WORK IT OUT

Phil.2:12,13 – work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to desire and to work for His good pleasure.

Christianity is hard too comprehend, no impossible to comprehend, with human reasoning alone. There are just so many things about it that don’t make sense. Things like ‘the first shall be last’ or ‘if you seek to save your life you will lose it’. One that always got me was before ‘honor comes humility’. Today’s verse is an example of the dilemma we face as Christians, is it God doing the work or is it us doing the work? At first Paul acts as if every bit of the responsibility falls on us, ‘work out your own salvation’ But before the verse is even over Paul says that ‘it God who is at work in you’. So Christianity is a great mystery, we yield our lives to Him, He works in us. He will give instructions, we have to follow them, and then He begins to work through us. Here is how C.S. Lewis describes this.

“The first half of this verse is, ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling’—which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, ‘For it is God who worketh in you’—which looks as if God did everything and we nothing. I am afraid that is the sort of thing we come up against in Christianity. I am puzzled, but I am not surprised. You see, we are now trying to understand, and to separate into water-tight compartments, what exactly God does and what man does when God and man are working together. And, of course, we begin by thinking it is like two men working “together, so that you could say, ‘He did this bit and I did that.’ But this way of thinking breaks down. God is not like that. He is inside you as well as outside: even if we could understand who did what, I do not think human language could properly express it.”

He calls us to preach and then He preaches through us. He calls us to pray then He prays through us. He calls us to be involved with His work financially, He then supplies the resources for us to give. We have to be willing and even aggressive at times but at the end of it all it is God who is at work in us.