All right, we are on page 173. Wrapping these things together here. We may do more than one lesson today, but we might not. Might just stick to one, or one section of the lesson, I'm sorry. Today, we're on the top of the page here, Why Baptists Don't Smoke, 173. This isn't meant to be a real, deep theological study should be pretty simple. Smoking, like many other drugs, is addictive. That's why so many Christians have a real problem in this area. Smoking and other harmful drugs should be absent from your life for three basic reasons. We're gonna look at those three reasons this morning and look at some scriptures. I wanna make a couple of points as well before we look at these three basic reasons. Whether we're talking about smoking, drinking, overeating, drugs, coffee, sweet tea, whatever it is, you know, you can now, some of those things that I mentioned, like eating, eating is obviously necessary to live, to survive, right? I mean, amen brother Travis, you have to eat, right? And, you know, we're not making that same argument. It's not equal with the argument of smoking, okay? Smoking, you don't have to do to survive. Eating, you do. Drinking water, you have to do to survive. Drinking soda, you don't have to do to survive. However, you know, is that an allowable thing? Some might debate that. Coffee and tea. Are those allowable things? I would say yes. I would say especially tea is definitely, from what we understand and know about it, it's good for you. Now, you know, drinking gallons of it every day is probably not good for you, especially if you fill it with, you know, several tablespoons of sugar or pounds of sugar. That's not good. You know, and sugar can be a major, that's actually one of my New Year's resolutions is to cut back on my sugar intake. My, well, say my sugar intake, it's more my processed refined sugar intake. I don't mind having sugar and, you know, fruits and things like that, but I want to cut down on how much processed sugar goes into my body. I think that should do me some good. I've already cut out pop. I pop very rarely. It's maybe once every three months or so, so it's very rare. But those are things that you've got to keep in mind. But here we're talking about smoking, and we might have a little discussion on legal stuff and whether or not it should be legal. Drinking is alcohol. The reason that I would argue that it should not be illegal, even though I believe it is sinful, I believe drinking alcohol is sinful. I don't believe that it should be illegal. The reason is because it's not something that, you know, it's not a substance that causes, well, let's back up a little bit, the purpose of things being legal and illegal. is for the purpose of protecting the life, liberty and property of the of the general community and for individuals in particular, not for protecting the life of a person against themselves. If you if you take that approach and you say, well, you know, Brother Travis, we're going to protect you against yourself. And so, therefore, we must not allow you to drink. We must not allow you to smoke. In fact, we need to have a meal plan for you because we have to make sure that what you're eating is not killing you. You can get really off the deep end when it comes to protecting someone's life against themselves, like seatbelts and speeding and a lot of those other things that I think are illegal laws or unlawful laws because they're for the best interest of, supposedly for your best interest. However, it's none of their business. What their business is is to make sure no one else hurts you. alcohol. It could be argued that when someone drinks and they get drunk and they drive, well, now they've hurt someone. So then, therefore, alcohol should be illegal. No, getting drunk and hurting someone or killing someone should be illegal, and it is. But it should be more than just illegal. It should be more than just manslaughter. It should be. It should be pretty heavy penalty. If we had really steep penalties for drunk driving deaths, you know, where the drunk driver killed someone. If the penalty for that was death, how often do you think we would have a lot of, you know, drunk driving? It would be a whole lot less if you knew that if you got in an accident, you were going to be put to death, hung or electrocuted in a chair or something like that. Well, that would that would make a big difference. But the answer isn't just to illegalize. Alcohol. because what's going to happen? People are still going to have bootleggers. We went through that right back in the in the teens and 20s. And of the last century, we're in the teens now of this century. Can you believe that you're thinking about the 20s? And I'm I'm thinking, wow, the 20s, they're almost here. You know, we're we're getting this year. We're over halfway through the teens after after this year finishes. So anyways, As we get into this issue of smoking, some would argue that it should be illegal, and I would, we'll talk about that a little bit if we have time. So, letter A here, for physical reasons, it is common knowledge that smoking is harmful and even deadly. Unsaved people quit smoking for this reason, even the more ought a Christian. 1 Corinthians chapter 6 verse 19. Let me say here, by the way, if this is your primary, and by the way, this isn't highlighted because I'm trying to bring attention to it. It's highlighted because if I don't highlight the verse that we start with or left off with, I won't find it. There's so many verses in the passage that I've got to remember where we left off, so I just highlight it. So this is not the primary verse that we use for smoking. The fact is you have to look at the concept, you have to look at the subject matter and you have to look at what the scripture has to say about it in principle. Because obviously the Bible, there weren't people smoking cigarettes like they do today back in that day. In fact, just a hundred years ago, it wasn't necessarily associated with what it's associated with today. And in fact, just 100 years ago, it wasn't. It wasn't as. Wasn't as deadly as it is today. The tobacco you know when they just grew the tobacco and they have the tobacco and they put him in the pipes or whatever and they wouldn't have additives and all of those things. It wasn't as deadly, wasn't as addictive, although it was. I mean, you know, I'm not saying that it was OK back in the day to, you know, put a little tobacco in your pipe and smoke it. But, but it was known actually for many years that, uh, that preachers in the South were paid with tobacco because it was a lucrative thing. You know, I mean, they could just give them, you know, the farmers could give them tobacco and then they could, they could take it into the shop and trade with it or whatever. That was back in the day that, you know, that property could be as easily traded as money. So, um, you know, you take a bag of tobacco into the general store and you say, hey, how much will you give me for this bag of tobacco? And they said, well, we'll give you so much credit for it, or we'll trade you this and this. That's why they used to call it, instead of going to the store to buy things, it would be, I'm going into town to trade. And so you would sometimes trade money, you would sometimes trade, you'd sometimes trade, you know, whatever you have to trade. If you're a pig farmer, you'd take, you know, ham in and you would trade it for other things. If you were a cattle or a cow farmer, you would take milk and you would take beef in there and you would trade for other things. And then the general store would be basically a storehouse that would take your stuff and give you the stuff you don't have that you need. And then someone else would come with the stuff that you don't have and trade it for stuff that you did have. But the general store would hang on to that so that you didn't have to come in and say, OK, you know, meet in town square and say, hey, who's got you know, who's got bacon? I need bacon. I've got beef over here, you know, and you trade back and forth. Instead, you've got a central location with the town store, the general store that would take generally everything and put out generally everything that the town had to offer. So anyways, my goodness, where do we get off on that? That was oh, talking about preachers being paid with tobacco. So again, we wanna look at this, and I think that he's, I'm trying not to get a lot, I'm trying not to get much deeper than he gets here. But I wanna make sure that we don't just say that you don't smoke because your body's the temple of the Holy Ghost, okay? That's not all of the discussion, okay? But the first verse we're gonna look at says what? Know you not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you, which you have of God, and you are not your own. Here it says, our physical body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. It is sacred and ought not to be defiled by any known harmful substance. First Corinthians 927, Apostle Paul kept his body under control by keeping Oh, I think I killed my battery here. Oh, there we go. Under his body. And it says, and this is a wrestling turner. He pinned it down and bringing it into subjection. It says, but I keep under my body and bring it into subjection, unless by any means, when I preach to others, I myself should be a castaway. So he's bringing it into subjection. He's keeping it under, in other words, He is not going to allow his body or his flesh to dictate what he could do or not do for the Lord So remember it says it is with your body that you serve the Lord harming it only hinders effective service That's why we encourage good health. That's why we encourage exercise and we encourage Eating right and we encourage not putting things into your body that you know are going to hurt you Uh, that's why I, you know, when we have our fellowships and we have a great time with our fellowships and we, we, uh, we stuff our faces with food and stuff. That's why we don't have them every Sunday. Uh, if we did, we would, we would probably, um, we'd probably all gain weight a lot more, but we would, we would probably, you know, kind of think about, we'd have to stop and think, you know, what do we really want to do with this? That, you know, the, the food and fellowship time is good, but do we really, do we want to gain weight? like fat and become less healthy as a result of fellowshipping together? No, of course not. So that's why we encourage healthy eating. And I'm not to say that, well, don't eat fatty foods and don't this and that. I mean, if you know it's hurting you, if you've got diabetes and you're like, hey, where's the kid's candy? and you gotta sneak back and get you a piece of candy, and you're so addicted to sugar that it's killing you, and you know it, shame on you. Cut that out. That's not a good thing to do. And just the same, though, we don't wanna knowingly harm our body with cigarette smoke, or cigar smoke, or any other kind of smoke, and again, also, other drugs for emotional reasons. Let her be here. Many people take up serious smoking and drugs, even prescription drugs because of underlying emotional causes, insecurity, anxiety, et cetera, and it quickly becomes a deadly crutch. Addiction is a terrible thing. Um, you know, it's, I understand, you know, I understand headaches. I get, uh, migraine headaches once in a while. Haven't for a while. Praise the Lord. And I pray that I don't have any ever again. I don't ever want to have one ever again. And when I do have one, I take medicine for it. I do. I have prescription strength medicine that I take for it. Um, it could be easy to say, I don't want to have a migraine. I'm nervous about that. And there is a prescription strength medicine that I was on for some time, about six months. uh, about seven years ago or so, but I would take it every single day at night before I go to bed. And it was a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, which is a long name for psych drugs. Okay. It was for the purpose of calming me down at night, putting me to sleep. So I would sleep just through the night and, uh, so that I wouldn't get migraines. And, uh, you know what? It worked. but my doctor only had me on it for a short period of time, six months, for a reason. Because those drugs, along with other types of drugs as well, those drugs can, you can get a dependency on them. You can also, and that dependency, we'll just back up there, That dependency is what we're talking about. We're talking about getting a dependency on a substance that you require in order to function. We've got to be careful that we don't have a dependency completely on caffeine. I mean, sometimes you got to change the way you do things. And, you know, I understand. I mean, caffeine's very good for you in some cases. You know, it can be very useful. If we're, but if we're drinking, you know, if we're drinking a pot of coffee throughout the day or two or whatever, that's, that's not good. You know, and that's the thing with, you know, I'll drink tea from time to time. I don't as much as I used to. Um, but, uh, you know, you, you drink that throughout the day, that caffeine, it's, it's, uh, it's pumping you up, but you build a dependency, your body builds a dependency on it. And that's not a crutch that you want to, that you want to carry around forever. It's not a crutch that you wanna make your body need. Just the same as cigarette smoke is not something that you wanna make your body need. I know some people that say, man, I just get nervous and I have to smoke. It's like, well, I get nervous too. I get stressed out. You wouldn't believe sometimes how stressed out I get. But I've gotta remember that it's God that cares for me and he's the one that's gonna take care of me. And I've gotta stop and say, you know what? I could get stressed out, migraine from being stressed out. By the way, I don't always get migraines because I'm stressed out. Sometimes I get migraines for other reasons that has nothing to do with being stressed out. But you know, fact is migraines can be caused by stress, by worry, by things like that. But the answer to your problems, to my problems, the answer to my concern and my care is not a cigarette. It's not a drug. It's not, uh, you know, the answer is not those things. You know, God gave us other physical things that we can do to relieve stress. Uh, exercise is a good stress reliever. Sleep is a good stress reliever. Now, both of those can be out of proportion. If you're like, man, I've got to relieve some stress and you go exercise for like six or eight hours, probably not a good idea. If you say, you know what, life stinks, I'm gonna sleep for a few weeks. That's probably not a good idea. You can overdo those things. But the emotional reasons here for smoking, these aren't good reasons for smoking. The believer has to be, Philippians 4, 6, be careful for nothing, but in everything, By prayer and supplication with Thanksgiving, let your request be made known unto God. You got to cast our care upon him. So we're going to be what? Careful for nothing. And rather, we're going to trust the Lord for all things and then verse 7. Says and the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep their hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. We need to be careful or full of care for nothing, but rather allow the peace of God to rule in our hearts. And the way that we do this, it gives us some verses here, and that's not it. I must not have put them in there. Nope, sure didn't. Give us some verses here. Philippians chapter 4, verses 6, 8, and 9. This does away with any need for addictive substances if we apply these passages. Philippians chapter 4, verses 6, 8, and 9. As we've already read verse 6, we'll just read from 6 to 9. says, Be careful for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. Let your requests be made known unto God and the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things. Those things which you have both learned and received and heard and seen in me do, and the God of peace shall be with you. See, if we apply this properly to our lives, then we're not going to have that, then we don't have to have that emotional thing to, or that emotional crutch. We don't have to have that. If we can, we do need to be dependent We do need to have a dependency when it comes to stress. We do need to have a dependency when it comes to care. We do need to have a dependency when it comes to difficulty, when it comes to strength, when it comes to alertness, when it comes to all those things. But our dependency that we have needs to be in the Lord Jesus Christ. If we depend on him, he will not fail us. The problem with all other dependencies is The more we depend upon them, the less our body will function for those things. Amen, Ezra? He's like, yeah. So the other one is for spiritual reasons. A smoking person or smoking Christian is a poor testimony because rightly or wrongly, the world believes the Christian is supposed to be clean in his habits. Number two here, one of the great obstacles to winning a soul for Christ is a stale tobacco breath or any bad breath for that matter. So I want to just discuss this for just a moment here. A couple of things. First of all, I want to kind of lay the rest of the issue of smoking here for Christians. The other thing, you can add some passages to this, spiritual reasons. Some things that we talked about last week and Sunday in our Sunday morning service if you just look back at that message and review or look back at that passage and review and some of the sister passages or Parallel passages that have to do with it that we're not to look like the world. We're not to be Just like the world. We're not to be in lockstep with their ways. We're not to follow their ways When people look at a Christian they ought to see just like they expect to see they ought to see holy living And if certain things are associated with unholy living, then those things ought to be put away from us, at least for the point of appearance sake. We do that not to offend others. And it may be that there are some things that are not wrong to do. I'm not saying smoking is not wrong. I do believe it is. But there are some things that may not be wrong, but you don't do in front of nonbelievers because you don't want to offend them. But scripturally, they may be OK. But when it comes to public appearance of of the Lord Jesus Christ, who you represent, we don't do it because it's a matter of of the appearance that we portray for the Lord. Now, what about what about legal stuff? Um, should it be legal or illegal for smoking? And is it? Is it right, wrong, indifferent, whatever the laws that we have in our state do not allow smoking in any public building? Yes, I think that's a good standard. Is that right? Wrong? Yeah, it's good. Why? Harmful to other people who don't smoke. You're right. You're right. Should that include other things that may not be harmful? What about e-cigarettes? Should they be allowed to smoke e-cigarettes indoors? Steam, the vapor. I don't know a whole lot about it either. But as far as secondhand smoke, from what I understand, you don't have the the secondhand smoke issue. Um, I would say that on the basis that the secondhand smoke hurts other people, it should be for one. It ought. It shouldn't really be an argument. It ought to be a courteous thing. I mean, we ought to be, you know, I don't know. Society ought to be, you know, people in society. What's that? Right. People in society ought to be just courteous enough to know that not everyone smokes. And so, you blowing your smoke in my face is rude. Yeah, especially if I'm eating or if I'm, you know, if I'm trying to breathe or live, you know, you know, blowing your smoke, whether indoors or outdoors. In the military, you know, a lot of people smoke outside and stuff and will be in formation. or we'll just be done with formation somebody will light up or whatever and we're talking there and Most of the time the smokers will step away from the unsmokers or the non-smoker that smokers the non-smokers Because there's a difference between a non-smoker and unsmoker and unsmokers someone who used to smoke and doesn't anymore, right? I just defined a word or defined a word that doesn't exist But the smokers would go away from the non-smokers. Why? Is it because the non-smokers are weird or something? Or because the smokers are weird? No, it's because they're being courteous. They're not blowing smoke in your face. It's a lot like, you know, the cussers will sometimes, if they have, you know, some sort of courteous or respect for others, they won't curse and swear in front of, people that they know are Christians, or specifically speaking, a lot of times the guys won't, I mean, they watch their language in front of chaplains in the military. They won't curse and swear in front of a chaplain. But the fact of the matter is, it's not me, you know, the Christian, or the pastor, it's not you, the Christian, that they have to answer to, they have to answer to God. But in terms of the legalities on the smoking, I do agree that it should be, uh, it should be illegal to purposely harm other people. Um, the next thing that's probably gonna come across the board eventually is smoking in the car. Is it okay to smoke in your own car? That's a good question. That's a good point. You don't have any kids in it to think about that. You're sitting in a car. Think about this. Let's not bring the kids up into it yet. Let's just talk about you're a non-smoker, and you and another non-smoker are in a car with two other smokers. And those smokers, it's cold out. They want to smoke. They don't want to roll the windows down. They're just going to smoke. So they smoke, and it fills up the car with smoke. And you're sitting in there in this smoke chamber. And not only are they hurting themselves, because they're getting both first-hand and second-hand smoke at the same time, but they're hurting you. They're hurting the other people in the vehicle. Now, should that be illegal? That's a tough one. I mean, really, does the government really need to, like, nanny us? No. But should the person that's forced to, I mean, you know, you can also say, well, I don't want to ride in your car. you know, and you just get out. Um, but at the same time, uh, there's also, you know, when obviously if it's my car, you're not smoking in my car. That's, that's a, that's a no go. Absolute no go. Uh, and most of the people in here would agree, right? You know, you're gonna let somebody hop in your car and fire up. No, no. Um, but the, the question of legality I would say, you know, public places, easy answer. Don't blow smoke in my face. You know, even out in the open, standing in the middle of the street. I mean, you blow smoke in somebody's face, you could be harming them. You don't know whose face you're blowing smoke into. If it's an asthmatic person, you actually could cause them to go into an asthma attack. Just standing on the sidewalk because you blew smoke in their face. And I'm not saying that, It's not the same, necessarily, just standing here smoking, somebody standing there smoking, and it's coming out, whatever. Because you're outdoors, it can kind of dissipate. But it can also not dissipate. But then you start asking the same questions of, when you start heading down that road, then you say, should we allow vehicles that have noxious exhaust fumes coming out of them, should we allow them to be on the roads? I mean, that smoke hurts people. So you gotta be careful to balance, and this is why this topic doesn't really deal with that, because you start getting out into that realm, I'm all for public places not having smoking, because I love being able to walk in, or even having a smoking section is good, where it's closed off, though. It used to be you could go to Golden Corral, or any restaurant. They got smoking section over there and they got non smoking section. You can go the non smoking section. Problem is you got the smokers getting up and carrying their smoke with them to the same area. Um, I like it. I prefer if they're gonna have a smoking section to have a door closing the smoking section. Now, does that need to be a law? I don't know. But I do think that it's if it's an enclosed space and their smoke getting you know, on you. That's kind of like, you know, do we allow cars to drive around in restaurants? No, you know, but do we need a law for that? I mean, common sense says that just and that's the same thing with this smoking inside. Common sense says, you know, it doesn't make sense. And when common sense doesn't work, sometimes you have to tell people, Hey, you can't do that. So what do you do? Do you make it a law that you can't smoke indoors? Here's my preference. Really? Uh, if somebody's gonna smoke inside, Um, it needs to be their own personal space. You know that they have if it's in a public space, then that that smoke has to be able to dissipate completely without harming other people around them. Otherwise, they could be, uh, liable for any health problems caused by that smoke. the problem and the reason that they've just gone straight to saying we're just not gonna allow it. We're just not gonna allow smoking. And the reason that they've done that is because you can't really track whose cigarette caused the health problem of that person because the effects are more long term over time. And so they just say, Okay, look, we know that this is causing problems. So that's a tough one. You have to balance. Personally, my position is, if there's no harm done to other people around you, no matter how sinful it is, although we should be against sin, if there's no harm done to other people around you by the way of their liberty, their life, or their property, then, and that's another question too, you know, the smoking causing property damage and whatever, but if there's no harm done to those, then you don't make it illegal. But when there's harm done to the life or health of another person, the liberty or the conscience of another person, and that's limited as well. It's not just like a free, open, you know, oh, you hurt my feelings, and so you can't say that. No, it's their liberty in terms of their, you're not restricting their freedoms by what you're doing. Sole liberty, we've gone through that, or the property of another. If it's not harming that, then the government really has no business in it at all. Uh, their business is to protect those three things. Outside of that, uh, it's it's whatever we allow them to do pretty much like, you know, public roads, things like that, whatever we allow. If we, as a community, decide we want to have public roads, we want to have, you know, public this public that then we do that and we have, um, But we have to be careful that we don't get to a point where we say it's the government's responsibility to do all of this stuff, and it's our responsibility to pay taxes so that it can get done wrong. It's our responsibility to do all those things. If we decide to use to pay taxes and let the government do it, then that's fine. We can do that. Some communities decide not to do that for their particular community for the particular locality. Instead of paying taxes, they have Membership dues where they have like a you know Neighborhood, you know, they call it Homeowners Association, you know where everybody gives some dues toward it and they and it's for the good of the community where you know You have some I come in and plow this plow the streets often You know bow the common areas or whatever, you know, so Anyways, I'm getting way off target here Any questions or comments on this, this, uh, this topic? It's an interesting topic. It's, it's, uh, and, you know, I, I kind of took it a step further than he was taking it, but I, I wanted to do that because I wanted to kind of bring that up and say, Hey, you know, what do you guys think about this? Um, do you think of anything else? Just let me know, send me a message or something. So let's pray. Father, we thank you, Lord, for this day. We thank you so much for your word, and we thank you, Lord, for the liberty, Father, to know that we don't have to be in bondage to any substance. We should simply be yielded to you and dependent upon you. We just pray your blessing now and the service to come, in Jesus' name, amen.