Ask Pastor Mike Live

Focal Point Ministries: Got a lot of them written in here. Let's start with Eric for just a second. Eric writes in and says, "Was the water that Jesus turned into wine—was it alcohol?" Well, it wasn't pure alcohol, that's for sure. But it wouldn't qualify for the word wine if there wasn't some alcoholic content in it. And of course, there was. The point that I like to make—not being a drinker myself of alcohol unless I'm taking NyQuil and I've got the flu—is that as a beverage, I think there's plenty of other things for me to drink.

Especially because, here's my point: there was a very big difference between the alcoholic content of first-century wine and what we have in alcoholic content today in all of the beverages that are alcoholic. Much higher content—and that makes sense, right? We're able to fortify these spirits, as they say, these alcoholic beverages, and they will get you drunk a lot faster than the wine of the first century. So no one was leaving a wedding ceremony or wedding feast stumbling down the street unless they were doing nothing but drinking, and that's not what wine was for.

It was part of what God had made, and certainly in a day when water wasn't always pure, it was a good way to have your hydration done with something that was going to kill any kinds of things that might hurt your body, to put it simply. So, yes, there was alcohol in the wine that Jesus turned into wine from water. But I don't know that that is an endorsement that all of us should be engaged in drinking. Timothy himself, as a pastor in Ephesus—where there were plenty of people doing nothing but wine-bibbing, as it was put in the Old Testament, just lingering long over their wine as it says in the scriptures—swore it off.

Yet Paul had to say, "Hey, for your stomach you might need some, so why don't you take a little wine for your stomach?" So if you're going to take wine, take a little wine and make sure it's low alcoholic content and never get near inebriation. God is pro-sobriety, Eric, and that's all I want you to know is that you ought to seek to be sober in all that you do. That's a good thing. It's not for kings to drink wine and not for rulers to crave strong drink, as the Bible puts it. All right.