Getting Gains God’s Way
Getting Gain’s Gods Way
The difference between religious performance and authentic faith becomes clear when we examine our motivations and methods for spiritual growth. Many Christians approach their faith like a checklist - attending church, reading scripture, and praying at designated times - while keeping God compartmentalized in specific areas of their lives. However, God desires complete access to our hearts, not just our habits. The rich young ruler's encounter with Jesus in Matthew 19 provides a powerful example of this struggle. Despite his perfect rule-following record, he walked away sad when Jesus asked him to surrender his wealth and follow Him. His possessions had become his security, preventing him from embracing the relationship Jesus offered. This story reveals three essential principles for authentic spiritual growth: choosing relationship over rules, dropping the weights that hinder us, and embracing community. True spiritual maturity happens when we invite God into every moment of our lives - during mundane tasks, challenging circumstances, and ordinary days. We must be willing to release whatever we're gripping tightly, whether it's material possessions, past hurts, pride, or the need for control. These burdens prevent us from stepping into God's purpose for our lives. Additionally, we need the Holy Spirit as our guide and fellow believers as our companions on this journey. When we focus on what we're gaining rather than what we're losing, we discover that God's way leads to freedom, purpose, and abundant life.
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Getting Gains God's Way: Moving Beyond Checklist Faith
Have you ever felt like your faith was just a series of boxes to check? Go to church - check. Read your Bible - check. Pray before bed - check. While these spiritual disciplines are important, God desires something far deeper than our religious performance. He wants our hearts, not just our habits.
What Does It Mean to Get Gains God's Way?
Just like physical fitness requires giving up certain comforts to build muscle and strength, spiritual growth demands surrender. We can't simply think ourselves into spiritual maturity overnight - it requires intentional choices and sacrifices. The question is: what are we willing to give up to gain what God has for us?
The Rich Young Ruler's Checklist Faith
In Matthew 19:16-20, we encounter a young man who approached Jesus with confidence in his rule-following abilities. He had kept all the commandments - no murder, no adultery, no stealing, honoring his parents, loving his neighbors. His spiritual checklist was complete, or so he thought.
But Jesus saw through the surface-level obedience to the heart of the matter. When He told the young man to sell everything and follow Him, the man walked away sad because he had great wealth. His possessions had become his security, and he couldn't let them go to embrace what Jesus offered.
Three Keys to Gaining God's Way
1. Choose Relationship Over Rules
The young ruler's mistake was treating faith like a checklist rather than a relationship. Many of us fall into this same trap - we allocate specific times for God rather than allowing Him access to our entire lives.
Real spiritual growth happens when we break the boxes we put God in and invite Him into every moment. This means finding God in the mundane - during diaper changes at 2 AM, while washing dishes, during our commute to work. God doesn't want limited access to our lives; He wants to do life with us completely.
Matthew 22:37 calls us to "love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind." Not part of our heart - all of it. He created us because He loves us and wants us to step into the fullness of what He offers.
2. Be Willing to Drop the Weights
Imagine trying to pick up groceries when your hands are already full - it's impossible. The same principle applies spiritually. We cannot grab hold of God's purpose for our lives when we're carrying too much other stuff.
For the rich young ruler, wealth was his weight. For us, it might be insecurities, past hurts, pride, doubt, fear, or the need to control everything. These burdens slow us down and prevent us from stepping fully into what God has called us to do.
Jesus died to give us freedom, not to burden us with more weight. Matthew 11:30 reminds us that His "yoke is easy and burden is light." He has a purpose for us to pursue, but we need to be willing to let go of what we're clinging to in order to grab hold of what He's offering.
3. Remember Life Wasn't Meant to Be Lived Alone
When the disciples questioned Jesus about who could possibly enter the kingdom of heaven, He responded: "Humanly speaking, it is impossible. But with God everything is possible."
We're not designed to navigate spiritual growth in isolation. God has given us the Holy Spirit as our trainer and guide, and He's placed us in community with other believers. We need each other - iron sharpens iron, and we're meant to encourage and strengthen one another in our faith journey.
Our weakness isn't a flaw to hide; it's an opportunity to display God's strength and to allow others to come alongside us. Whether through connect groups, church community, or spiritual friendships, God wants us to do life together.
Don't Focus on What You're Losing
The rich young ruler walked away because he could only see what he was losing, not what Jesus was offering. He missed an incredible opportunity because he was focused on the wrong thing.
When God calls us to surrender something, it's not to punish us or take away our joy. It's because He has something better in store. He wants us to live unhindered, unburdened, and free - stepping boldly into the purpose He's designed for us.
Life Application
This week, take an honest inventory of your spiritual life. Are you living with checklist faith, or are you cultivating a genuine relationship with God? What "weights" might you be carrying that are preventing you from fully embracing what God has for you?
Consider these questions as you reflect:
What areas of my life am I keeping from God's influence?
What am I holding onto so tightly that I can't grab hold of God's purpose for me?
How can I move from doing things for God to doing life with God?
What step of vulnerability or faith is God calling me to take in community with others?
Don't be afraid of what you might need to surrender. Instead, be excited about what you're going to gain. God's way of gaining isn't about losing - it's about trading good for great, and temporary for eternal. Step into that freedom with courage and boldness, knowing that the best is yet to come.
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A discussion guide for the sermon can be found here.
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Good morning, church. How are we this morning?
Good. Who loves this heat? Mixed reviews across the board. I love it. I'm so excited for summer.
But it really does hit you when you've had freezing cold and then all of a sudden we Welcome a lovely 30 degree day. But at least it's sunny. So I have the honor and privilege of sharing with you this morning. Thank you very much.
When I first was kind of writing this message and God was Kind of downloading this. I didn't have a child. And. And the funny thing was I thought I'd already learned these lessons before I had a child, and then I had a child and I relearnt these lessons all over again. And it was a very humbling process.
So what I'm sharing to you this morning is very much from the heart. It's very much a season that I am still walking through. But I think we never could kind of end walking through this. So to get to what I'm speaking on this morning, I have titled my message Getting Gains God's way. Now, getting gains, not a cool term.
I thought it was a cool term. One of those, you know, kind of shortening things that all the young guys do. And I was like, I'm going to be really relevant this morning. I'm not going to be very relevant this morning because this is outdated and old and shows my age a little bit more than I would like. But getting gains is a fitness term and it's about building muscle, getting stronger, and improving your physical self.
Now, who has ever actually gone on this journey of trying to get fit? Who's done this before? Yeah. Yeah. It's not always as easy as we like to think it is.
Right. When we go out on this journey of fitness, fitness, we can get really motivated and run out and go, go, go. But it's a lot harder the longer we get into it. In fact, we can't just think one day that we're going to be fit and magically be fit the next day. I wish it worked that way.
It would be awesome. But unfortunately it doesn't. You have to work hard and you have to be willing to give something up. Now, whether that is the pizza night that you have once a week, whether it's that, you know, 10pm snack right before you go to bed that just tastes a little bit better than, you know, all the other meals. Whether it is your time because you need to go to the gym or you need to work out, there is always something that you have to give in order to gain.
That's how life works. And the same principle applies to our walking with God. We need to give something up in order to gain. If we want to see spiritual gains in our life, we need to be willing to surrender. But the things we need to surrender aren't always the things that we think.
So we're going to look into scripture this morning and unpack this a little bit with me. Are we ready this morning? Church. Awesome. Let's go for It.
So I am reading from Matthew 19:16, 20, and this is the story of the rich young ruler. And it says, a young man came to Jesus with this. Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life? Why ask me what is good? Jesus replied, there is only one who is good.
But to answer your question, if you want to receive eternal life, keep the commandments. Which ones? The man asked. And Jesus replied, you must not murder, you must not commit adultery, you must not steal, you must not testify falsely, honor your father and mother and love your neighbor as yourself. And the young man replied, I've done all these commandments, what else must I do?
And Jesus told him, if you want to be perfect, go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor. Then you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me. But when the young man heard this, he went away, sad because he had many possessions. This young man had something that I like to call a checklist.
Faith. He was going through life trying to tick all the boxes, follow all the rules in order to accomplish faith, in order to get eternal life. But Jesus, Jesus flipped this on its head because he didn't want this young man just to follow rules. He wanted this young man's heart. And he wanted to give him the opportunity not just to tick some boxes, but to change his life completely.
And this morning, that is what God is offering up to us, church. Not just the opportunity to go through the motions of life, but rather to step in and live the life he has called us to in the completeness and the full fullness. But the thing is, we need to be willing to give some stuff up. We need to be willing to step out in faith. So we're going to pop into three revelations that I've found in this scripture of how to gain God's way.
So point number one is relationship over rules. Now this young man we see, he comes and he's all ready to show Jesus just how good he's been at following all the rules. And sometimes in life we can do exactly the same thing. Oh God, look at the things that I have done. We go to church and we tick that box.
We do our 10 minute devotional in the morning and we tick that box. I prayed five minutes before I went to bed and I ticked that box. I feel good. Those things are great to do church, and we need to do do them in order to be people of faith. But that's not where it stops.
God wants more than that. Us ticking boxes isn't the goal, us giving our heart over To God is the goal. So we don't do this by just allotting time in our lives for God, but we do this by allowing God access fully to our entire of our lives. It's about breaking the boxes that we can sometimes put God in and allowing him to work his fullness all the time. And we go through seasons.
Life can be really challenging, we can get really busy and it can be hard to do that sometimes. I've recently gone through that myself. I was very active in church before I had my lovely little daughter. I would be here every Sunday, I'd be serving in kids church. I did my Bible reading every morning and I thought I was going great, great.
And then I became a mum. Now I have a beautiful daughter. She's five months old and she is 100% all the time. She doesn't chill out. She's not one of these lovely babies that, you know, lies and is happy and smiling at the world.
She's like, no, I want to go, go, go, go, go mum, let's go. So she's started to learn to crawl. Well, she's trying to teach herself so she's army crawling across the floor trying to get to every. And we have wooden floors so she's slipping across the floors. I can turn my back for five minutes and I don't know where my child is.
She's under a chair or she's, you know, trying to pull herself up on a table. And I no longer have time to sit in God's word because I'm chasing after my child. I no longer have the time to be at every single service because I'm caring for someone else. And when all these boxes that I had kind of rested my faith on started to fall away, I wasn't left with a great relationship with God. It wasn't as strong as I thought because I'd been putting all my weight and putting all my hope in what I was doing for God rather than the relationship that I was building with God.
And it's been very humbling to have to find God in the middle of nappy changes. It's been very humbling to find God at 2:00am when your child is staring straight at you going, hi. And I'm like, no, we're going to sleep, please. But God wants to meet us in the mundane. See, God wants to be with us when we're doing dishes and God wants to be with us when we're at work.
God wants to be with us at school. God doesn't want a limited access to our Lives. He wants access to all of our lives. It says in Matthew 22, 36, 37, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and all your mind. Church.
That's not part of your heart or part of your soul or part of your mind. It is all of it. Because he wants all of you. He didn't create you to get a little bit of you. He created you because he loves you and he wants you to step into the fullness of what he has to offer.
He wants to do relationship with you because he cares about you. He wants to be there when you are struggling. He wants to be there in the middle of the mundane. He loves showing up when we're doing dishes. He loves to show up when we're driving our car.
He wants to just do life with you. Church. So it's us letting go of the boxes and sometimes the restraints that we put on God and saying, I want you always, not just for a moment. I want you to do a work in my life every single day. And this is where we will start to see a real spiritual change in our lives when we acknowledge that God is not just here in our head head, but we allow him access to our heart and we allow him to do work in our life.
Are you allowing God to do that work in your life this morning? CHURCH the second point is be willing to drop the weights. I need everyone to turn around to the person next to them and say, drop the weights.
Beautiful.
Now I've got a brand new weight. It's all good. Who knows that you can't pick up things if your hands are too full of other stuff? Who's ever been to the grocery store and you've tried to navigate it without a basket because you think, oh, I've got this. And all of a sudden you're picking things, picking things.
And before you know it, your hands are way too full and you're trying to navigate your way to the checkout and maybe get that one last thing on the way. It is hard to pick up stuff when your hands are full. Now, for this, I'm going to need a willing volunteer, any volunteer. Someone who's strong, someone who thinks they've got a lot of muscles. Don't make me pick out on you.
I'm just going to pick on you. Mia. Yeah, Beautiful. Come on up, everyone. Let's give her a hand.
Welcome. Hello. So here is your challenge this morning. I need you to pick this weight up.
Now, this was designed for kids, so, yeah, it's very heavy now I need you to try and pick up those boxes.
Pretend you're small. Yeah, pretend you're a small child and this isn't going to work. Beautiful.
Now, I need you to stay like that for the entire rest of the service.
I'm joking. Everyone, let's give her a hand. Thank you very much.
Now, I need you to imagine this. If you were small, that would be hard to do, man. Everyone in church is just too muscly. But here's the thing. If I'm trying to hold my.
Okay, if I'm trying to hold this in my hand, this is heavy and my hands are full. So if I'm trying to then get everything else, and if I'm trying to pick up the purpose that God has for me, I'm going to struggle. See, with the rich young ruler. I don't need to keep carrying this around.
There we go. For the rich young ruler, he was lugging around wealth. He held onto it so tight that he couldn't actually let it go in order to step into what Jesus was calling him to. It said that he walked away sad because he had a lot of stuff. We can carry a lot of stuff, Church.
We can carry a lot of weights. It's not always wealth. It can be our insecurities. It can be our past. It can be pride.
It can be doubt. It can be fear. It can be love of control. But we carry these things around with us. And then we try and pick up the purpose and the things that God has for us.
We try to take it in full, but we can't because our hands are too full. You will not be able to step in fullness into what God has called you to do if your hands are too full of everything else. See, here's the thing. Jesus gave up his life on the cross. He died for our sins and he died to give us freedom.
The Bible says that we are transformed. We are anew. When we come into Christ, he doesn't want us to carry all these burdens into our relationship with Him. He doesn't want us lugging all these things into our relationship with him, into our purpose, because he knows they're going to slow us us down. Because he knows that we're not going to be able to pick up everything that he's called us to.
He wants us to have complete freedom. And to have complete freedom, we need to be willing to surrender. It says in Matthew 11:30 that, My yoke is easy and my burden is light. Jesus has something for us to pick up. He has a purpose that he wants us to run towards.
He has something that he wants our hands to grab onto.
But sometimes we need to be willing to let the things that we like to hold go. Because sometimes our insecurities can be a bit of a comfort to us. Sometimes a love of control can be a bit of a comfort to us. I can say that personally, I love to control things in my life. So when God's like, it's time to let go, I'm sitting there in the corner like, you sure?
I'm going to hold onto this just a little bit longer. But that's not what God intended. He wants us to let things go. He needs us to let things go. We are designed to live in freedom by a God who made you intently so drop the weights because there is so much more that God is calling you to that God is calling our church to.
And he doesn't want us lugging all this other stuff into it. We're about to step into an incredible new season and expansion. God doesn't want us to be dragging along all the past stuff with us. He wants a church and a people that are free to run after what he has for them because it's exciting. Church.
It's time to drop the weights.
And the last point this morning is that life wasn't meant to be lived alone.
Now if we jump to the very end of this Bible verse, the disciples were kind of questioning Jesus about who can get into the kingdom of heaven and if it's so hard. And this was Jesus's response. And I love it so much. He looked at them with intent and said, humanly speaking, it is impossible. But with God everything is possible.
We are not meant to do these things alone. God doesn't want us to try and drop all the weights of our life alone. God doesn't want us to try and step into relationship with him alone. He doesn't want us to go through life alone. Because when we are alone and isolated, you are going to struggle.
Because that's not what we were designed or how we were designed to be be. God wants us in community. God has given us the Holy Spirit to help us in our weakness. He is our trainer and our guide and our strengthener. He's also given us our church community.
He's given us each other. Everyone, look around this room. There are people here that can help you on your journey. Journey. We are created to come alongside each other and do life alongside each other.
We are designed to that. Iron strengthens iron. Iron strengthens iron. We're supposed to sharpen Each other up, hold each other accountable, encourage each other in our walk with God because God knew we couldn't do it alone. Our own strength isn't enough to get us through through.
Our own strength isn't enough to step into the purpose that God has for us. He didn't want us to be strong and have it all because then we wouldn't need him. We need him every day. Church. Our weakness is meant to be a display of his strength.
It's supposed to be an opportunity for us to come alongside each other and run after after him together. He wants us in church, he wants us in community. He wants us to do life alongside each other. This church has some beautiful opportunities. You've heard about the connect groups and the Alpha Nights and all those things.
There are so many opportunities to connect. And I know it can be terrifying for some people. It can be a bit of a scary thing. I am an introvert at heart. You wouldn't believe it sometimes, but I'm really scared of people and having conversations with them, it can be really uncomfortable.
So I go out into a busy, loud foyer and I'm like, oh, oh no, look, the cups need refilling. I'm going to go do that instead. It can be really scary. But that's where God calls us to take a step, step of vulnerability and a step of faith. That's where God calls us.
If that foyer is too loud for you, find a connect group. Find people that can come alongside you, that can encourage you because there is so much that he has for you. He wants you to do it with others and he doesn't want you to struggle alone because you were never meant to struggle alone.
Take that step of faith because God shows up when we're vulnerable. God shows up when we take that step of faith. He's called us to be courageous. Church. He's called us into a purpose that we can't even see yet.
Because that rich young ruler, he walked away. He missed the opportunity that God had for him because he couldn't see what Jesus was offering. All he could see was what he was losing. Don't focus on what God might be calling you to lose. Because there's so much more that God wants to give you.
There is so much more that God has in store for you. Step into that freedom this morning, Church. Step in with courage, step in with boldness, because that's what you're called to do. That's the people. We are called to be on fire for God, unhindered, unburdened and free.
And doing it alongside each other. So as I finish this morning, I just want to leave you with this question. What might you need to surrender today? What might God be stirring in your life for you to let go of? How can you step out in freedom in his name to do what he has called you to do?
Because this next season is exciting. The next season that we're walking into is incredible. So step in with freedom and step in with boldness. Church. Don't be afraid of what you're going to lose, but be ready for what you're going to gain.
Thank you.
I just going to to close our eyes and bow our heads and we'll pray you out. Thank you, Lord God, for everything that you have done. Thank you, Father, that you are with us every single second of every single day that you're after our hearts, Lord and Father, as we go on this journey of surrender, Lord, as we come to discover you anew and discover you afresh, God, I just pray that you will continue to show yourself to us. Continue to reveal your heart for each and every single individual here, for our church, for our future, for the communities around us. Lord God, strengthen our feet, Lord, and let us with humble hearts come surrounded and ready for all that you are going to give in your name.
We pray and thank you. Amen. All right. Yep, we do have Pastor Adrian coming up, but please enjoy everything that is outside for you. It's going to be a great afternoon, so stick around.
Why don't we give Kathleen a great hand? Hey, what a beautiful message. You know about. This is who we want to be as Christians, isn't it? Who's that?
You know, I don't know about you. If some of us have grown up in church and others of us are brand new, but Christianity and our faith in Christ is not supposed to be a burden. It's not supposed to be about rules. It's supposed to be a freedom of entering into the life that he's called us to. And that's what I love about our church.
I'm watching so many of us enter into that freedom to be, you know, free to love, to forgive, to be generous to others with who we are. And you guys are awesome at that. So let's hold on to the that. Hey. And we've got.
What have we got out there? I've been smelling the barbecue. Who likes a good barbecue? It's barbecue sausages. So if you like sausages, you're in luck.
I don't like sausages because I don't know, there's something wrong with me. But we got sausages and bread. We got activities. Let me pray for you. Let me pray for you before we finish.
And let's bow our heads and close our eyes. Lord God, I thank you for your people in this place today, Lord. I thank you, God, that you are. You're a God of love, Lord. You're not a God who demands things of us, Lord.
You're God who has given it all for us and then invites us to live that life with you, Lord God, it's a life of love, It's a life of joy. It's a life of forgiveness, of freedom, of acceptance, Lord God, of pouring out this beautiful life so that others can receive it. So I pray for each of us, Lord God, as we go to our workplaces, in our homes, you know what we're facing. You know what we're facing in our minds. Lord, I pray you'd set us free.
Set us free to know that we're loved. Set us free, God, to forgive those who hurt us. Lord Jesus. Set us free, God, to know that you've called us to make a difference. We're not wherever we go, God.
And that you're smiling on your people. You're smiling on your sons and daughters. They're called to do great and mighty things for you, Lord, we pray it in Jesus name. Everyone said amen. God bless you guys.
Why don't we stand to our feet, the band sing one last time, go have some activities and barbecue. Have a great day.
Hallelujah. Hallelujah.
Related Bible Verses
Matthew 19:16–26 (NLT)
16 Someone came to Jesus with this question: “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” 17 “Why ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. But to answer your question—if you want to receive eternal life, keep the commandments.” 18 “Which ones?” the man asked. And Jesus replied: “‘You must not murder. You must not commit adultery. You must not steal. You must not testify falsely. 19 Honor your father and mother. Love your neighbor as yourself.’” 20 “I’ve obeyed all these commandments,” the young man replied. “What else must I do?” 21 Jesus told him, “If you want to be perfect, go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” 22 But when the young man heard this, he went away sad, for he had many possessions. 23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “I tell you the truth, it is very hard for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. 24 I’ll say it again—it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!” 25 The disciples were astounded. “Then who in the world can be saved?” they asked. 26 Jesus looked at them intently and said, “Humanly speaking, it is impossible. But with God everything is possible.”
Click to view Matthew 19:16–26 on Bible.com
Matthew 22:36–37 (NIV)
36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’”
Click to view Matthew 22:36–37 on Bible.com
Matthew 11:30 (NIV)
For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Click to view Matthew 11:30 on Bible.com
Proverbs 27:17 (NIV)
As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.