Spiritual capital is the result of obedience. You put some away every day, every week, every month. As time goes by it builds. Like most investments, it builds very slowly. But there is a point after twenty or so years that the interest begins to take off. And every year to follow brings an even greater return, because the interest is starting to resemble a bullet train running at full throttle.
How do you affect your family for the next one hundred years? By doing something today. By being obedient today. And then by doing something tomorrow. And one day those small deposits will begin to add up. Every time you love your wife as Christ loved the church, every time you live with you wife in an understanding way, every time you grant your wife honor as fellow heir of the grace of life, you are putting away principal. It’s like money in the bank.
Every time you take the time to listen to one of your kids, every time you bow your head and ask God to lead you and your family for the day, every time you refuse to alter your expense account to pick up a few extra bucks, every time you pray for a guy who stabbed you in the back in order to get a job promotion that should have gone to you, God sees those actions. And he will reward those actions.
In other words, every time you obey Christ and His Word, it’s as though you are making a deposit of spiritual capital. And every time you obey the Lord, He immediately matches your spiritual contribution of obedience. One day you’ll look around and begin to see that your children are picking up momentum spiritually that they will pass on to their children. And it’s quite probable that your compound interest will begin to pick up steam right about the time you reach the end of your earthly life. Just as you are ready to check out, the compounding effect will begin to pick up momentum beyond your wildest dreams.
This is estate planning at its finest. And when you leave this kind of spiritual inheritance to your children, it’s all tax-free.
Now you have to stay with me here. I am not talking about earning your way to heaven. That is impossible. And most of you understand this. But there may be someone reading this who doesn’t understand it. So let me take a couple of paragraphs to explain this. It’s critical that you understand. There are men who think they are Christian fathers who are not Christian fathers. And they are pretty good guys. They don’t cheat on their wives and they don’t cheat on their taxes. But they are making a fundamental mistake. They are embracing Christianity on their terms. You can’t do that. If you are going to be a Christian, you have to come on God’s terms.
A lot of people are trying to earn God’s favor and forgiveness through doing good works. And there are hundreds of thousands of fathers who view Christianity this way. But they have completely missed it. God does not operate on those terms.
The only way that any of us ever reach eternal life is through grace. Sheer, unadulterated grace—apart from any human work or merit. In other words, God gives you something you don’t deserve. And the reason you don’t deserve it is that you have sinned against God. And you know in your gut that you have sinned. Every person reading this has sinned. I’ve sinned and you have sinned. We’ve gotten ourselves in a hole we can never get out of. Only God can get us out. But we only get out His way.
Eternal life cannot be earned. It can only be given by God the Father through His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Are you still with me? The way that a person becomes a Christian is to throw himself on the mercy of God and to ask God’s forgiveness of his sins. The reason that God will forgive your sins is that Jesus went to the cross and paid for your sins by His own blood.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus, in order that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast (Eph. 2:4–9).
That pretty well sums it up, doesn’t it? Forgiveness of sins is a result of God’s grace and mercy.
Have you asked Christ to be the Lord and Savior of your life? Do you realize that you have no hope to know God and to be forgiven by Him other than turning your whole life over to Christ?
When you submit your life to Christ, He will begin to change you in a number of ways. And one of the most important changes will be that you won’t be just a father. You will be a Christian father.
Let me bottom-line this one more time because eternity is hanging on your understanding of this. The Christian father is not trying to earn his way to heaven. Salvation has been sovereignly given to him. Eternal life and the forgiveness of sins are a free gift. A Christian father realizes the enormity of the gift that he has been given and, as a result, he begins a journey of living in obedience to the Word of God out of a deep sense of gratitude for what God has given to him.
—Steve Farrar
Steve Farrar is the author of many books, including the best-sellers Point Man, Finishing Strong, and Battle Ready: Be Strong and of Good Courage in These Troubled Times.