. . . continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose. (Phil 1.12-13)
As one old bishop put it, “We have been saved, we are being saved, and we will be saved.” Paul is here focussing on the present tense, what we are doing in the here and now.
This is an incredibly important passage for understanding how God works in us, and what our responsibilities as Christians are. How does it work?
Paul tells us that God is working in us right now; we normally understand this to refer to the work of the Holy Spirit (though, any time one Person of the Trinity is at work, they are all at work). The love of God is being spread abroad in our hearts through the Spirit, enabling us to suffer, persevere, develop a godly character, have hope, and to be witnesses for Jesus Christ (Rom 5.5). He is producing the fruit of love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control in us (Gal 5.22-23).
These are not small things! And there is much more that could be said about the work that God is doing in us – but this is just a short blog.
Paul says God works in us “to will and to act.” Now the question becomes, whose willing and whose acting?
It is clear that both the willing and acting are ours. Here is the thing, though: we will and act in fear and trembling because we cannot see the Spirit at work; we must have faith that he is in us, and ministering his grace to us.
Having faith like this is not very easy these days, especially when there are so many voices telling us that we can hear God directly in so-called “conversational prayer,” telling us this or that. This essentially negates the need for faith here.
The hard fact of it is, as we are walking along in the world, to the physical eye we will not look much different from our neighbour; and the fact that our willing and acting is based on the foundational work of God’s Spirit within us will also not be visible to the naked eye. But this is what Paul is getting at.
We need not worry overmuch, brothers and sisters, what God’s will is for our lives when it comes to particular situations. We should instead have faith that he has been at work in us since the day we were born again, and trust that the good desires that we have, and the good things we wish to do, come from the work his Spirit has already been doing in us.
J & S on Mission 