Binge Drinking: Pocket Puritans series (John Flavel)

Binge Drinking

In the Pocket Puritans Series

Often considered a modern phenomenon, binge drinking is in fact an age-old problem. John Flavel, a 17th-century Puritan minister in the naval port of Dartmouth, England, pulls no punches as he confronts the sin of drunkenness head on. Flavel’s treatment is a highly relevant expose of the soul-destroying evils of this detestable sin.

“Drunkenness is like a sudden landfall, which brings a great deal of dirt with it.”

“To read the work of a Puritan doctor of the soul is to enter a rich world of spiritual theology to feed the mind, heart-searching analysis to probe the conscience, Christ-centered grace to transform the heart, and wise counsel to direct the life. This series of Pocket Puritans provides all this in miniature, but also in abundance.”

— Sinclair B. Ferguson

Flavel’s Ten effective arguments against the practice:

1. It should exceedingly dissuade from this sin, to consider that it an high abuse of the bounty and goodness of God in affording us those sweet refreshments, to make our lives comfortable to us upon earth.
2. It degrades a man from the honour of his creation, and equalizes him to the beast that perishes.
3. Drunkenness is a a sin by which you greatly wrong and abuse your own body.
4. Drunkenness wastes and scatters your estate, poverty attends excess.
5. Consider what vile and ignominious characters the Spirit of God has put upon the subjects of this sin.
6. Sadly consider, there can be nothing of the sanctifying Spirit in a soul that is under the dominion of this lust.
7. It is a sin over which many direful woes and threats hang in the Word.
8. Drunkenness is a leading sin, which has a great retinue and attendance of other sins waiting on it.
9. That drunkards are in Scripture marked out for hell; the characters of death are upon them.
10. That it is a sin out of whose power few, or none are ever rescued and reclaimed.