Excerpts from Tom Streeter sermon, Pastor of Zionsville Fellowship, Zionsville, Indiana:
At the end of this excerpt is the play or download link:
All civilized societies have considered gambling a vice. Vice stands opposite of virtue. The Bible promotes the virtues of industry, thrift, wise investment and patience. All of which are undermined by the vice of gambling. They are replaced by what the Bible says are deadly sins of greed, lust, sloth and immediate gratification. Not only is gambling a practice considered a practice opposite of Biblical teaching.
Ancient philosophers and teachers have warned that is has damaging effects at both the community and individual levels. And modern studies on the gaming industry show that this is exactly true. Domestic abuse, bankruptcy, divorce, alcoholism, community breakdown, increased poverty, addiction. All can be linked to gambling.
Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his own property. Crimes are those acts by which a man harms another person or another’s property. Then laws must be made to control acts of crime, must culture have preferred not to create laws governing vices and have done so only when vice becomes extreme and undermines public stability. What a man does to himself or his own property generally is his own business, when this harm extends beyond himself or his own into the wider community; it is deemed a crime. A vice can become a crime.
Aristotle taught that gambling had both a corrupting and distracting nature. The person who spends his time or the lady who spends her time doing those kinds of things is being distracted from what matters.
First: It is a vice and not a virtue.
Second: As a vice it is addictive. Destructive to individuals, families, takes advantage of the poor and ruins community.
Third: It is a violation of good stewardship. It is not the way to use money that God has put into your hands as a steward.
It is not only clergyman who spoke out against gambling. “This madness, referring to gambling, is of a destructive tendency and often conducts person with it to poverty, imprisonment and death.
Let me talk about some of the social ills:
The problem of addiction. Researchers today say gambling is the fastest growing teenage addiction. Indeed teens are being induced into the world of gambling by its glorification. On sports channels and on such channels the travel channel. I must tell you I am a little discouraged when I go to the sport channel and all they’ve got is a bunch of celebrities sitting around the table gambling. But out kids watch the stuff and are being induced to enter into that world. The number of compulsive gamblers will increase to between 100 and 500% when gambling is brought into an area. Cost to the state to rehabilitate addicts can range from $11,000USD to $40,000USD per person.
Crime. Three years after casinos arrived Atlantic City went from 50th in the nation to 1st in crime. Prostitution became so wide spread that the police chief recommended that it legalize. John Kent, researcher at the University of Illinois calculates that for every $1 received in gambling revenues it costs the state $3 in increased criminal justice, social welfare and addiction control. So we are not winning on that one.
Gambling does not reduce civility. Civility as it has been defined by many people in the past has to do with the good disposition of citizens and the promotion of public good. Rather than developing virtue and character in people, gambling promotes vice and corruption. We must categorically state that gambling never has and by its very nature develop virtue.
State sponsored lotteries now dominate the landscape. And it is import to realize that government run lotteries change the purpose of government. It is failure when the role of government changes from protecting its citizens to preying upon its citizens. They know they can not raise taxes, so what do they do? Go in the backdoor and prey upon the people. Citizens who participate in gambling especially legalized and state sponsored gambling encourage the predatory role of our government. Think about that!
Historically, gambling came to and end through public sentiment. People crying out for a more virtuous and moral society. So the people began to cry out “we want to get rid of that that preys upon our morals and upon our ethics.” And second through government intervention, passing laws banned state lotteries and legalized gambling.
How do you think it will end? Will it end? Probably slid too far. I don’t know! But I think that if there are people who care and really do care about the morals and ethics or our country, maybe something can be done about it.
Now here is what I want to tell you. There is no explicit prohibition in the Bible against gambling. Otherwise it does not say “Thou shall not gamble” and it does not say “Thou shall not use drugs”. There are a lot things that you can not point to and say but if we believe if these things are true and right and pure and if there is a true virtue and if there is anything worth of praise then we ought to think on these things. Although we do not have a specific prohibition in the Bible, historically Christian leaders and the Christian community deemed it a vice, which is corrupting to individual character and public health.
Apart from the corruption and connected to the practice the Bible teaches that one of the first duties of the Christian is stewardship. This means that we not to be wasteful, irresponsible or careless with the money that God has put into our care. Our responsibility is more than private, it's public, it's about our country, it's about our towns, and it’s about our families.
| The Vice Of Gambling | | ZF Teachings - 2004 | | Tom Streeter | |
