Sanctification Is Not a Test You Pass

On 5 July 2026, Leonard Stone, senior pastor of Maranatha Community Church in Kempton Park, preached a message titled “Passing the Test.” It is worth stopping over, and not because it is a pile of nonsense. It is not. It is warm, it is practical, and a fair amount of it is true. That is precisely the problem. The framework carrying the whole message quietly swaps the gospel of grace for a ladder of human effort, and in a couple of places tips clean over into promising material payout for good behaviour.

The Claim

The sermon runs on a single picture. Life is a series of tests. Pass them, and God moves you “to the next level,” hands you more, blesses you. Fail them, and you stall out, and you sit the same exam again and again, “for the next 20 years,” until you finally get it right. That picture is laid over jealousy, honour, submission, patience, giving, and tithing, with advancement waiting on the far side of a pass.

“Start passing the test.”

Sermon, “Passing the Test,” Maranatha Community Church

The gate is explicit. You will not get the thing you are praying for, the sermon says, “until you pass the jealousy test.” Tithing, passed as a test, produces “a financial release.”

What Is True, and Worth Keeping

Say it plainly: the sermon gets things right. God does refine his people through trials. Peter says the tested genuineness of our faith is worth more than gold (1 Peter 1:6-7). James tells us to count trials joy, because the testing of faith produces steadfastness (James 1:2-4). Hardship is one of the tools God uses to shape Christlike character (Romans 5:3-5). It is also true, and genuinely useful in the pew, that trials show us our own hearts, since God already knows them, and that God will often leave a circumstance exactly where it is in order to change the person standing in it. None of that is the problem.

The Problem Is What Carries the Weight

The engine of this message is not grace. It is performance. Pass and you advance, fail and you are held back. Growth turns into something you generate by effort, and God’s favour turns into something your performance unlocks. Start passing the test, the sermon urges, and the blessings will follow you home.

Scripture does not root your sanctification in your effort. It roots it in God. “It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). The One who started the good work in you is the One who will finish it (Philippians 1:6). Paul went after this exact instinct with a question that still stings: “Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” (Galatians 3:3). A message about growing in Christ that spends its full length on what you must do to pass, and next to none of it on what Christ has done and what the Spirit is doing, has put law where the gospel is supposed to stand. It preaches effort as the machinery of blessing, and it leaves the cross outside in the parking lot.

Blessing Is Not a Wage You Earn by Passing

The sermon keeps putting God’s blessing behind a turnstile. That is give-to-get logic wearing the costume of testing, and it should be called what it is.

Scripture does tie persevering faith to reward, so nobody is denying a link exists. But the reward on offer is not a car, a house, a spouse, or a wire transfer. It is Christ himself and “the crown of life” (James 1:12), a faith proven and “resulting in praise and glory and honour at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:7). And it comes as grace, not as payroll. Paul draws the line about as hard as a line can be drawn: “to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due,” while to the one who simply trusts God, it is credited as grace (Romans 4:4-5). The moment blessing becomes a wage you earn by passing, it has stopped being grace, and the God being described is no longer the Father of the gospel. He is an employer settling accounts on Friday.

The Old Testament Pressed Into the Wrong Shape

The message also handles its own texts badly. The Fall gets reduced to a “failed obedience test,” as though Adam flunked an exam he might have booked a retake for. But the Fall was not one more retakeable test. It was the catastrophe that wrecked the whole race and made a Redeemer necessary (Romans 5:12-19). You cannot sit it again, which is the entire reason the gospel exists. Filing it next to the traffic test and the patience test flattens sin itself.

The wilderness and the promised land get the same treatment, turned into a template for unlocking “your dream” if only you will pass. But Israel’s journey is redemptive history moving toward Christ, not a self-improvement scheme for landing your promotion. And Deuteronomy turns the point straight back on the sermon. God tested Israel in the wilderness to humble them and teach them that man lives by God’s word and not by bread (Deuteronomy 8:2-3), then warned them that once the blessing came they must never say, “my power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:17). The self-crediting posture this whole framework breeds is the very thing that passage exists to forbid.

Why It Matters

A framework like this cuts in two directions, and it draws blood both ways. It crushes the struggling, because if blessing follows passed tests, then everyone still suffering is being told, in effect, that they are failing. Guilt gets stacked on the afflicted. And it feeds the pride of the comfortable, who are invited to read their success as a transcript of their maturity. Worse than either, it shifts the ground of a believer’s assurance off Christ’s finished work and onto his own record of exams passed, which is no assurance at all. It sends people back into the week to strive in the flesh, mistaking moralism for the gospel and exhaustion for growth.

The Warning

The danger here is not a wild heresy that announces itself at the door. It is a warm, practical, partly true message whose centre of gravity is in the wrong place. Sanctification is real, but it is the Spirit’s gracious work in us, not a treadmill of exams we pass to earn a promotion. Our blessing is secured in Christ and handed over free, not released to us in proportion to our performance. Where a sermon sends you home mainly to try harder so that God will do more for you, and points you to your own effort instead of to Christ, it should be received with care. This one should be marked as such.