Citizens of God's Kingdom: Work Without Giving Up
(Philippians 2:12-18) Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. Do all things without murmurings and disputings: that ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world; holding forth the word of life; that I may rejoice in the day of Christ, that I have not run in vain, neither laboured in vain. Yea, and if I be offered upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy, and rejoice with you all. For the same cause also do ye joy, and rejoice with me.
This passage turns around one phrase in verse 12: “Work out your own salvation.” The point to notice is those words 'work out' which translate a single word in Greek. Strong defines this word as: “to work fully, i.e. accomplish; by implication, to finish, fashion.” (#2716) As citizens of God's kingdom, the Philippians had begun working for God; they had started walking down the road of salvation--and Paul's insistence was that would continue in that path, that they would follow God until their Christian life came to completion, that they would work without giving up in their life of fellowship with the Gospel.
Paul gave this exhortation in confidence that they would listen to him, for they had obeyed the word of God given through Him--both while he was in Philippi and while he wasn't. It had been some time since he had last visited Philippi and at present, he couldn't have gone if he had wanted to--but they were still obeying the gospel he had preached; it would seem their obedience had grown even stronger with Paul's absence. One missionary told of how he would preach in a village and often the people would completely follow everything he told them to do--until he left the village and then they would all go back to doing the things they had been doing before. That wasn't the kind of obedience the Philippians had. They were dedicated to God's kingdom. And that was why Paul could exhort them to “work out” their salvation, to strive to bring it to completion.
The overall picture of this book is that the Philippians, at least those in the church whom Paul addressed, were already Christians. So, in that sense, they already had “salvation.” At least, their deliverance had begun. But it was not complete. We can think of it this way: when the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea, they were saved from Egypt; they were delivered from Pharaoh. They were no longer slaves in the land of Egypt. But that deliverance would not truly be complete until forty years later when they crossed the Jordan River into the land of Canaan. During that time, there was continual danger. Time after time, they were almost destroyed by hostile agents, human or natural. More often, they were almost destroyed by their own attitude, by their own murmurings and disputings. More than once, they even considered going back to Egypt, going back into slavery. Even after they got to Canaan, things weren't perfect but at least you could definitively say that they had completed their deliverance from Egypt. In the same way, when a person becomes a Christian, when they kneel at an altar and ask God to forgive their sins, their salvation is begun. They have been brought out of the kingdom of Satan and made a citizen of God's kingdom; they have been delivered from the house of sin and made to sit in heavenly places with Christ Jesus. Their salvation is begun, but they are still in danger of falling away to temptation; of tripping and stumbling; of giving way to pressure from those around them. In that sense, their salvation is not complete until that moment when the trumpet will sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. (1 Corinthians 15:52) Perhaps, for all we know, after that, there will still be progress to be made and things to be accomplished, but at that point, we can definitively say that our salvation has been completed.
We should note that this is a command and a very personal one. This is not merely an observation that something is happening, but a command to do something. And specifically, it is a personal command. Work out “your own” salvation. This does not mean “find your own way of salvation” or “make your own terms of salvation.” The Bible makes it clear that there is only one plan of salvation for there is only one Savior. Jude calls it “the common salvation.” (Jude 3) But this does mean that each of us is personally responsible for our own soul. Though the New Testament very much stresses the role of the church and what we do for one another, it nevertheless remains that no one else can work out your own salvation for you.
It is also, for lack of a better word, a very “serious” command. Notice that Paul says we are to do this with “fear and trembling.” In Ephesians 6:5, Paul tells slaves to obey their masters “with fear and trembling.” Now, just in a vacuum, you would think that this would mean fear of punishment--which is why a slave usually obeys his master. But if you look at Ephesians 6, it becomes clear that Paul didn't mean that, since his point is that slaves shouldn't be primarily concerned with pleasing or displeasing their masters. The point of Ephesians 6 is that the work of slaves was only secondarily for their masters and was primarily for God. They worked with fear and trembling because they were doing very serious work; the work of God. They were to work with a conscious realization of the weighty responsibility they had, to be careful and conscientious as befitted those who do the work of God. And that is what Paul is saying here. We are to work out our own salvation with the carefulness and conscientiousness which befits such an important task; with a full realization of the greatness of the task in which we are engaged.
But there is something odd about this command. Paul says that we are to work out our own salvation. That means it is something we must do. But Paul makes it clear in his other letters, and even later in Philippians, that salvation is not something that can be either begun or completed by human efforts. “By grace are ye saved through faith and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God.” It is not just that salvation is begun by God; it is also completed by God. In Galatians 3:3 Paul makes this clear. “Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?” From those passages, you would think that man has no part to play in it or, at the very least, has only a nominal, token role in it. Yet here we have this command. And it is not just this single verse. Throughout the New Testament, we have commands given to Christians--commands to walk in a certain way and to stand for certain things. And commands are always addressed to our wills--they are telling us to do or not to do certain things. Those things may not always be physical--there are commandments regarding our attitudes and our thoughts--but they are always things that we are (or are not) to do.
So here is a dilemma. On one hand, salvation is something God does to us, something we could never do on our own. On the other hand, we are continually being commanded, in one way or another, to work out our own salvation.
We may be able to figure this out if we look at exactly what these two sides are. First, what is our side? Specifically, what did Paul mean by telling the Philippians to work out their own salvation? To be humble, united, and to work without murmurings and disputings. In other words, to desire to do God's will and to actually do God's will. What then is God's part? It is in verse 13--He is working in us to will and to work.
And when we look at this, we will see that far from being opposed, these are actually the same thing. We will and work and God is at work in us to will and work. It's not that half of this is our work and half is God's work. We both share in the same work. If we are willing and working the things that God desires, then we are doing God's will and work, and if we are, it is because God is at work within us. But it is something we must choose to do. We can reject God's work and His will and then He will not be working it in us.
We can understand this practically with an example. Let's suppose a man is tempted to steal. We know that it is wrong to steal. It's God's will for us to be honest. We know that God will work his will in us. But it would be stupid for us to pick up the money and think, “Well, if God doesn't want me to steal, He'll stop me.” What should we do? Make the choice to resist the urge. “Yield not to temptation.” In other words, work out his own salvation. But we can only do that because God is working in us. Rather than being two things in opposition, these are actually two ways of looking at the same thing. When we do God's will, then God is also doing His will in us. Man was created to do God's will. There was never supposed to be a distinction between our will and God's will, because the two would have always existed together, side by side, willing the same things, doing the same things. We must “surrender our wills” to God, but on a deeper level, our will is most truly our own when we are willing to do the will of God.
And willing to do it consciously. I said before that if you resisted a temptation to steal, it was because God is working in you. But obviously, there are people who make no profession of Christianity who also resist such temptation. And while in some cases, their motives may be mostly wrong, in some cases there is true virtue and true honesty involved--and that is only because God, in His grace, is at work in the hearts of those who are far away from Him. Without His prevenient grace, there could be no true goodness in the world. But the sinner has no connection to God. When God gives him grace, he may never realize that it is grace and think it is just a natural endowment of his, that is he is just naturally a respectable, honest sort of chap. It may rain in the desert, but rain will never make an oasis. If we are to truly will and do the work of God, it must be by consciously, with fear and trembling, realizing that God is at work in us.
But notice why--why does God do this? “Of his good pleasure.” Always before I thought that this was saying that God was at work within us to produce His pleasure, His will in us. But the word “of” here functions as an explanation. This is the WHY--why God is at work within us. This phrase should sound familiar to those who have done study in the book of Ephesians, for there Paul explained that the entire work of salvation was accomplished because of God's good pleasure. There are some things we would only do if someone actually forced us; others we would only do under severe coercion; others we might do with enough pressure; others that we could be persuaded to do; others because we feel they need or ought to be done. But there are some things we chose to do simply because we want to. That is the idea behind this word “good pleasure.” God works in us because He wants to.
So what did it mean for the Philippians to work out their own salvation? Paul had already addressed some issues earlier in chapter 2 and now he summarizes his appeal in verse 14: “Do all things without murmurings and disputings.” And, really, there isn't much need for commentary on this verse. I don't need to go through in-depth word studies and elaborate illustrations to show to you what murmurings and disputings are nor to make you realize that such things sometimes occur even within the church. This ties back to Paul's exhortation at the beginning of the chapter, an exhortation to unity and humility. Paul didn't want the Christian's relationship to God or to one another to be disrupted by complaining and needless arguing.
And you might think that murmuring and disputing is just a minor issue, something that's not really all that important. But Paul didn't see it that way. The Philippian church was a strong church, dedicated to the fellowship of the gospel, but it seems that this problem of disunity, of murmuring and disputing, was its Achilles' heel. After saying “do all things without murmurings and disputings,” Paul begins verse 15 with these words: “That ye may be” (or, as Robertson has it, “that ye may become”) and then goes on to describe his vision for the church. He seems to be saying--this is what you could be, what you could be to God, to the world, and to me--if only you will work out your salvation and get over this problem of murmuring and disputing--this is the only thing which is holding you back from fulfilling God's plan for you. On this verse, Charles Spurgeon comments: “We cannot be blameless if we murmur and dispute, for such things naturally lead to sin. Our lights cannot shine if instead of trimming them we occupy ourselves with blowing out the lamps of others.”
We need to go back to the Old Testament for a minute. The Children of Israel were nominally God's people, the chosen nation, specially belonging to God as His children. But the sad reality is that for much of the time, they did not act the part of God's children and instead lived in sin like the people around them. God rebuked them for this, speaking through Moses in Deuteronomy 32:5-6. “They have corrupted themselves, their spot is not the spot of his children: they are a perverse and crooked generation. Do ye thus requite the LORD, O foolish people and unwise? is not he thy father that hath bought thee? hath he not made thee, and established thee?” In these verses, God rebukes the children of Israel for three things: (1) for being corrupted, (2) for not being identifiable as God's children. (Clarke takes the “spot” mentioned in verse 5 as meaning an identifying mark; they lacked the mark of God's children. Other translations understand it differently but come to the same conclusion in the end. The NET Bible comments: “Israel’s major fault was its failure to act like God’s people; in fact, they acted quite the contrary.”) (3) For being a perverse and crooked generation.
Paul, being steeped in Jewish knowledge and the study of the Old Testament, almost certainly had this verse and these accusations in his mind as he wrote Philippians 2:15: “That ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world.”
The children of Israel had become corrupted. But Paul's prayer was that the Philippians would be blameless and harmless. Blameless in Greek means the same thing it does in English, but the word harmless would be better translated as “unmixed” (Robertson) “pure” (NET Bible) or uncorrupted. The Israelites fault was that they could not be identified as God's children, but the Philippians were to be the sons of God, without rebuke. “Without rebuke” can also be translated “without spot” (Robertson) Moses condemned the children of Israel as a perverse and crooked generation. But Paul exhorted to the Philippians to stand out from the crooked and perverse nation around them.
And I got to this point in writing this when something occurred to me which may or may not be significant. Paul prefaces this verse with a warning against murmuring and disputing. And those two things were two of the main distinguishing marks of the Israelites during their wilderness wandering. We look at the children of Israel and we might think that their grumbling was the least of their problems. But it is possible that it was tied more closely to the rest of their failure than we might think. And in that case, I suppose one might argue that perhaps that the murmuring and disputing that still occurs in the church today may have more serious consequences than we would like to admit.
In any case, Paul's desire for the Philippians was that they would stand out from the world, being pure and blameless, in reality and in reputation the children of God. In Hebrew thought to be the son of someone meant to be like them. To be the son of God means to be like God. The Christian should look up to God like a child looking to his father and say: “I want to grow up to be like you.” But there is another side to that and it's that other side which Paul seems to be thinking of here. Because, as Christians, we are children of God and are therefore like God, people will judge God based on what they see in us. We are God's representatives to the world. That is why Paul says that we “shine as lights in the world; holding forth the word of life.”
The final result of the Philippians working out their own salvation was that they could be a witness to the world, revealing the character of God to those around them by being blameless and holy. Thus they would be able to hold out to the world the life-giving word of the Gospel.
The word used in verse 15 for “lights” means something which gives life and is used by the Greek OT to refer to the sun, moon, and stars--and many people think that this is the picture Paul is thinking of here. Montgomory's New Testament translates it this way: “You shine like stars in a dark world.”
The world of the New Testament was a dark world. It was a time of great sin, a time when false religions were rampant, when many people had given in to doubt and despair. And it was in that world that Paul told the Philippians to live, blameless and harmless, and to shine like stars, holding forth the word of light. When confronted with darkness, it will not do much good to murmur and complain, to remonstrate or reminisce, to become despairing or disgruntled. When confronted with darkness, the proper response is to shine a light.
If the Philippians would do that--if they would become that light in the dark world--if they would work out their salvation so that they could become brokers of the living world--then Paul could die happy. In verse 16 he ends his exhortation by saying: “That I may rejoice in the day of Christ, that I have not run in vain, neither laboured in vain.” The day of Christ seems to mean the judgment, what the People's New Testament Commentary calls “The day of accounts,” the time when all work on earth is reviewed and evaluated. When that day came, Paul didn't want to look back and say: “All that I did and went through for the Philippians was pointless because there was no fruit. I preached to them and they started out well, but they didn't pull through and nothing came of that work in the end.” Instead, he wanted to rejoice to see what God had wrought through his work and through the Philippian church. And Paul goes even further than that.
Verse 17 contains three separate words we need to take note of: “offered” “sacrifice” “service.” Sacrifice is a concept we are familiar with. It was a major part of both pagan and Jewish religion and was the act of offering something to God or to the gods, usually by the slaying of an animal. And in both pagan and Jewish rites, there were times when a drink offering would be poured out on the animal as part of the sacrifice. This is called a libation and that is the meaning behind this word offered. Finally, the word service is leitourgia (where we get our modern word liturgy) and it means the service or work of a priest, especially in offering a sacrifice.
Put these words together and we have a picture of what Paul is saying to the Philippians when he says “if I be offered upon the sacrifice and service of your faith.” Their faith--that is, their faith in God, their life as Christians, their ultimate salvation and their witness to the world--was like a sacrifice offered by a priest to God. They were dedicated to God like a sacrifice and they would be pleasing to God like an acceptable sacrifice. And if, in order to make that happen, Paul's own life would have to be poured out as a libation on that sacrifice, then he was content. Not just content, but rejoicing. “I joy, and rejoice with you all. For the same cause also do ye joy, and rejoice with me.” Read that out of context and you would associate that with something happy occasion--not somebody talking about their own death. And it wasn't that Paul was a morbid man who was happy to die. But if his death could be part of this sacrifice to God; if his labors and sufferings and death would help the Philippians work out their own salvation and become blameless and harmless to shine like lights in the darkness, then he was happy. He could rejoice in giving up his life because he was giving it up to God. He could speak like this to the Philippians because he knew that they, like him, were dedicated to the fellowship of the gospel, working as citizens of God's kingdom.
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