“Isn’t it true that church people aren’t supposed to drink?”

It’s a question that comes up constantly, usually followed by a comparison: Protestants are told not to drink, while the Catholic Church has traditionally taken a more relaxed view — wine even has a place in the Mass itself. So the assumption forms: drinking must be a denominational rule, something a pastor decided rather than something God actually said.

But that gets the whole question backwards. What we’re allowed to do and not do isn’t decided by a pastor or a priest — it’s decided by God. And it isn’t a rule reserved for churchgoers. It’s a moral question every human being on earth faces, because morality was never ours to define in the first place. That right belonged to God alone, long before a man and a woman reached for a piece of fruit and decided they’d rather decide for themselves.

So before we get anywhere near an answer about wine, here’s the real question underneath it.

Can You Actually Avoid Everything God Forbids?

Here’s my honest answer: no. Nobody can.

People occasionally write to me with questions like, “Is it a sin to drink alcohol?” I have never once received the email, “Is it a sin to lust in my heart, or to hate someone?” Nobody asks that question — not because it isn’t sin, but because everyone already knows the answer, and knowing the answer doesn’t change anything. You can’t simply decide not to feel contempt for someone. You can’t switch off desire by an act of will. So people stop asking, because asking implies the possibility of obedience, and this is the one place where obedience clearly isn’t on the table.

Yet Jesus doesn’t lower the bar to match our ability. He raises it past anything we could reach:

If someone told you, “Just don’t lust in your heart and you’re guaranteed heaven” — could you do it? Could anyone? No. Not one person in history has managed it, because Scripture itself says no one can.

Can Refusing a Drink Make You Righteous?

One offense is enough to make the whole record guilty.

Underneath “is it okay to drink” is usually a real, sincere motive: I want to keep God’s commands and please him. The problem is the method. Selectively obeying the commands that happen to be manageable, while quietly setting aside the ones that aren’t, was never going to add up to pleasing a holy God.

God is holy. He isn’t grieved by 90% of a life gone wrong — he’s grieved by a single uncorrected inch of it. Someone could get everything else right and still stand condemned by one unresolved fault, because perfection doesn’t average.

This isn’t actually a strange standard — it’s how we already think about crime. We don’t call someone a criminal because they broke every law on the books. One law is enough. Murder alone earns the label, regardless of everything they got right.

God’s law is stricter still. There’s no plea bargain, no mitigating circumstances. Break it in your heart once, and you’ve broken it all. So whether or not you happen to avoid alcohol changes nothing about your standing before a holy God — and by Jesus’ own logic, even the desire to drink, apart from any actual drink, already counts. Whether you drink or don’t, that’s not what determines where you stand.

Drinking Was Never the Real Question

Which is exactly why Jesus came. Why he took the cross. Why he rose again.

Because our thoughts and our conduct could never be perfect, the God who is perfect put on flesh and lived the perfect life we couldn’t — and then paid, in full, the wage our sin had earned.

James Tissot, What Our Lord Saw from the Cross

Believe that — that you are a sinner, but that Jesus died for your sin and rose again, and your guilt has been fully paid — and the perfect life Jesus lived becomes credited to you. God looks at you, and instead of seeing the wreckage, he sees his Son’s finished record. Which means he delights in you, not because your actual life has cleaned itself up, but because that is no longer the record he’s reading.

Out of that comes real freedom — freedom to live, freely, before him.

If you genuinely trust in Christ, that faith covers every sin, not a curated subset of them. Hatred, theft, worse — the cross paid for all of it, in full, once. But here’s what actually changes: if Christ is truly your Lord, if the Spirit genuinely lives in you, that same Spirit will not leave you comfortable in what you’ve been forgiven for. He leads you to hate the sin, to turn from it, to keep coming back and repenting — not because your standing depends on it, but because that’s what it looks like to actually belong to him.

So whether or not you drink was never the real issue. It never was. The real question is simpler and much harder: do you actually trust Jesus?

If Christ Really Is Your Lord…

So let’s ask that question honestly. Has Jesus actually become the Lord of your life?

If so, here’s what Scripture actually says — not what a tradition assumed on its behalf.

There is no verse anywhere that says “do not drink wine.” What Scripture forbids is drunkenness.

Paul even tells Timothy to use a little wine medicinally:

And we know that Jesus himself turned water into wine at a wedding running short of it — and that he drank it. On the strength of that alone, drinking itself was never automatically sin.

But we also know someone who lived his whole life without a drop:

My point here isn’t “drink” or “don’t drink.” It’s that God, according to a person’s faith, their life, and his particular purpose for them, may permit alcohol for one person and prohibit it for another. It was never a blanket law applied identically to every believer everywhere. A few honest guideposts instead:

• Enjoy it, if at all, well short of drunkenness.
• If the Spirit convicts you and it unsettles your conscience when you drink — stop.
• If your drinking would become a stumbling block for someone else’s faith — stop, for their sake.
• And don’t condemn someone else for drinking. They don’t answer to you. Ask instead whether they know the gospel of the cross — if Christ is truly theirs, the Spirit will lead them where he leads them.

What we need isn’t a law about wine. What we need is fellowship with God — walking in his word, worshipping, praying — and out of that relationship, the Spirit gives us a genuine sensitivity to what’s actually his will for us.

What Scripture Clearly Does Forbid

That said, not everything is left open to personal discernment. Some things Scripture addresses directly, for everyone.

Sexual sin is the clearest example Paul gives. And to be direct about it: even sexual sin doesn’t cost someone their salvation, if their faith in Christ is genuine — Paul’s “I have the right to do anything” applies here too. We do have that freedom. But not everything we’re free to do is good for us, and Christ being your Lord means the Spirit inside you will make you hate what he hates.

If you know that Jesus endured that agony on the cross because of your sin, you will come to hate that sin.

Age ratings exist to flag content unsuitable below a certain age — but that’s a human line, not God’s. By his standard, all sexual content, all violence, all of the media built to feed those appetites, is sin. Don’t watch it. Don’t feed it.

And yes — you will still fall. That’s not hypothetical; it’s the ordinary Christian life. When you do, repent, and get back up. If you fall again, repent again, and get back up again. Pray, and the Spirit will keep freeing you from patterns that feel impossible to escape. I’ve experienced that freedom myself, more than once.

Don’t give up on yourself just because you’ve fallen into the mud again. Christ’s blood has already washed what you’re carrying whiter than snow. Don’t hide from God the way Adam and Eve hid in the garden — that instinct to hide is itself a failure to trust what the cross actually accomplished.

If you actually understand the grace that forgave you, you won’t want to hide your sin from God — you’ll want to bring it into the light and repent, because that’s what real relationship with him looks like.

In that ongoing closeness with God, may you come to know exactly what he’s calling you toward — and walk the path he’s already prepared for you.