The church is plunging headlong down the pathway of spiritual drunkenness and is on a collision course with moral decay. Christians are, for the most part, staggering through life drinking the intoxicating wine of pleasure.

Most of us are on a pleasure binge with the price of intoxication mushrooming every day. While we revel in our pleasure and ease, the tumbleweeds of neglect begin to collect in our spiritual lives. Spiritual alcoholism has set in.

As we stagger through life, oblivious to our rightful responsibilities as Christians, like a true alcoholic, we require a more potent pleasure to satisfy our cravings. Occasionally we sober up enough to realize the price we have paid for neglecting our spiritual lives. The dull hangover of remorse sets in and we begin to crave the feverish whirl of pleasure so we can forget our spiritual troubles.

One day, though, we are going to wake up and realize that it was just a long, drunken, pleasure-binge. The dull, throbbing hangover will set in, our souls will be spent, our children will be lost, our sense will be deadened, and guilt will immerse our lives. We will realize that we have played the part of the fool.

We will then begin the long, lonely walk down the empty halls of spiritual barrenness. The echo of our footsteps will be hollow and lonely as we try to retrace the tragic steps of our lives that were at one time so bright and promising. By this time our talents will be spent and our wills broken. We will be doomed to walk the littered back alleys of spiritual frigidity and eventually eternal doom. We will sob out of anguish but it will be too late. Wake up brothers. "Awake, thou that deepest, and arise from the dead and Christ will shine upon thee" (Eph. 5:14).

Truth Magazine XXI: 6, p. 85
February 10, 1977