Welcome to our service today. It is great to have you here and we would love to invite you to stay after the service and join us for tea and coffee.

It turns out that the things that we tend to value most, and the things that God values most, aren’t always the same. And as counterintuitive as God’s values are, in the end they’re the only things that end up satisfying us.

Each kingdom or country in this world has its own currency – ours is the NZ dollar. The Kingdom of God has its own currency too, and this is how Jesus describes it in Mark 12:29-31 The most important command is this: … ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.’ The second most important command is this: ‘Love your neighbour the same as you love yourself.’ These two commands are the most important.

From this we learn the currency in God’s Kingdom is love, and that makes it quite a bit different to the currencies of the kingdoms of this world. In our worldly kingdoms, success is about how much of the currency you can obtain and how much you can spend. But in the economy of God’s Kingdom, success is about how much you can give away, how much you can lose and how much you can sacrifice.

The thing of greatest value in God’s Kingdom – love – flows in the opposite direction to the things of value in the world’s kingdoms. In God’s Kingdom, the more you give, the more you have. The more you sacrifice, the richer you become. Perhaps that’s why all the money in the world can never satisfy the deepest yearnings of the human heart – love.

With love & blessings, Sandra