Romans 10 (The Message) 4-10  Moses wrote that anyone who insists on using the law code to live right before God soon discovers it’s not so easy—every detail of life regulated by fine print! But trusting God to shape the right living in us is a different story—no precarious climb up to heaven to recruit the Messiah, no dangerous descent into hell to rescue the Messiah. So what exactly was Moses saying?

The word that saves is right here,
    as near as the tongue in your mouth,
    as close as the heart in your chest.

It’s the word of faith that welcomes God to go to work and set things right for us. This is the core of our preaching. Say the welcoming word to God—“Jesus is my Master”—embracing, body and soul, God’s work of doing in us what he did in raising Jesus from the dead. That’s it. You’re not “doing” anything; you’re simply calling out to God, trusting him to do it for you. That’s salvation. With your whole being you embrace God setting things right, and then you say it, right out loud: “God has set everything right between him and me!”

11-13 Scripture reassures us, “No one who trusts God like this—heart and soul—will ever regret it.” It’s exactly the same no matter what a person’s religious background may be: the same God for all of us, acting the same incredibly generous way to everyone who calls out for help. “Everyone who calls, ‘Help, God!’ gets help.”

Why drinking lost its allure to me.

Throughout my lifetime I have listened to stories and watched people struggle first hand with addictions. I have witnessed people try and try and try and try to conquer dependancies of all sorts only to fail time and time again.

Romans 9 and 10 reminded me of something Bobby shared with me a couple weeks ago about repentance being a ‘turning to the light’ instead of a ‘Stop’.

Matthew 3:2 “Repent of your sins and turn to God..”

In Matthew, John the Baptist asks us to repent and turn to God – affirming the idea that repentance should be associated with a turning to the Light, not just a stop action. For how can we stop unless light casts out the darkness. We become what we fill ourselves with.

I’m not going where you think with this – because I don’t necessarily think of alcohol as a bad thing in and of itself. I think of dependency on anything but our Lord misleading.

Drinking lost its allure in my life when I realized it was a downer. I began to experience life with less fear, not a numbed fear, but with the excitement and adventure of faith in the Creator of the Universe. A life where He casts out the fear in the Light of His Glory.

Romans 10: But trusting God to shape the right living in us is a different story—no precarious climb up to heaven to recruit the Messiah, no dangerous descent into hell to rescue the Messiah. So what exactly was Moses saying?

The word that saves is right here,
    as near as the tongue in your mouth,
    as close as the heart in your chest.

It’s the word of faith that welcomes God to go to work and set things right for us. This is the core of our preaching. Say the welcoming word to God—“Jesus is my Master”—embracing, body and soul, God’s work of doing in us what he did in raising Jesus from the dead. That’s it. You’re not “doing” anything; you’re simply calling out to God, trusting him to do it for you. That’s salvation. With your whole being you embrace God setting things right, and then you say it, right out loud: “God has set everything right between him and me!”

And then He gives me a gift like this. I have never felt as rich in life as I do in these moments and I thank God that alcohol is not numbing my senses because I want to absorb every drop of His Glory.