Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2111
Delivered on Lord’s Day Evening, May 26, 1889
“And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess. But be filled with the Spirit.” Ephesians 5:18.
WHILE I was reading to you just now, in the fourth and fifth chapters of Paul’s letter to the Ephesian Believers, I could not help feeling that you could little understand the elevation and the purity of the precepts of the Apostle, as they must have appeared to the inhabitants of such a wicked city as Ephesus. When first read, these precepts must have seemed like an unearthly light.
We have now a public sentiment which condemns drunkenness, lying, and many other vices which were scarcely considered worthy of censure by that degraded people. Christianity had not affected public sentiment at the time—that sentiment was distinctly immoral. The sin of fornication was scarcely judged to be sinful. Theft was most common, as, indeed, it is in the East to this day. Lying was universal and only blamed if committed so clumsily as to be found out.
I may say of drunkenness, that, although it was not regarded as a commendable thing, yet it was looked upon as a failing of great minds, not to be too much condemned. Alexander the Great, as you know, died through drink. He offered a prize on one occasion to those who could drink the most and in that famous drinking-bout, large numbers of his chieftains and nobility died in the attempt to rival others. Even of such a man as Socrates it is said (though I know not with what truth) that he was famous for the quantity that he could drink.
The stories of the feasts of that age I would be ashamed to repeat. And you certainly would not have the patience to hear them. Drunkenness, and gluttony, and such like were the common faults both of the great and of the small. For while some had no opportunity for gluttony—for they did not get enough to eat—they only failed to be gluttons for that reason and not from principle. The Apostle sets before his new converts, not a modified system of right and wrong, but the purest virtues and the most heavenly graces.
As the ages have rolled on, we have seen the wisdom of holding up from the first an elevated standard, both of doctrine and practice. We must not bring the standard down to the men but the men up to the standard. We may not, with the design of making converts more rapidly, alter the pure Word with which our Lord has entrusted us.
Brethren, I am not going to speak to you tonight about the sin of drunkenness. Many of you feel an intense aversion to that degrading vice. If there are any here who require a homily upon drunkenness, they have only to let conscience speak and it will tell them how base a sin it is. If they do not know the shamefulness of their wicked habit, there are plenty round about them who will let them know in indignant language. Perhaps of all the sins that are rife in our country today, drunkenness brings the most present misery upon mankind.
A very large proportion of the want from which people suffer is due to wasteful excess in drink. You know it is so, if you are intelligent observers. Other sins may seem to go deeper into the soul, and are more subject to punishment by our laws. But for creating widespread suffering, suffering brought upon the innocent, upon the wife, and upon the child— this vice raises its head above all others. This throngs our workhouses, fills our jails, and crowds our lunatic asylums— yes—and fattens our cemeteries with carcasses of men and women who die before their time.
This is the Moloch of the nineteenth century. I am not going to preach about that one particular vice tonight, as though I would saw off a big limb from the tree of evil. It is my custom to lay the axe at the root of the tree, aiming my blows at the very nature which bears this evil branch. Still, this is a very far spreading limb. And, as I have seen the woodmen lopping the tree before they cut it down, there will be no waste of time if I aim a blow or two at this huge branch of the tree of evil, this bough of drunkenness.
It is far too common to this day. But, thank God, through the efforts of temperance friends and, I hope, through the power of the Spirit of God upon many, it is not as it used to be. And it is regarded now in a very different light from that in which it was viewed even by Christian people years ago.
The Apostle has been pleased, in this passage, guided by the Holy Spirit, to put in apposition and, in some respects, in opposition, a prohibition and a command—“Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess. But be filled with the Spirit.” He had a reason for putting these two things together. There is a very, very, very wide and deep abyss between being drunk with wine and being filled with the Spirit. Drunkenness is down, down, down to the depths of the brute, and far lower still—fullness with the Spirit is up, up, up, to the very heights of God.