Spiritually Working Out
Phil 2:12-13 January 16, 2011
Intro:
I don’t know about you, but it has seemed a little difficult to re-engage this January. Joanne and Thomas and I enjoyed our vacation, though we didn’t enjoy arriving back in Edmonton last Saturday in the middle of the biggest snow storm of the year which then led into the coldest week we’ve had yet this winter. And though it doesn’t feel like it particularly, we are half-way through January already!
Prior to our focus on the Advent season, we were exploring the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church at Philippians. During the fall we managed to cover all of chapter one and half of chapter 2, and this morning we are going to dive back into Philippians and start our journey once again. But I don’t plan to get far... there are a couple of rich verses that I want to look at in-depth, and I want to start with some time refreshing our minds about where we’ve been.
Context: vs. 1:27-2:11 (NLT)
I won’t go all the way back to the beginning of the epistle, but we do need to go back to what is generally seen as the start of the section we are still in, which began in 1:27, because it sets the context for the verses we are going to look at today. There Paul introduced the section to come by writing, "Above all, you must live as citizens of heaven, conducting yourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ." The rest of chapter 1, and all of chapter 2 thus far have been elaborating on what it means for us to live as citizens of heaven, and how we should conduct ourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ. Rather than try to summarize it, I’m just going to read the entire passage that we have already studied, it is not too long.
27 Above all, you must live as citizens of heaven, conducting yourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ. Then, whether I come and see you again or only hear about you, I will know that you are standing together with one spirit and one purpose, fighting together for the faith, which is the Good News. 28 Don’t be intimidated in any way by your enemies. This will be a sign to them that they are going to be destroyed, but that you are going to be saved, even by God himself. 29 For you have been given not only the privilege of trusting in Christ but also the privilege of suffering for him. 30 We are in this struggle together. You have seen my struggle in the past, and you know that I am still in the midst of it.
1 Is there any encouragement from belonging to Christ? Any comfort from his love? Any fellowship together in the Spirit? Are your hearts tender and compassionate? 2 Then make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one mind and purpose.
3 Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. 4 Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too.
5 You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had.
6 Though he was God,
he did not think of equality with God
as something to cling to.
7 Instead, he gave up his divine privileges;
he took the humble position of a slave
and was born as a human being.
When he appeared in human form,
8 he humbled himself in obedience to God
and died a criminal’s death on a cross.
9 Therefore, God elevated him to the place of highest honor
and gave him the name above all other names,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Continuing on... vs. 12-14
This beautiful hymn about Jesus leads into the next two verses which we are going to look at today. I’m switching to the NIV, where Paul turns his thoughts back to the people of Philippi and writes this:
"12 Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed--not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence--continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose."
I don’t want to go further than this because I think there is enough there for us to figure out together -- what is this "salvation" that we are supposed to "work out", with "fear and trembling", and doesn’t that seem to contradict this next verse that says it is "God who works"? Let’s take some time with each of those ideas and see if we can discern together what God is saying to us.
Salvation:
Let’s start with salvation. In our evangelical tradition we tend to see salvation as a single act happening at a moment of time. We see it as the thing God did when we understood and received the message, prayed the sinners’ prayer, and became a Christian. This is how we tend to talk about it: "when were you saved?", "he/she got saved", "I received salvation". We’ve tended to focus on that one, great, powerful moment in time, and come to believe that is what the New Testament means when it speaks of our salvation.
But that is not the whole story. Salvation is not just a single event at a moment of time. When the Bible talks about salvation, it speaks of it not only in the past tense, but also in the present and the future tense. I was saved, I am being saved, and I will be saved. It is far more encompassing that we generally assume.
So how does all that work? Well, when we accept Jesus as Saviour and Lord we are saved -- this past-tense experience of salvation is when we cross over from death to life and God changes our eternal destiny so that it is secure with Jesus. This one we understand, though even here our experience tells us that this transition is not always one powerful defining "moment of conversion", but is often a journey over time where we come to recognize that yes, we really do believe and accept Jesus and are living for him.
And the future element is easy for us to grasp -- we know that when Jesus comes again or we die and meet Him, we will be saved from the penalty for our sin which we deserve and we will instead be welcomed into an eternity with Jesus in an active, purposeful, exciting, creative, perfect, heaven. (note I did not say "we will enter our eternal rest..." -- heaven is not a place where we float on clouds with harp music lulling us into some lifeless stupor... God didn’t create us to spend eternity with him groggy and half asleep).
But what of this present-tense notion, "I am being saved"? This one is key, regarding salvation in general but this passage in Phil 2 especially. What does it mean for us to continue being saved? I think I’d like to hear your thoughts on this... what do you think?
For me, the central idea is the continued transformation of my daily life, so that I can experience the incredible life God desires for me now instead of the one I settle for as I give in to temptations and sin and then suffer the consequences. I just said heaven is not a place of grogginess -- I actually believe that as we live our lives on our own instead of as God desires we live that grogginess now. Our lives become bland, sleepy, surface, and instead of real and lasting joy we at most get a chuckle or a smirk from some lame TV show. It is the difference between laying on the couch watching a cooking show and actually sitting down at the table and joining a feast -- the TV is two-dimensional, you can see it and you can hear it, but that’s it. In reality, you see it, hear it, smell it, touch it, and taste it. To be continually saved, to affirm "I am being saved", is to affirm that God continues to transform my life now and God continues to save me from a bland, semi-conscious state of passivity, and bring me into what Jesus called "life to the full."
I’m going to pause there for a moment. It is January, a good time to reflect on our lives and perhaps begin some changes. As you look at your life, especially your relationship with God, is it characterized by "life to the full"? Is it more like watching the cooking show on TV or sitting at the banquet? I think some of us might be lacking in spiritual passion. We might have sidelined our first love -- Jesus -- and we might be putting too much effort into other areas of our lives to the neglect of our earnest, lively, joyful pursuit of life as citizens of heaven. Maybe you look backwards to times in your life when you were closer to God and recognize a gap between where you were then and where you are now. If so, repent, draw near to God -- He didn’t wander away, He didn’t get sidetracked, He isn’t the sleepy groggy one. The banquet is infinitely better than the TV show! Come back in. There is no shame or condemnation awaiting you, no Jesus with arms crossed and a scowl waiting for you to grovel and humiliate yourself. Only joy, forgiveness, and a seat at the table.
"Work Out..."
Let’s get back to the passage... it says "continue to work out your salvation". I hope this is a little more clear when we see salvation as an ongoing, present reality. It makes a little more sense, but that gets us to the next problem: what is this "work out" bit? Aren’t we saved by grace? Isn’t salvation entirely a work of the Holy Spirit, and not of us -- "8 God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. 9 Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it." (Eph 2).
Absolutely. All true. But then what happens next? God saves us, then does He take over our lives, push us into the passenger seat of the car while He drives and we just go along for the ride passively staring out the window? Nope. Our free will does not end when we accept Jesus as our Saviour and Lord. We still get to choose how to live, and the great hope and purpose is that our new lives will be lived with choices where, "as citizens of heaven, (we) conduct ourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ. It doesn’t all stop at the moment of salvation -- even that classic text from Eph goes further if we read the next verse: "10 For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago." We "can do" the good things he planned, and this is the "working out our (present/ongoing) salvation.
Next we have to counter the negative connotations of the word "work" in our overly-indulged culture. Work is a good thing. Our culture reverses that -- work is a necessary evil so that we can make money to buy things that we can then enjoy. Scripture knows nothing of that definition of work -- that is a consumption message to manipulate us into a consumer identity. Work is a privilege, an honor, a purposeful creating of something valuable. more on that another time... I need to get back to Philippians
Fear and Trembling:
What is this next phrase about -- "with fear and trembling"? I need you to listen closely -- if you’ve tuned out a bit, please tune back in J. First, we are not talking about the future aspects of salvation -- this "fear and trembling" is NOT, repeat NOT, about some insecurity about where we will spend eternity. It is absolutely NOT we are terrified that if we don’t work hard enough we will get to the end and Jesus will say, "nice try but you didn’t make it..." Absolutely NOT.
Instead, this is about our attitude in the present to God’s ongoing work of saving us as we work out this present salvation through our determined obedience. Our attitude. Let me put it on a pendulum -- at one extreme is this distant, terrible, punishing God, who will smite us if we don’t obey. I reject that completely, because it is not the Jesus I read of in the Gospel. But on the other side of the pendulum, which I think many of us are in greater danger of, is a weak Jesus who is at most a peer. We twist the very true images of Jesus as friend, of God as Father, of a purposeful intimacy with God that we should have and that God desires to have with us, and we twist those images so that we are on the same level -- we are equals, we are peers, God is a buddy we hang around with. And then what happens is that we ask this buddy to help us out. We cram Him into the back seat of the car so that He can push us out of the snow bank we go smashing into because we didn’t pay attention to the conditions of the road and drive accordingly. But I reject that also, and here is where the passage pulls us back to when it speaks of "working out our salvation with fear and trembling". It is not fear of punishment, instead it is a constant awareness of who this God really is -- the All-Powerful Lord of the Universe. It is not a fear to keep us apart, but a fear to keep us from exalting ourselves to equality with God, a fear that in our moments of decision about how to live keeps us from putting our desires on par with God’s, as if we have a choice between them without consequence. The fear is not what God will do to us if we disobey, the fear is what we will do to ourselves when we sin, and how that will impact our relationship with God and our experience of life.
Back to God...
That brings us to the final verse (see why I only chose two verses today!). It is good news: "for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose." Lest we read verse 12 and felt overwhelmed with how much we were responsible for, or (worse) misunderstood and felt we now had to work to earn our salvation (categorically NOT!), Paul reassures us. It isn’t us, it is God. Note he has it all covered -- "to will and to act". God will take care of the desire (will) and the action. So again it is not about us, not about our earning anything or deserving anything or taking credit for anything. God does it. So where does that leave us -- back in a place of passivity, "well I don’t feel like obeying yet, God hasn’t given me the "will" yet, so I’m just going to keep sitting in front of the metaphorical TV watching life go by until God stirs up the will in me"? NOPE! We still have free will, we still are responsible to make choices, being saved (past tense) and making Jesus Lord does not mean we become remote-controlled drones, with Jesus up in heaven at the control console as if we are a computer generated character in a video game. Instead, we choose what to expose ourselves to. We choose what to pay attention to. We choose between church and sleeping in, between prayer and surfing the internet, between a novel and Scripture. And when we choose to pay attention to Jesus, He loves us actively, He forgives and empowers, He opens us up to life, He takes us into the banquet where we can see, hear, smell, touch, and taste; instead of standing at the window outside in the cold. And that creates the will, that is God "working in us to will and to act", and our desires are transformed and then our actions flow from those desires.
Conclusion
I feel like we’ve covered a lot of ground this morning, I hope and pray that the Holy Spirit has and will take what each of us needs to hear and burn it into our hearts.
Interestingly, God seemed to be whispering the same things to Pastor Sue as she prepared our worship through music, and me as I prepared our worship through digging in God’s word. This passage of Scripture brings us to the inner core, and the transformation that needs to happen there, so I’m going to let her lead us through this final movement in our service today.
