Years ago a speaker at a convention told the following story and it stuck with me these many years.
Two young men wanted to get away from the bad winter in Wisconsin so they jumped in their old jalopy and headed to Florida to try to get work there. Everything went fine until their car broke down in southern Georgia. Fortunately their car rolled to a stop right at the gate of a junkyard. The owner was just closing the gate to go home for the day. They asked him to sell them the part they needed to repair their car. He generously told them they could go into the junkyard and find the needed part and fix their car and he would give them the part free of charge.
However, he gave them a warning of two dangers they would encounter. He said “In my junkyard you must be careful and not fall into the bottomless pit. Also, I have a junkyard dog, a Rottweiler, that will kill you if he can.” The young men prided themselves on being tough and fearless and they thought the man was just trying to scare them. They went through the gate and hadn’t got far until they saw a huge hole in the ground. “That must be the bottomless pit,” Jake said to Bubba, as he threw a rock into the hole. They didn’t hear it hit the bottom. Could this really be a bottomless pit?
Bubba said, “Let’s throw this old engine block in the hole. We will hear it when it hits the bottom.” So they rolled the engine block over into the huge hole in the ground. All of a sudden they saw the Rottweiler coming at them growling, slobbering, and literally flying through the air! Jake and Bubba were scared out of their wits! Their feet were frozen to the ground. But to their immense relief the Rottweiler flew right past them and went down the bottomless pit.
They decided they had seen enough and they would get the part for their car elsewhere. The owner was still standing at the gate when they came out. He saw the look on their faces and said, “I see you believe me now – you saw the bottomless pit and the dog didn’t you?” “Yep, sure did,” Jake replied, “But we have some bad news for you. Your dog jumped right down the bottomless pit.” The man said, “I don’t know how that could happen. I had him chained to an old engine block.”
The Moral Of The Story:
Never chain yourself to anything going to the bottomless pit. It will drag you down with it! Which explains my NO vote in the upcoming referendum on alcohol. In almost 60 years of ministry I have seen homes broken, lives shattered, men and women in prison, broken bodies in hospitals, and preached funerals of people who were deceived by alcohol. Alcohol has never begun to pay for the damage it has done. If there was a disease that crippled and killed as many people as the drug alcohol does, there would not be an election to make it more accessible, there would be a Foundation for research for its elimination.
Proverbs 20:1 – “Wine is a mocker, intoxicating drink arouses brawling, and whoever is led astray by it is not wise.”