WORKING OUT SALVATION

"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." - PHILIPPIANS 2:12,13
 

I think that we are sometimes misled in our interpretation of this familiar text by attaching an incorrect notion to its two opening words.  To a hasty reader they imply that the safety of the soul can never be attained until the end of life. They may even seem to some to contradict the idea of salvation through faith, of immediate salvation on the ground of Christ's merits, which is the common teaching both of Paul and of the  other apostles.  They appear to throw back on our feeble shoulders the burden of our own redemption; and while they add the encouragement of God's cooperation with us, they yet seem to leave out of sight the complete salvation of the soul in Jesus Christ.  Not a few, I imagine, have hastily cited these words as somewhat inconsistent with the doctrine of justification by faith.

But the difficulty arises simply from a misunderstanding of the words "work out"; and perhaps I can best express the wrong and the right view by an illustration.  Let us suppose a slave offered his liberty on condition that he accomplish a certain amount of work.  This will illustrate the mistaken view of our text.  The slave is to work out his freedom.  He may have encouragements.  His master may even give him assistance.  But his freedom is to be the reward of his own exertions.  He will pay for it by his own toil.  He will work it out in the sense of securing it as the wages of years of labor.  If this were the sense in which we are to work out our salvation, it would be obvious that we have a hard task upon our hands, and that if ever we gain freedom we shall have good reason to compliment ourselves.

But let us suppose the case of a slave emancipated by his master, given his full liberty at once; and then directed, both for the sake of gratitude to his liberator and for the sake of his own self-development, to prove himself worthy of freedom.  He, too, is now to work out his liberty: but not in the sense of procuring it, but in the sense of bringing out that which is in it, of using it well, of applying himself so as to enjoy his new privileges.  He is to prove himself really free by manifesting self-control; by securing employment and culture; by making his own the blessings and the prerogatives of freedom.  Legally free, he is to work out a freeman's life, that he may manifest to others and himself enjoy both the rights and the duties which pertain to his new condition.

This latter case will illustrate, I believe, the sense in which we are to work out our salvation.  We may have it at once by faith in Christ Jesus.  No one teaches this more plainly than Paul.  Jesus secured our needed emancipation.  We are free from condemnation.  We have passed from death unto life. We are no more the possession of Satan, but the accepted children of God.  We are reconciled to God by the death of His Son, and our first need is to realize, in all its wonderful meaning, the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.  Having this possession, we are to work it out to its consummation. Having it legally, we are to work it out practically. Having it in the germ, we are to work out in our lives all its tendencies and consequences.

And this is to be an individual matter.  Each one is to work out his salvation for himself. Each one stands in an individual relation to Christ.  Each one has individually believed and individually lives. And so, individually, we are to weave into the fabric of our own lives, as that grows with the years, the pattern which God has given us; we are each to work it out, as the skilled workman may work out in wood or metal the idea which lies already fully formed within his mind. We are not to work for life, but, as it were, from life, as being those who already have it and who are resolved, by divine grace, to experience all that life implies. Just as God Himself works out in the history of creation His primeval thought, that thought which before the first creative word was uttered already embraced in itself every moment of history, and every atom of existence, so are we in the sphere of Christ Jesus, in whom potentially we have all things, to work Christ out with fear and trembling into the actual being, thought and character of our souls.

With this understanding of the text, let us take, in turn, the chief elements of which our salvation consists and consider how they are to be worked out to their proper results.

First, our salvation consists in the enlightenment of our minds by the saving truths of the Gospel, and therefore we are to work these truths into the actual fabric of our lives. A man becomes a Christian in part through the personal apprehension of certain practical truths.  Those truths are old in that they have been known in the world from the beginning of Christian history; they have been formulated into dogmas and creeds; they have been expressed in the hymns an prayers of the Church of all ages; they have become the familiar commonplaces of religion.  Yet to each man they are new, in that, in becoming himself a Christian, he feels their force for the first time.  To him it is as if they had just been revealed.  They are practically a new discovery to him.  They have power over his mind.  They have a vital meaning for the first time.  It has been said that genius is shown by making fresh what is familiar.  Some of the greatest discoveries of science have consisted in the perception of what really lay in the commonest and best known facts.  Truth is all about us: and the discoverer or the poet but catches a glance, through facts with which all are familiar, into the realm of ideas and forces which have always existed in the facts, but which ordinary eyes have not seen.  So the believer is a discoverer; and the new light which he now perceives for the first time is practically to him a revelation.

What these saving truths are I need not rehearse. They are not many.  They are all closely connected with each other.  They are so related that when the mind has felt one, it must needs feel the others also. Foremost of them is the reality of God; His personal presence; His authority and His power; His righteousness and His holiness.  Closely united with this there is the sense of man's sin – of his alienation from God – and, therefore, his need of repentance and pardon.  Now these two truths merge in the perception of what in reality Christ is, what He signifies in the history of mankind: that God has manifested Himself in the person of Christ and that we may have redemption through Christ's name.  This is to human minds as the light of the sun.  It carries with it a thrilling perception of what God is and what we are: that faith is our duty, love our life, and heaven our hope.  God has shined into our hearts to bring the light of knowledge of His glory in the face of Jesus Christ.

Certainly, although this perception of Christ is enough to alter a man's whole view of life, the truth is very imperfectly apprehended by him.  Even so, how little he knows of God! How little he understands the cross itself! He must feel that this Sun which risen upon him with healing in its wings is yet full mystery.  Of its past history and of its present nature he knows scarcely anything, while beyond the circle in which it moves and from which its beams fall upon him the vast unmeasured distances of space assure him that secrets of which he knows nothing but the fact of their existence await further illumination.  Only he knows that he has enough light to walk and work and live by. He must feel as I suppose one would who has discovered some mechanical principle which solves for him a knotty problem by which he been vexed, but the further application and the inner-most meanings of which are as yet unsolved.

Nevertheless, he is enlightened, and now, yielding with joy to the discovery he has made, he is impelled to work out to all its legitimate consequences the saving truth of the Gospel.  It will never do to stop.  Truth is realized only when it is embodied and worked out in some material.  As a theory it is but a cloud driven by the winds.  The cloud must descend and enter into the structure of the world, and the truth must enter into living expression. And the natural material which such truths as these of the Gospel seek is the human soul. In its life truth is to become, as it were, incamate.  Take any political theory as an illustration. You know that it is realized only by being worked out in the fortunes of a people.  Only so can its real worth appear. Only so can the truth and the error in it be separated. Only so can its mission be fulfilled. Otherwise it will evaporate and disappear.  Or take any scientific truth. You know that it is discovered as a fact in actual operation.  The object of science is to ascertain what is working in the natural world, and this is but another way of ascertaining how the Creator is working out the principles which He impressed upon the world.

I was deeply impressed by an anecdote once related by Dr. Archibald Alexander Hodge, of that distinguished scientist, Professor Joseph Henry.  As a young man Dr. Hodge was Professor Henry's assistant In making his experiments.  He says: "I can well remember the wonderful care with which he arranged all his principal experiments. Then often, when the testing moment came, that holy as well as great philosopher would raise his hand in adoring reverence and call upon me to uncover my head and worship in silence. 'Because,' he said, 'God is here: I am about to ask God a question.'"  Surely, that was the right spirit of scientific inquiry – none the less exact for being religious – and it went upon the idea that God is working out in nature His own thought and plan. So, I say, truth is to be embodied – worked out into the material of our lives: and the Christian, being once enlightened, is to work out his salvation with fear and trembling.

I could take each of the revealed truths of the Gospel and show, in part at least, how it is to be thus wrought out. Take, for example, the truth of the Incarnation.  It is not to be regarded as a mere mystery without moral bearing upon our lives.  It was the culmination in Scripture history of the truth which had been formerly taught to Enoch when he walked with God, and afterward to Israel by tabernacle and temple in which Jehovah dwelt.  It reveals the possibility, I mean, of the indwelling of God in and among men.  Worked out by the believer, it results in a sense of divine nearness and likeness which make the whole world radiant with divine presence.  It results in the sense of God in us – Christ in you, the hope of glory, our bodies the temples of God by the Spirit: and thus, in the growing consciousness of union and communion on earth with the Father and the Son. I, too, am a son of God, and this carries with it a view of privilege and duty, of inheritance and possession, of expanding life and eternal glory before which the mind fails as the eye before the sunbeams, and can but wait for time to unfold the unspeakable reality.

This must suffice as an example.  You may take each truth of the Gospel and similarly work out its logic in your life.  It will not be bare logic, but living experience, growing knowledge. God means His word thus to be wrought into His new creation; therefore, perhaps, it was that He revealed Himself not as an abstract truth, but as a life, the Word made flesh – that as out of nature the student gathers part of God's thought, so out of Christ he might gather more. Thus as the student reapplies what he has discovered, so are we to reapply in our lives what we discern from Christ's. God does not wish His truth to return to Him as it came forth, any more than the farmer when he sows his seed wishes to pick up the seed again as he cast it down.  What he looks for is the harvest – the product of the seed which he has sown as it has been worked through the processes of nature.  So God desires His word to return to Him not in propositions and theories, but in living souls – informed, pervaded, illuminated, recreated, by the truth they have received. And if we have been enlightened by these saving truths of the Gospel, this is in order that the fabric of the new creation may arise in us made according to the pattern shown in the mount.  We are now and henceforth to work out this salvation in our thoughts and feelings and actions, even to the very last result.  Thus shall we approach unto the perfect man – the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

But let us take another view of our salvation. It consists not only in the enlightenment of the mind by saving truth, but in the fact which is thereby revealed of sin actually forgiven, of justification for Christ's sake before the Father, of acceptance in the Beloved: and this reconciliation with God we are to work out into its ultimate aim of perfect holiness.

No candid student of Scripture can doubt that it teaches the doctrine that the sinner is freely justified and acquitted by God from all his guilt as soon as he believes in the Lord Jesus.  God does not put us on probation when we come to His Son.  He treats us as the father of the prodigal did his penitent boy.  He acknowledges us as His sons, and forthwith reinstates us in our place in His house.  Therefore Christ said to the penitent woman and to the believing paralytic, “Thy sins are forgiven thee."  Therefore He cried to all His hearers, "He that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life."  Therefore Paul wrote in the spirit of Christ: "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus," and quoted to the same effect the old prophet's words, "Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved."  We believe, therefore, in immediate justification.  God accepts the penitent sinner as righteous for Christ's sake.  He imputes to him the righteousness of Christ. He declares him legally guiltless.  God is reconciled to the sinner and the sinner is reconciled to God. The believer is a free man.  Before God's law he is an innocent man.  His sins and his iniquities are remembered no more.  He is reconciled in Christ to God. At the foot of the cross the burden rolls off

Now, perhaps, this is precisely what most of you understand by salvation. It is salvation; but in one very important sense it is incomplete: and hence the difficulty which men so often find in it.  Not a few people actually regard this doctrine as injurious. They say, for example, that it teaches men so to rely on the work of another as to do no work themselves; that it affords also an easy excuse by which men can imagine themselves saved while they continue living in sin.  It is said, further, that this doctrine is a mere legal fiction, such as we cannot suppose God to act upon, however men may do so  He must treat men as they are: and to accept as righteous for the sake of another those whom He knows to be unrighteous would be to bring His government into merited contempt.  Hence the sheltering robe of Christ's merits is sought to be dragged from our shoulders, much as the elder brother would have torn from the prodigal the "best robe" which his father had put upon him: and we should all be left in our shame and sinfulness to stand the poor chance we should have at the hand of eternal righteousness.

It will help to remove such objections from your minds and may lead you to give no ground for such objections to others, if you will mark the bearing of our text on this view of our salvation.  There is no doubt, as I have said, that the Bible teaches immediate justification for Christ's sake.  But it is important to add that the Bible insists with equal force that the salvation which is made legally ours we are to work out; the liberty which has been declared to be ours we are to exercise both as to its privileges and duties; the acquittal which we have received we are to make a real and personal deliverance from actual bondage of sin.  It is only on the supposition that the formal will thus become the real that it permitted.  It is only on the supposition and certainty of our becoming like Christ that we are allowed to know that in Christ we are saved.

In this, as in the former point, an illustration may make clear the force of our text. In Drummond’s well-known book on Natural Law in the Spiritual World, one of the most interesting chapters is upon "Environment."  This is the modern word for circumstances.  It means the sum total of the outward conditions in which any object lives.  The influence of an animal's environment upon it is now recognized as one of the great complex forces in its development. If it adjusts itself to its environment it will live.  Harmony with environment is the condition of life, and the higher the environment, the higher the life.  If it be removed to another environment, it will often, if it have sufficient vitality, come to adjust itself thereto so as quite to change its habits.  This is a well-known fact in nature and, as Drummond points out, we find the same fact in moral and spiritual matters.  A man is made by his company.  If he would improve, he must put himself in a better environment.  Yea, his effort should be to put himself into the best of all environments, of which God Himself is the chief factor, that by adjusting himself thereto he may find in harmony with God the perfect life.

I think that the ingenious author might have carried his argument a step further.  His book has been criticized because it contains no reference to atonement, and here, if anywhere, this might have been introduced.  For when God reinstates us into His favor in Christ Jesus and accepts us as righteous for Christ's sake, this is but placing us in the most favorable circumstances for the growth of spiritual character.  We are in Christ as the tender plant, which, sheltered in the conservatory from the winter's storm, produces even tropical fruit.  So in Christ, with guilt removed, with favor shown, with hope heating high, we are so situated that, in spite of contending temptation, we may work out in our lives the actual image of the Saviour.  We do not have to work against only hostile influences.  We are only in a state of imperfect adjustment.  Already we have the faith, the love, the desire, and in Christ we become fashioned, as otherwise we could not do, into the likeness of our Lord. If you wish to reform and save a child whom you have discovered in a home of squalor and vice, you will not have much prospect of success if you shall merely give it good advice and offer to pay its schooling and furnish it with clothes, while leaving it in its squalid, vicious surroundings.  No; if you wished to save such a child, you would feel that these would undo all your work.  You would remove it beyond their influence.  Perhaps you would take it to your own home.  There you would have reasonable hope of its reformation.  There it would be able to work out your benevolent intentions.  The purity and cleanliness and religion of your home would gradually become natural to it.  The old nature would be put off and a new nature put on, congruous to the new circumstances amid which you have placed the child.

Thus, as I conceive it, God does with the believer.  He puts him, first of all, in such a new relation to Himself, that in it spiritual growth is possible. We could not be made holy without first being forgiven.  We could not work out our salvation without having first received it as a free gift.  But having so received it, we are to work it out.  Like emancipated slaves we are to prove ourselves worthy of liberty.  Being declared freemen, we are to shake off our fetters.  There is plenty of need of effort and toil.  It is real work.  God does not exempt us from such work.  Only it is work with a reasonable prospect of success: and that is not true of the work of those who labor for their salvation with the law against them.  We are to work our salvation out.  We are to enter into a personal experience, ever more and more complete, of that union with God, that liberty from sin, that deliverance from evil, which already we have the moment we believe in Jesus, though we have not realized in experience its infinite blessings.

Such, then, I apprehend to be the meaning of this command.  There are other points of view from which we might regard it, but these two that I have presented to you must suffice.  Certainly they are sufficient to give ardor and hope to every earnest believer.  The apostle does indeed say, "Work with fear and trembling."  But no doubt he so spoke because he would have us realize the momentous nature of our task.  We may well be filled with awe as we consider the privileges we enjoy, the trust committed to us, the magnificent goal which is held before us.  And by fear and trembling I understand not slavish terror, not fear which springs from doubt, but the solemnity and carefulness which should spring from the sense of our divine sonship and our peerless portion in Christ, which are to be worked out in this world and in the flesh.  And that we may not faint he does not fail to add also the reminder, "It is God which worketh in you both the willing and the doing according to His good pleasure."  This phrase confirms our view of the text.  We are to work as those in whom God already works and dwells; as those therefore, whom He has already accepted, and whose purpose is to carry out His purpose; whose work is done because He is working; and who, therefore, again have the utmost encouragement to persevere.

Let us obey, therefore, my hearers, this most practical command.  Consider the capital you have to start with, and then work out its utmost capacity, that the return may be larger, and a larger reinvestment follow. Already you are Christ's, I assume. Yours is the Sacrifice and the Advocate; yours is the citizenship on high; yours is the Holy Spirit; yours are the truth and the promises. Therefore your work is plain. Enjoy your liberty.  Put sin under your feet.  Apply the truth to every exigency of life. Follow in the footsteps of the Master.  Solemnly, carefully, yet joyfully and hopefully, work out into life and character, in opinion and emotion and conduct, in short, into your whole being, the salvation which you have from Christ by faith; and you need not fear.  He who worketh in you will enable you to succeed.

And if there be any poor soul here who is trying to work out salvation for himself in the other sense, with no acceptance of a Saviour now, – working it out doubtfully, anxiously, and vainly, seeing how poor and faulty the result is, – let me point out to that soul its great error. Your anxiety, your toil, your readiness to work, my brother, are all right; but you are working in the wrong way and you never will succeed.  You need to stop working for a while, to look at your worthless products, and then to Him for salvation – to the Lord, our Righteousness.  He only can save you. He will put at once the robe on your shoulders and strength within your heart.  He will give you what you cannot make for yourself, and then He will enable you to work as you never worked before; to work out in your life by His spirit the glorious salvation which He has purchased by His blood. Work not to Christ, but for Christ and with Christ, and you will have solved the problem – the working out of your own salvation.

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