Dear Friends

I don’t think anybody likes banks at the moment, but my personal annoyance are those savings accounts where you carefully invest your few hard-earned pennies, and then when you go back and check how they are getting on a bit later (maybe only a few months later) you discover that that account now pays such a small amount of interest that it needs a magnifying glass to see it. Not that you get much interest on any investment these days, of course!

What is more, sometimes it takes a month of Sundays to unearth the facts. They open a new account with a very similar name and advertise the massive rate of interest that that one pays (perhaps over 2%!) - and you are fooled into thinking that that is where your money is. But eventually, in the small print somewhere, you discover the dreadful truth. You have been getting 0.002% for the last two years! I suppose the wise investor takes notice of the information they are given at the time of opening the account. When it say 'pays 2.5% until such and such a date’, it probably doesn’t mean that after that date it will pay even more. It probably means that that is when the 0.002% kicks in.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus warned his followers: 'Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.’

Matthew 6:19

We can all smile ruefully about that! Does Jesus mean that all prudent saving is wrong? We have to read on to get the whole picture. What comes next are these words:

But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. - Matthew 6:20,21

The point is where our heart is. If the focus of our life in the present and our hope for the future is in our investments, we are on shaky ground. Jesus calls us to make God and his kingdom our focus and our security for the future. That should be our treasure and that should be where our heart is!

God will not disappoint us by paying a derisory rate of interest on our investments: what he gives us by his grace will be amazingly and unexpectedly enormous - more than we have ever dreamed of!

With best wishes,

Stephen Bowen