweight. 00:18:46.680 |
And though he has money to spend, his enjoyment of that money is substantially diminished. 00:18:54.680 |
And his lifespan, I would be surprised if he makes it another decade. Why? 00:19:00.680 |
Well, in talking to him, a lot of it is traced back to his heavy drinking in his early years. 00:19:14.680 |
Heavy drinking in his early years caused significant physical problems for him now. 00:19:19.680 |
Now this person is compared to many alcoholics highly functioning, called a functioning alcoholic, right? 00:19:27.680 |
He's not an alcoholic in terms of the way that we use that term in our culture in the sense of an addiction. 00:19:33.680 |
He's not addicted to alcohol. He was a drunk when he was younger. 00:19:38.680 |
But if you think about so many people who are drunks and how that follows them through their lives, it destroys things. 00:19:46.680 |
The long-term effects personally are tremendous. 00:19:50.680 |
What about other financial and specifically to keep focused on these financial threads, 00:19:56.680 |
the cost of the financial cost of dealing with sickness throughout your life is huge. Huge. 00:20:06.680 |
It's so sad to have to deal with financial costs of sicknesses that are completely preventable. 00:20:12.680 |
There was no reason for the sickness to occur. But now you've got decades of medical bills. 00:20:17.680 |
And then the opportunity cost of sickness is also huge. 00:20:22.680 |
The cost of not being able to take advantage of opportunities, the cost of not having the energy to start a business, 00:20:28.680 |
to get a good job, to work because you drained because of the physical condition. 00:20:33.680 |
And all of it traces back to drunkenness while a youth. It's very sad. 00:20:43.680 |
Moving on from personal to family costs. Think about the short-term family costs. 00:20:52.680 |
Another proverb says this, "Like a thorn that goes up into the hand of a drunkard." 00:20:59.680 |
You ever know a friend who when there are three sheets to the wind has not the ability to feel pain and does something foolish and stupid? 00:21:09.680 |
Something that results in them hurting themselves and they're bleeding and they don't feel it. 00:21:15.680 |
That's the picture. "Like a thorn that goes up into the hand of a drunkard is a proverb in the mouth of fools. 00:21:23.680 |
Like an archer who wounds everyone is one who hires a passing fool or drunkard. 00:21:33.680 |
Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly." 00:21:40.680 |
Bit of a connection here between fools and drunkards, eh? And yet most drunks, what do they do? 00:21:47.680 |
Talk about how great the drunkenness was and want to go back and repeat it. 00:21:51.680 |
What's the impact on family? Well, it destroys relationships. 00:21:56.680 |
Talk about the financial cost. A good relationship, a good marriage relationship, will save you a tremendous amount of money because you're content to be together. 00:22:05.680 |
Destroy a good relationship with drunkenness or any kind of destructive behavior, 00:22:12.680 |
and now all of a sudden we've got to go out and medicate constantly to try to fix social emotional problems with financial expenditures. 00:22:23.680 |
Take this on from the long term to the medium term and you wind up families have tremendous costs. 00:22:28.680 |
When you study drunks and alcoholics and you see the amount of money that they spend and destroy their family's livelihood. 00:22:37.680 |
I think of a very good friend of mine whose dad was just a complete drunk. 00:22:43.680 |
And for many years of his life, the first thing that they had to do was try to wrest the paycheck from him on Friday before he drank it all away. 00:22:54.680 |
And there were many occasions when his dad would get paid on Friday and would stop at the bar on the way home 00:23:01.680 |
and the whole paycheck would be gone and would disappear before he had the opportunity to even make it home to meet the needs of the family. 00:23:21.680 |
When you study the impact on the marriages of many people who are dealing with one member of the marriage who's a drunk, divorce is incredibly prominent. 00:23:34.680 |
Talk about one of the biggest financial mistakes you can make. 00:23:37.680 |
Divorce is certainly at the top of that list. 00:23:49.680 |
Now, that's not even to talk about the things that the drunkenness leads to. 00:24:02.680 |
In the short term, it destroys the ability to function. 00:24:05.680 |
Some people say, "Well, I function better after I've had a drink or two." 00:24:10.680 |
So you're going in for surgery tomorrow, going to be going under the knife on the operating table. 00:24:20.680 |
Your surgeon walks in with a cup of coffee in the morning to greet you pre-op and you say, "Oh, what are you drinking?" 00:24:32.680 |
Getting on an airplane and you see the pilot there and as they're sitting in the front seat, you peek over their shoulder into their shirt pocket 00:24:38.680 |
and there's a little flask and you see them take a little tipple out of the flask. 00:24:42.680 |
Do you really feel so good about flying on that airplane? 00:24:48.680 |
Going into court, are you going to sit down and have a couple of martinis with your attorney at lunch? 00:24:54.680 |
Before he goes in and makes his closing argument before the jury? 00:25:00.680 |
I don't buy this nonsense of, "I function better after I've had a drink or two." 00:25:07.680 |
But think about the other things that it leads to. 00:25:13.680 |
Would you try to trade stocks while you're drinking? 00:25:17.680 |
People make a joke out of, "Oh, I drunk dialed," or, "I drunk texted," or, "These days, I drunk tweeted." 00:25:26.680 |
It's not a laughing matter because it has a tremendous cost associated with it. 00:25:39.680 |
The worst thing about alcohol is that it leads many times to a cycle of addiction. 00:26:06.680 |
Those who tarry long over wine, those who go to try mixed wine, 00:26:12.680 |
do not look at wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup and goes down smoothly. 00:26:18.680 |
In the end, it bites like a serpent and stings like an adder. 00:26:22.680 |
Your eyes will see strange things and your heart utter perverse things. 00:26:27.680 |
You will be like one who lies down in the midst of the sea, 00:26:36.680 |
"They struck me," you will say, "but I was not hurt. 00:26:47.680 |
Is that not the picture of the drunks you know? 00:27:01.680 |
I always picture the person inflicting injury on themselves over some stupid thing, 00:27:15.680 |
I'm making the point that on a family level, these things are destructive 00:27:19.680 |
over the short-term, medium-term, and long-term. 00:27:24.680 |
Many of you have family members who are alcoholics. 00:27:28.680 |
The cost on your family because of alcoholism is huge. 00:27:33.680 |
When you look at dementia and problems functioning in older age because of 00:27:44.680 |
Don't be a fool and devote yourself to drunkenness. 00:27:57.680 |
My final comments are with regard to the cost on society. 00:28:01.680 |
I want to show you how individual actions compound society-wide. 00:28:10.680 |
I'm going to lead off here with this proverb from Proverbs 31. 00:28:15.680 |
She says this, "It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine 00:28:20.680 |
or for rulers to take strong drink, lest they drink and forget what has been 00:28:26.680 |
decreed and pervert the rights of all the afflicted." 00:28:34.680 |
This passage here has a tremendous application because in the short-term, 00:28:39.680 |
people can make foolish decisions that affect others. 00:28:42.680 |
If you're in a place of leadership, whether you're a king or whether you're 00:28:48.680 |
some kind of civil leader, you must make wise decisions, and you cannot 00:28:56.680 |
Over time, the decisions that you make and the decisions that individuals 00:29:02.680 |
When a society is dedicated to drunkenness, it leads to lost productivity 00:29:09.680 |
When a society is dedicated to drunkenness, that leads to health problems. 00:29:13.680 |
I read a report a couple years ago about the Russians and the amount of 00:29:18.680 |
alcoholism in the Russian society and the amount of physical problems 00:29:25.680 |
When a society devotes itself to drunkenness, it leads to shortening 00:29:30.680 |
A couple years ago, there were a bunch of news articles because for the first 00:29:33.680 |
time--I can't remember if it was white men and women or just white men, but 00:29:37.680 |
I think it was just white men, but check me out on that--white men in the 00:29:41.680 |
United States for the first time had a shorter expected lifespan. 00:29:53.680 |
Alcohol and drug abuse leading to shortened lifespans for the first time in 00:29:57.680 |
recorded history where we expect rather living longer to live shorter has a 00:30:11.680 |
Now, I'm using these examples here because I think that they illustrate. 00:30:17.680 |
First, I want you to hear me very clearly that when you have something that is 00:30:21.680 |
so clear in terms of its impact, when you have a moral behavior that is so clear 00:30:32.680 |
that it has such damaging effects, it's not something to be played around with. 00:30:39.680 |
Go and study some of the Indian populations or Aboriginal populations and 00:30:45.680 |
look at how alcohol and alcohol addiction utterly destroys their entire 00:30:58.680 |
So we think that it's fun to talk about drunkenness. 00:31:01.680 |
Go and study teenage drinking and the men and women that it destroys. 00:31:07.680 |
Go and study the rates of absolute alcohol poisoning that occurs on college 00:31:13.680 |
campuses and go and look at how that destroys lives. 00:31:18.680 |
There's a friend of mine online that was reading a testimony, and she is very 00:31:22.680 |
active in standing out in front of the abortion mills and working with people 00:31:27.680 |
to try to help save some of the babies that their mothers are going in and 00:31:37.680 |
And one of the person's accounts, one of the mothers that had an appointment to 00:31:41.680 |
murder her baby, she said, "I can't keep it because I don't know who the father 00:31:55.680 |
Lives are destroyed and bodies are pulled apart because of drunkenness. 00:32:05.680 |
Now, there's a moral dimension and a financial dimension. 00:32:08.680 |
I focus on the financial dimension because that's most specific to the show. 00:32:15.680 |
But the moral dimension is every bit as important, if not more so. 00:32:23.680 |
Jesus said in Luke, he said, "What does it profit a man if he gained the whole 00:32:30.680 |
So not only are there impacts for behavior that we see today in terms of the 00:32:38.680 |
expense of it all, not only are you destined to poverty because of excess 00:32:44.680 |
drunkenness, but there's an impact on a moral dimension. 00:32:55.680 |
The author writes this, says, "The night is far gone. 00:33:01.680 |
So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. 00:33:07.680 |
Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in 00:33:14.680 |
sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy, but put on the 00:33:20.680 |
Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires." 00:33:26.680 |
The warnings are incredibly stern in terms of the impact of drunkenness. 00:33:32.680 |
Scripture from Galatians says this, says, "I warn you as I warned you before 00:33:38.680 |
that those who do such things will not inherit." 00:33:45.680 |
Now, the works of the flesh are evident, sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, 00:33:50.680 |
idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, 00:33:58.680 |
dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. 00:34:06.680 |
I warn you as I warned you before that those who do such things will not 00:34:15.680 |
Now, the beautiful thing about this, I'm going to close with one more 00:34:19.680 |
scripture passage and a poem, is that the past is not the future. 00:34:28.680 |
If you find yourself, as so many people have, suffering from the effects of 00:34:32.680 |
drunkenness earlier in life, recognize that those effects will stay with you, 00:34:38.680 |
but you can change and you can move forward and you can adjust your behavior. 00:34:42.680 |
Now, perhaps you, like me, have never dealt seriously with drunkenness, 00:34:48.680 |
never been a problem for me, but at least help by not promulgating something 00:34:55.680 |
that destroys lives, destroys families, and destroys finances. 00:35:07.680 |
Scripture says this, it says, "Or do you not know that the unrighteous 00:35:15.680 |
Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who 00:35:20.680 |
practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, 00:35:28.680 |
nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. 00:35:36.680 |
But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the 00:35:42.680 |
Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." 00:35:46.680 |
That's the hope, is that these types of behaviors, and drunkenness is just the 00:35:50.680 |
one that I chose to focus on today, but these types of behaviors will destroy 00:35:56.680 |
your finances and they will destroy your life, but they don't have to persist. 00:36:10.680 |
Drunkenness and the damaging effects of drunkenness is something that almost 00:36:16.680 |
It's hard for me to imagine anybody from any worldview, any perspective, that 00:36:20.680 |
would disagree with most of the comments that I've made in this show. 00:36:26.680 |
You don't have to be a disciple of Jesus Christ to recognize these things. 00:36:32.680 |
There are plenty of complete atheist psychologists who can affirm the 00:36:38.680 |
I know plenty of people who care not a whit for religion, but who don't drink a 00:36:43.680 |
drop because of these things that I've talked about. 00:36:49.680 |
You don't have to believe the authority of the Bible. 00:36:52.680 |
But drunkenness does have an effect, and part of its sanctions, part of the 00:36:57.680 |
negative results are because it's a breaking of the law of God. 00:37:06.680 |
There are blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience, and wealth is 00:37:15.680 |
I don't want to go into a long dissertation on that at the moment, but if you're 00:37:20.680 |
experiencing difficulty, if you're experiencing financial difficulty, look 00:37:27.680 |
seriously at the moral behavior in your life and ask if this is connected to that. 00:37:35.680 |
The connection with drunkenness, with all of the examples that I've seen here, 00:37:42.680 |
But ask yourself that question and search to see what your behavior is and 00:37:47.680 |
recognize that the past is not the future and things can be changed. 00:37:59.680 |
I close with a famous poem that's one of my favorite poems. 00:38:03.680 |
It's called "The Touch of the Master's Hand," and it says this. 00:38:07.680 |
"'Twas battered and scarred, and the auctioneer thought it hardly worth his 00:38:12.680 |
while to waste his time on the old violin, but he held it up with a smile. 00:38:29.680 |
'Three dollars once, three dollars twice, going for three. 00:38:36.680 |
But no, from the room far back a gray-bearded man came forward and 00:38:42.680 |
Then, wiping the dust from the old violin and tightening up the strings, 00:38:47.680 |
he played a melody, pure and sweet, as sweet as the angel sings. 00:38:53.680 |
The music ceased, and the auctioneer, with a voice that was quiet and low, 00:38:58.680 |
said, 'What now am I bid for this old violin?' 00:39:12.680 |
Three thousand once, three thousand twice, going, and gone,' said he. 00:39:18.680 |
The audience cheered, but some of them cried, 'We just don't understand. 00:39:25.680 |
Swift came the reply, the touch of the master's hand. 00:39:30.680 |
And many a man with life out of tune, all battered and bruised with hardship, 00:39:36.680 |
is auctioned cheap to a thoughtless crowd, much like that old violin. 00:39:42.680 |
A mess of pottage, a glass of wine, a game, and he travels on. 00:39:47.680 |
He is going once, he is going twice, he is going and almost gone. 00:39:53.680 |
But the master comes, and the foolish crowd never can quite understand 00:39:58.680 |
the worth of a soul and the change that is wrought by the touch of the master's hand.