Weighed and Wanting: Addresses on the Ten Commandments

by Dwight Lyman Moody

I would to God that we could have all gambling swept away. If Christian men take the right stand, they can check it and break it up in a great many places. It leads to stealing.

WHERE THE STREAM STARTS.

The stream generally starts at home and in the school. Parents are woefully lax in their condemnation and punishment of the sin of stealing. The child begins by taking sugar, it may be. The mother makes light of it at first, and the child’s conscience is violated without any sense of wrong. By and by it is not an easy matter to check the habit, because it grows and multiplies with every new commission.

The value of the thing that is stolen has nothing to say to the guilt of the act. Two people were once arguing upon this point, and one said: “Well, you will not contend that a theft of a pin and of a dollar are the same to God?” “When you tell me the difference between the value of a pin and of a dollar to God,” said the other, “I will answer your question.”

The value or amount is not what is to be considered, but whether the act is right or wrong. Partial obedience is not enough: obedience must be entire. The little indulgences, the small transgressions are what drive religion out of the soul. They lay the foundation for the grosser sins. If you give way to little temptations, you will not be able to resist when great temptations come to you.

GOD’S WEIGHTS.

Extortioner, are you ready to step into the scales? What will you do with the condemnation of God—“Thou has taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbor’s by extortion, and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord God?”

Employer, are you guilty of sweating your employees? Have you defrauded the hireling of his wages? Have you paid starvation wages? “Thou shalt not oppress a hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates. . . . What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord God of hosts. . . . Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.”

And you, employee, have you been honest with your employer? Have you robbed him of his due by wasting your time when he was not looking? If God should summon you into His presence now, what would you say?

Let the merchant step into the scales. See if you will prove light when weighed against the law of God. Are you guilty of adulterating what you sell? Do you substitute inferior grades of goods? Are your advertisements deceptive? Are your cheap prices made possible by defrauding your customers either in quantity or in quality? Do you teach your clerks to put a French or an English tag on domestic manufactures, and then sell them as imported goods? Do you tell them to say that the goods are all wool when you know they are half cotton? Do you give short weight or measure? See what God says in His Word: “Shall I count them pure with the wicked balances, and with the bag of deceitful weights? Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small: thou shalt not have in thy house divers measures, a great and a small: but thou shalt have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure shalt thou have: that thy days may be lengthened in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. . . . Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meteyard, in weight, or in measure. Just balances, just weights, a just ephah and a just hin, shall ye have.” Are you like those who said: “When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? and the sabbath, that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying the balances by deceit? that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes; yea, and sell the refuse of the wheat?”