The media has been largely dominated this morning by reports that high-stake fruit machines are to be scrapped (the maximum bet will we reduced to anywhere between £2-£50...let's pray it's closer to the former!)
Currently, anyone over the age of 18 is able to gamble £100 every 20 seconds on countless machines in the UK. One chap interviewed spoke of how he lost £5000 in an hour trying to recover his losses! What a desperate situation to be in...why on earth do people gamble?
I'm not talking about kids using 2p-pushers at the seaside, or those who enjoy a raffle or chucking a couple of quid in a fruit machine before leaving the pub. I'm referring to those who are genuinely desperate to enrich their lives significantly, to the point where they are prepared to risk losing vast sums of cash they cannot afford to lose in the first place.
Are times that hard? If they were, some might say, they wouldn't have £100 to spend every 20 seconds in the first place. Is it an addiction, then? Of course it is! But, the addiction is born out of a crave to have more. And more. And more. And this, clearly, is born out of unhappiness at the user's current lot. You can probably guess where this is going...
The hole in the lives of an addict is Jesus-shaped, we know that, and the Bible is rammed with verses to show us how we should abstain from the love of money, to put trust in God alone and to rest in faith that God will give us all we need. This is easy to say when life's going well and we can afford the 'basics' though...when we're living in our cosy little bubbles of contentment in our three-bed semis, battling over whether France or Spain will benefit from our credit cards next Summer. But when we're in the pits, when the rust-bucket we struggled to afford breaks down again, and our children are surrounded by friends covered in brand names with new phones (that cost more than our rust-buckets) sticking out of their back pockets, what will we say then?
In all of our hours of mentoring each week, we spend so much of that time speaking to young people who just aren't content in life, and the pressures that materialism brings add to that choke-hold year on year. Our prayer is that these young people will find contentment in JESUS and not be addicted to something empty and bottomless, giving false hope of security.
Holy Spirirt, we pray You will go before us into the schools; God we pray that these young lives will come to know You as their Father; and Lord Jesus, we pray that these precious lives will find contentment in YOU; That YOU will be their addiction, their security.
Please join us in praying for all these young people every day. And of course, that they come face to face with the true contentment that comes from knowing they are loved by Jesus.