Lord, I was born a gambling man

Earlier this year, I was attending a business conference at one of the top hotels on the famous Las Vegas Strip. While Las Vegas offers great tourist and business opportunities, the one thing that it is commonly associated with worldwide is gambling.

Gambling has an mindboggling effect on people. Most people don’t win at gambling but when they do, they invariably lose it by putting their winnings back to try and win more. The lure of feeling lucky and winning suddenly is so high that people are willing to give away years of hard earned money in a few moments.

All the grand hotels on the strip are designed to make you pass through their casinos going anywhere in and out of the hotel. Whenever I passed through my hotel casino, I tried to appreciate the blessing of not being like all the gamblers there, waiting anxiously for that magical moment to appear in their lives.

However, while I felt great about knowing that I was not like the gamblers, something inside me kept telling me that my thoughts were perhaps too negative about how I felt towards them. They were probably nice people otherwise, doing good works for the world and may even be guided to become great submitters someday.

Satan can make humans pick one negative action of a person and judge that person’s entire personality by that one trait. Besides, who was I to feel any contempt or negativity towards any gambler in the casino when I was just like them in the years before God guided me away from the evil of gambling (4:94). Instead, I should have been more appreciative of God and prayed for their guidance if they deserved it. After all, we do want to forbid evil and have a world full of submitters, don’t we?

This realization softened me in preparation for a big lesson God was about to teach me. I call this lesson my “lucky win,” in keeping with the subject of gambling, though we know that nothing happens by chance. Everything is in accordance with God’s perfect plan for us.

The biggest “gambler”
During the sermon I was delivering to a dear sister in Submission who came specially to Las Vegas to help me do my Friday Congregational Prayer, it suddenly occurred to me that of all the gamblers in the casino that day, the biggest “gambler” of all was me. Yes, indeed, me and all of us around the world are the biggest gamblers of all—and here’s why!

When we opted to witness a demonstration of Satan’s claim that he could be a god besides God (33:72), we took on the biggest gamble of our lives. The gamble where the risk and stakes are incredibly high, and the outcome is gigantic and irreversible. This was truly a very important realization for me because our life on Earth is our last and final chance to redeem ourselves where we simply cannot afford the risk of losing. Fortunately, God also made me realize that while we have gambled with our souls, as submitters, our game and gamble is very different from the rest of the gamblers in the world. The table on the next page shows how (for the purpose of explanation, I’m using the term “Worldly Gamblers” for the gamblers in the casino and “Universal Gamblers” for all submitters).

Praise be to God that I learned these lessons in Las Vegas. They were a far greater win for me than my business conference because they reminded me to be more careful about my responsibility on Earth. I could now add these lessons to the lessons God taught me about twenty-five years ago why gambling is evil.

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