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.

We also warmly welcome those of you who have come to support Will and Melissa as they share their testimony of why they are getting baptised later today out at Sumner Beach.

It is an awesome privilege to be able to approach God with freedom and confidence. Most of us would be apprehensive in the presence of a powerful ruler...a King, President or Primeminister! But thanks to Jesus, by faith we can enter directly into God's presence through prayer. We know we'll be welcomed with open arms because we are God's children through our union with Jesus. As silly as it sounds, we don't need to be afraid of God as some people are. We can talk with Him about any and everything at anytime. He is just waiting to hear from us. 

With love & blessings,

Sandra

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

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.

In Luke 22 we read “He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed.”Having just been betrayed by a close friend and knowing that His accusers were coming to take Him to His death, Jesus got alone to pray. How He prayed that night gives us insight into how we should pray when we experience times of deep anguish and pain.

Firstly we must acknowledge that ultimately, God is in control of our situation. The first thing that Jesus did when He began to pray was to acknowledge that God was ultimately in control of His situation. Secondly we need to accept the fact that God may not answer our prayers in the way we think He will or should! God sees the bigger picture and we need to trust that He has our best interests at heart even if we can’t see it. We also need to humble ourselves to accept His answer. Prayer does change things but we need to remember that as well as that, prayer changes us. Fourthly we need to leave the result of our prayers up to God. Jesus left the result of His prayer up to His Father. He left Himself completely at the will of His Father. Lastly we need to keep on praying. In verse 43 we read that Jesus kept on praying. I know I give up on praying too early a lot of times! As I wrote earlier prayer changes us. The more time we spend in prayer the deeper our relationship with our Heavenly Father will be.

With love & blessings,

Sandra

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.

Courage takes many forms. It can take courage for someone to just get up in the morning; it can take courage to care for someone in need; it can take courage to turn up at work or school in the face of bullying; it can take courage to cling to faith when everything and everyone tells you it is all an illusion.

We also need to recognise that courage is not the opposite of fear. Without fear, there would be no courage, but only foolhardiness. Courage kicks in when we take note of our fears, but don’t let them shape our lives.

To be courageous is not to be fearless, but to refuse to surrender to fear. Like a lot of things in life we need to learn this so we can put it into practice when we find ourselves in a fearful situation. “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). Sometimes we fear because we forget that God made us with His love. His love takes away our fear. It is from Him that we find the source of our courage.

With love & blessings,

Sandra