If you are loving, God is love, love is a principle of the kingdom. If you are loving and giving and generous you know what? Relationships really go well. But if you take the opposite of that which is selfish and got hate in your life and you try to run your relationship it just does not work. The kingdom of heaven is a serving kingdom, so if you learn how to serve and learn how to meet the needs of people and how to help people, you find your influence increases and you become quite great. Your business becomes great because of service. Why? Because it works. If you have no customer service or you're not a servant, you just don't help people, then you become isolated and you find that your business declines. In the kingdom of heaven honour is a principle; what you honour you attract. So when you honour people you find things start to draw towards you; you dishonour them, they move away from you.
So life actually is designed to operate according to the kingdom of God. However, when man fell his mind got so shifted that we think different to the ways of the kingdom of God. See, so what we think works actually doesn't work, see? What we think is how life works actually is totally against what the kingdom is. So in the kingdom God says if you want to be great, fantastic, we want you to be great. Greatness is in you. This is how it happens: you develop the lifestyle of being a servant and you learn to serve through your giftings, and greatness is in you. You'll emerge, you can't help it. But we just think no, that's crazy. What we need to do is tread on people and work our way to the top and put ourself forward, that'll get us ahead. So intuitively the way we operate as an unsaved person or even as a Christian initially, is we think that just to copy the way of the world. Now you have to understand that because I'll share with you a little bit later that one of the things that affects us deeply is the culture we're in.
If we're going to actually be successful and fulfil our calling we've got to recognise cultural pressure and take a different stand towards it - not a religious stand but a different stand, a kingdom stand. Got the idea? So we're designed to work right, now we're designed to be an ambassador. Let me define an ambassador. I looked up in the dictionary, here's an ambassador. An ambassador is a diplomatic official. How about that? They're a diplomatic official of the highest rank - so you are a diplomatic official of the highest rank. The world doesn't know that yet, but one day they may discover that. You've got to discover it, and you're sent by one sovereign state to another to act as its resident representative. In other words an ambassador is a person who is sent from one country to another by the government of that country, to live there, be a resident there and to represent its lifestyle and values and its cultural, and to advance it's interests.
So the ambassador from the United States lives in a special house down in Wellington and he is there. He acts and he's empowered by his government to make decisions and to speak and to act on behalf of the United States. His sole mission is to represent his country and to advance his country's interests. Now he lives in our nation, therefore he's to a measure subject to the laws of our nation - but he actually comes from another nation. Now that's exactly how we are. We are an ambassador. We are born again from above. Our citizenship, where we belong, our whole life is found in the realm of heaven. Therefore we're called to speak and act on behalf of heaven in the earth. How can you do that if you don't even know how heaven works? How can you do that if you don't understand the value system and the lifestyle and how things work in there, see?
See when the young man came to Jesus for example, the rich young man, and we look at it and it seems incredibly hard but the rich young man come to Jesus and he said what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus said have you kept the commandments? He said I've done this, this and this. He said you've got one thing you lack. He said what's that? He said we need to sell up what you have and give it all away. And he went away very sad. Now what you've got to understand, most people look at it and say oh God, to be a Christian you've got to give up your money, oh, that's bad. But it's not that at all. Jesus saw that his life was gripped by the power of money, and what He wanted him to do was to learn that in the kingdom of the world you have to collect and gather and you're under the power of money. But in the kingdom of God you learn to sow and release money and actually learn to receive returns.