Prior to coming to faith, I struggled with a fondness for the bottle. Two years into my life in Christ, I was full of the joy of the Lord but I was still occasionally imbibing in the same old comforts to which I’d long been accustomed, convincing myself each time that things were better now because, “at least” I wasn’t consuming as much as I had in the “old days.”

One night, however, I stopped into my usual liquor store and grabbed a six-pack. The guy at the counter had been working there for years. He smiled at me and made the following remark with comfortable familiarity:

“Gonna’ party-down again tonight, huh?”

He’d said things like this before and I had thought nothing of it… but on this particular evening, his words went through my gut like a saber. Had I exhorted him to know Jesus at that moment he might well have assumed I was joking.

Other preachers can debate the permissibility of moderate alcohol consumption, such is not the purpose of this essay. For me there simply was no middle ground; on that day I finally realized that I was either going to be a servant of the Lord or I was going to be a drunk. I could not live my new life in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17) while simultaneously living my old life as a corpse (Eph. 2:1-2). Like Lot’s wife, I had been looking backward when I should have been moving forward. Thankfully, unlike that unfortunate woman, God did not turn me into a pillar of salt. In fact, within days of leaving those shackles behind me, I began to find doors opening on every side. Within a year, I was regularly preaching the gospel at an inner-city church in Denver. I could write pages about all that has occurred since then. Bottom line? God extends us everlasting grace (Lam. 3:22) but when we faithfully move forward, he is capable of opening the entire horizon before us like an open sea (Heb 11:6).

Vince Hartford

Extended Scripture: Genesis 19–20