2 Thessalonians 3:10

GAMBLING

‘If any would not work, neither should be eat.’

2 Thessalonians 3:10

The moral way of acquiring wealth and property is to labour for it. So far as property comes to us, it either must be given us or we must inherit it; but it is immoral to strive to obtain it without working for it.

I. This, accordingly, is the evil of gambling, that men play for money because they are mean-spirited enough to want it without honestly earning it. In every form of gambling the gain of one man is another’s loss. The gamester can get nothing from God by his play: nor anything out of nature: he can only get out of his neighbour. And as no one consents with his whole will to lose, the gain is robbery.

II. The domestic and public evils which flow from this vice are at once widespread and stupendous. What homes it has desolated! What lives it has destroyed! What children it has orphaned! What hearts it has broken!

III. True manliness requires that we have an inner life: an inner intellectual life, through the due education of our powers; and an inner spiritual life through the indwelling within us of the Holy Spirit of God. It needs that the fear of God lay hold of our people before the demon of gambling will be cast out of the social life of the land. But the demon must be cast out if the Kingdom of Heaven is to come.

(SECOND OUTLINE)

A RIGHTEOUS CONDITION*

In harvest-home God is reminding you not only that it is He Who supports you, but He teaches you how, and on what conditions, He supports you. God gave us our lives as a free gift. He continues our lives only on certain conditions. Harvest-home is the time when God intends us to notice this. It is a time of rest from labour. For though God gives the harvest, man has had to till the land, and sow the seed, and reap the crop.

I. If God gives, man also has had to work.—Teaching us this, that when God created man with all his powers and capacities, God meant those powers to be exercised, otherwise the man should not continue to live. It is God’s great protest against idleness. If any man will not work, neither let him eat. There is no harvest without labour.

II. The idle man is breaking God’s first law.—I hardly know which is worst, the man who works so hard as to shut out the thought of God Who gives him the reward of his work, or the man who is idle and will not work at all. Certainly they are both very far from God, but perhaps the idle man is the furthest off in the end, for Satan is sure to fill his soul with evil.

III. God gave us our active powers to be used.—He gives us our harvest, but He gives no harvest except we sow as well as reap. The fact that God’s way of supporting the lives which He has given us is by way of work, is God’s proclamation against all idleness. It is God’s warning to all who are not actually forced to work for their bread that God expects them to do something with the powers and faculties which He has given them—something useful to their neighbour, something for God’s honour and man’s welfare. God Himself rests not—‘My Father worketh hitherto’ is the word of Christ, and if man needs rest it is because of the weakness of his nature. It is only while actively engaged in useful labour that man truly lives.

Illustration

‘God gives us our spiritual life. But He only supports it on condition of our exerting the powers of our spiritual lives. We must be active, living, working Christians; our spiritual life, our religion, must be an active one, our religious energies must be exercised, or else God ceases to sustain our religion, and then in the world to come all good dies out of us; our spiritual life—i.e. our goodness, all that in us is like unto God, dies finally. This is the Second Death, the death of goodness. From it may God deliver us!’