Aileen and I recently opened an RESP for our grandson and made an initial little deposit. An RESP (Registered Education Savings Plan) is a kind of savings account that allows money to accumulate without taxes, provided it is someday used for education. Finn isn’t yet even a year old, so this may seem a little premature, yet there is actually no better time than now because of the principle of compound interest. In this way, a dollar set aside when he is an infant will have a much greater effect than a dollar set aside when he is a teenager.
Though compounding is a simple principle of basic economics, I have noticed that many people don’t know about it. Simply, compound interest means that interest accumulates not only on the principal (the original amount deposited into an account), but also on the interest it earns over time. In the first year, you earn interest on the $1,000 you initially deposited, but in the second year, you earn interest on the $1,000 plus whatever interest accumulated through that first year. In the third year, you earn interest on the $1,000 plus whatever interest you accumulated through the first two years. And so it goes. Compounding allows money to grow even without adding new principal. Earning interest on interest is a simple and honest way to turn a buck into a couple of bucks.
While compound interest is a financial principle, it resonates in other fields as well, including the field of faith.
One of the reasons Christians are so eager to teach and train their children and so eager to see their children put their faith in Jesus is essentially to see their children’s faith compound over a lifetime. The lessons learned on a mother’s knee, the principles taught in family devotions, and the catechism questions memorized in Sunday school are the small amounts of principal that can grow and expand into spiritual riches throughout a lifetime.
This is not to say, of course, that adults cannot come to faith or that their faith cannot be true, deep, and meaningful. But it does mean that they begin at a disadvantage, that they have to make up for lost time, and that they have to lay a foundation as grown-ups that could have been gained when they were tiny. When Aileen came to faith at the age of nineteen, she knew less doctrine than most of the first-graders at our church. Though she was already in university, she joined a class of high schoolers to get her initial catechesis. And though she did make up for much of that lost time, she had many fewer years for all of that knowledge to “compound,” to grow and express itself.
There is a call to parents here: Just as you may begin to save toward your children’s financial future when they are young, it is also wise to consider their spiritual future when they are young. Lessons learned when they are tiny do not easily fade but instead accumulate and bear fruit over a lifetime. So teach them well, train them well, and encourage them to make this faith their own. The first truths they learn are likely to be the last forgotten.
There is also a call to children here, and perhaps especially teenagers: There is no time like the present to put your faith in Jesus and to take your faith seriously. As soon as you begin to work and earn money, you will be told the financial principle that you should immediately begin to save toward your eventual retirement. And according to a similar principle, you should begin now (Immediately! Today!) to trust in Jesus, to study his Word, and to learn his ways. Just as it would be unwise for you to allow a good financial opportunity to pass you by, it is also unwise for you to allow a surefire spiritual opportunity to pass you by.
An author once pointed out that “as the merchants who have accumulated the most gigantic fortunes are commonly those who began to be rich before thirty, so the richest Christians are usually to be found among the converts of the Bible-class room and the Sabbath school.” That led him to this exhortation: “Begin young, my friends, if you would attain to great riches. Those who are no longer young may still be saved if they will come heartily to Jesus … but God reserves the highest reward to those who enlist the earliest, and serve the hardest and the longest.”
Parents, do your utmost—trusting God all the while—to help your children be among those who serve the hardest and longest. Children, trust Christ now to place yourself among them. And watch how the Lord compounds the earliest truths, lessons, and steps of obedience.
