Sunday: The Mastery of Narcotics
WEEK 44
SUNDAY
THE MASTERY OF NARCOTICS
Proverbs 20:1; 23:31-33
We now look at another phase of mastery in the Acts—the mastery of narcotics and pick-me-ups. When you look through these amazing pages, you find an almost complete absence of that which occupies so much of modern life. Much modern life is an attempt to stimulate jaded nerves and minds and bodies. People are run down and need a pick-me-up. Or if they don’t need a stimulus, they need a sedative, something to allow them to sleep. I am told that five million people depend on sleeping powders to put them to sleep every night; stimulation by day and sedatives by night, the vicious circle.
Yet in the pages of the New Testament there is only one mention of a physical pick-me-up: “don’t drink water anymore, but use a little wine because of your stomach problems and your frequent illnesses” (1 Tim 5:23). And that wasn’t a pick-me-up; it was wine used as a medicine, of doubtful efficacy at that. Here is a society free from all stimulants and pick-me-ups. Had they found something that took the place of these extraneous stimulants? Yes. Paul puts it in these words: “So by all the stimulus of Christ” (Phil 2:1 MNT). Was Christ the stimulus that stimulated the total person—body, mind, and spirit—and made outer stimulants unnecessary and absurd? Yes. His impact upon our lives stimulates them and makes them their best, plus. His thinking stimulates our minds until they nearly pop with newness; his love stimulates our emotions until we want to put our arms around the world and love it to him; his will injects a new energy and decisiveness into our wills until we want to do something about everything. Our whole beings are heightened by his impact.
I feel sorry for anyone who has to turn to narcotics for stimulus or for sedatives. The moment I see such a person, I know that, if he or she is a follower of Christ, the following is far off—secondhand—so far that the stimulus of Jesus does not get to the person vitally and satisfactorily. The narcotic, whether it is liquor or tobacco, says to the world, “I need a substitute for Christ.” One isn’t gaining from Christ what one needs, or these substitutes would drop off like a dead leaf, unneeded.
O Christ, you are my all-sufficient stimulus. You silently bombard every cell of my being with life and power. In you I am alive, alive to my fingertips. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: All my powers are at their highest and best through the stimulus of Christ.