Every Sport at Once

From Dan's Desk

A quick word first. I was away with my family this week, so the Thursday letter reaches you on a Sunday. Back on schedule Thursday. And since it is Sunday, I am praying you have a blessed one, with a few minutes in it to sit with what Jesus did for you on the cross.

Last Sunday I watched the Bills game with old friends, phones in hand all afternoon. I asked which app they use for their betting. They each named a different one.

The other direction is the youth at church, who ask me in those words whether it is a sin. And when I say youth I mean youth: high school boys and middle school boys.

It is always the kids who bring it up. I have not had a parent ask me about it yet.

I do not watch sports on YouTube and the ads still find me. Hollywood actors and retired stars, answering the objection before you have formed it.

The NFL starts in a few hours and baseball and hockey are already going. Every sport at once. I have never placed a bet and I am not tempted to, so take this from one step outside, and I am not here to make you feel dirty about twenty dollars on a hockey game.

From Wise and Faithful

Is Sports Betting a Sin? An Honest Answer for Canadian Men

Single-event betting has been legal here since 2021, the ads run through every broadcast, and the church has mostly said nothing. So I wrote the honest answer: what Scripture says and what it does not, why I will not hand you a verse that settles it, and the signs that this has stopped being a judgment call. There is one concrete step at the end that takes four minutes.

Why Index Funds Are the Most Christian Way to Invest

And then the piece I would rather you read, because it answers what the first one leaves open: where does a man point an appetite for risk that is not going away? The case for owning a slice of thousands of real companies, and why that is the more faithful posture as well as the better-performing one.

Worth Your Time

[Report] Betting on Boys: Understanding Gambling Among Adolescent Boys
Common Sense Media, 2026
Read
If you have a son, read this one. It is American data and I do not think that saves us. 36% of boys aged 11 to 17 gambled in some form last year, and six in ten said the gambling content turned up in their feed without them going looking for it. The finding I cannot shake is about friends: 84% of boys whose friends gamble do it themselves, against 17% of boys whose friends do not. It travels through the group, and the group is at school.

[Review] The Intentional Father, by Jon Tyson
The Gospel Coalition
Read
The line that has stayed with me: if a father does not take responsibility for the formation of his son, the world will do the forming. Tyson built an actual plan for his own boy rather than hoping proximity would do it. I am not sure I agree with every part of his programme, and I do not think that matters much next to the premise.

The Week in One Number

1% to 10%

That is the share of Ontario students betting on sports online, in 2019 and then in 2025. A tenfold rise in six years, from CAMH's Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey: 11,108 students across 246 schools, Grades 7 through 12. Grade 7 is twelve years old. Online gambling of all kinds went from 8% to 12% in the two years since the last survey, and CAMH called the sports betting number alarming.

Then the number that explains it. More than 80% of all the students surveyed had seen or heard an online gambling ad in the past month, and 23% see one every single day.

Worth running: the Compound Interest Calculator, with whatever you were going to put on today's games.

Source: CAMH, 2025 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey, released August 2026.

A Question I Keep Getting

"Is putting twenty dollars on the game a sin?"

I want to answer honestly, which means admitting there is no verse that settles it. There is no chapter on parlays, and a pastor who spends all his outrage there has picked a strange hill.

What I bring instead is this. I have lost real money being certain I was right about something. It happened in a brokerage account, which is the detail worth holding onto: I went aggressive early, had some success, mistook luck for skill, stayed in too long and got burned. The pull is ordinary, and I felt it somewhere perfectly respectable.

So here are three questions, and none of them is an accusation. Could you stop this month if your wife asked you to? Does she know the number? Do you bet more when the week has gone badly?

And then the question this week actually turns on. Who is watching you do it?

Do this. I am not going to tell you that picking a number makes this fine. But if you are going to treat it as entertainment money, then treat it the way you would treat any other entertainment money, and put three gates in front of it.

It never comes from debt. Not a card you are carrying a balance on, and not a line of credit. If it is not money you could lose without a single thing in your month changing, it is not entertainment money.

The eight moves on The Steward's Map come first: the giving, the buffer, the high-interest debt. Entertainment money is whatever is left once those are genuinely in order, and for a good number of men reading this there is nothing left once they are, which is its own answer.

And your wife could tell you the figure right now if you asked her.

Then pick your season number. One figure, decided today, covering football and hockey and whatever else you watch between now and spring. Most men never pick one. They decide a weekend at a time, which is how a man ends up with a number he never chose and cannot say out loud. If yours is zero, that is still a number, and it is the one I would say out loud first.

Good News About the Good News

Barna's Open Generation study, the American arm of a survey that ran across dozens of countries, found that 77% of 13 to 17 year olds are at least somewhat motivated to keep learning about Jesus throughout their lives. 52% said very motivated, 25% somewhat. It is a couple of years old and nothing since has contradicted it.

Which is worth holding beside everything above. The same boys getting eighty gambling ads a month are more curious about Jesus than most of us assume, and more willing to be asked.

What they are short of is adults, and that shortage is the one a man on this list can personally do something about this fall. No budget and no committee.

Source: Barna Group, The Open Generation.

Coming Next Week

Thursday, back on the regular seven o'clock slot.

There is also a version of this question for much younger kids, the card packs and the pack rips, that I want to get right before I write it. I am not putting a date on that one.

The Close

Nine days from now the hockey season opens and the baseball playoffs start the same afternoon. The apps have been waiting all year for that.

A sportsbook takes a margin on every bet it accepts, and that margin is the entire business. It works whether your team covers or not.

I downloaded Wealthsimple Predict once and never used it. The same account will sell you an index fund.

Put that twenty dollars into a broad market ETF each week and you have bought a piece of thousands of companies whose people get up and go to work on Monday. I will not tell you that is guaranteed, because it is not. But an owner gets paid for work that actually happened.

So put your money into something that makes something, and do it somewhere a younger man can see you. In my case that is a room of boys at church who have never heard a grown man say where his line sits and why.

Then the last thing, because it is the only guarantee in this letter. Repentance and trust in Jesus is settled before you make it, because the work was finished by someone else. Our wealth is in the cross.

We will tell the next generation. That is the job, and it was always the job.

Set your season number this week, and tell somebody younger than you where it is and why.

Grace and peace,
Dan

P.S. If you coach a team or know a sixteen year old who trusts you, you are already one of the adults I mean.