1/22/56

Philippians 2: 5-16

Text: Philippians 2: 12; "Work out your own salvation....."

Paul, the great spiritual apostle and missioner, is a writer and teacher of the message of salvation by the grace of God. It is almost startling, then, to find him uttering such a statement as he wrote in his letter to the Philippians: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." Is that in line with the rest of his teaching?

Of course these words are not as startling as they first sound. When Paul uses the words, "Your own," he is not recommending human self-sufficiency in place of reliance upon God. Rather, he is urging the Christians at Philippi to stand on their own faithful feet rather than to lean upon him, Paul. "Not only as in my presence, but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation...."

They were little people there at Phillippi, just beginning Christians. They may have been uncertain, lonely, lost without the guidance and assurance of Paul now that he was no longer in their midst. That is the way it often is when we have depended upon some more experienced personality or some great soul. A man leaves the familiarity of a job that he has done so long as to be quite familiar with it, and accepts a new responsibility, perhaps a promotion, maybe in a new location, and he feels suddenly insecure as he steps into the new and the unknown. But he must soon stand on his own feet and make his own decisions. Often he looks higher than himself for spiritual aid and assurance, while he is getting the feel of the work and gaining confidence in it.

We cherish the brave one at our side who keeps us from being cowardly; the teacher who is afire with some truth that has brought light and hope to us, the dependable man who has made us believe in goodness, the great soul who has made us believe that we can be better. So long as we are in the circle of people who thus influence us, we are all right. But they go away, or we leave, and then everything is different. We are on our own. We must grow up in our own confidence, even though it may be hard.

It is to this fact that Paul is speaking when he says "work out you own salvation." How shall a person work out his salvation? Is that possible? In a sense it is not. It is a deep theological truth that we are not saved from our distresses, our shortcomings, our perversions and sins, our tragedies, our dissatisfactions, except by the grace of God. Nevertheless, part of the truth is that we must put forth our own efforts. There is a hymn, familiar to many, in which one stanza begins, "Must I be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease?" But the singer is quickly reminded that there is a cross for everyone, and for himself as well.

Salvation means not only release, but responsibility as well - the responsibility of working out the salvation God has begun in men - - in you and in me. Paul can never rest until he has made his fellow Christians understand what salvation must lead to, and result in.

Salvation is the whole process of God’s saving mercy. It goes on throughout life -- and beyond mortal life. Its evidences are found here and now in practical things. "Moralism" is sometimes made out to be a smoothly disparaging word. But one of Paul’s most persistent purposes was to make all Christian people let their salvation grow into the every day morals that give flavor to life. Christians were to work hard to (1) make an honest living; (2) they were to be law-abiding citizens which included paying their taxes; (3) they were to tell the truth, not cheat, not go into debt. (4) Husbands and wives were told by Paul how they were to bear themselves toward one another. (5) He wrote how fathers should treat their sons and how sons should think and act toward their parents; (6) how masters should treat their servants and servants their masters. (7) He wrote about kindness and consideration and courtesy.

These things would not grow by accident. If men wanted the redeeming waters from the reservoirs of God, they had to be diligent in keeping the channels open for God’s grace to flow into their lives.

(1) There must then be desire on the part of all who want God’s salvation to be real. One church was condemned by Paul because it was "lukewarm." And even the mercy of God will not save a man against his will. He must want salvation. He must go after it like a merchant seeking pearls, says Paul.

In small towns of the past in our country, there were to be found here and there, preachers with little formal training, though with much personal religious conviction. Now and then one of these fellows would display a good deal of gumption even though his grammar was lacking. One such preacher, full of a sense and sincerity used often to preach about predestination, and about those who will be elect to heaven. [Good Calvinist doctrine, even if it is a bit deep -- and debatable.]

A local citizen who had achieved considerable note in the political world met the preacher one day and said to him: "I hear you preach a lot about predestination, and about those who will be elect to heaven. What about me? Do you think I will be elected?" To which the preacher replied: "Well, sir, you run for the council once, and you got elected. Then you run for mayor, and you got elected to that. Then you run for Congress, and you got elected to that. And now you ask me if I think you might be among the elect for heaven. But I don’t see how you can expect to get elected to something that you ain’t runnin’ for." Well, there must be a desire for salvation if it is to be known in the strong, quiet confidence of the here and now, or in the hereafter.

(2) There must, also, be determination. "Work out your own salvation," said Paul. Whatever kept Paul back from his best self was intolerable to him. "O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" [Romans 7: 24]. And from this cry for deliverance would spring forth his own earnest determination, in a passion of commitment. It is a decisive question for us, how much effort we are willing to make.

A prisoner in an eastern state made his escape after two years of digging a tunnel. It had involved great risk and hardship. But he hated the walls that locked him in. Some of us may be locked in prison cells just as devastating -- in a moral and spiritual environment that we detest; some hidden selfishness, some sin unrepented and unresolved, from which we can not walk out into the once unbounded world of faith and hope that once was ours. Will we stay restricted? We will, until we are so fully bent on deliverance that we are willing to dig ourselves out. The chains that bind our lives to mean thoughts and small interests, with ignominious limits within which we have let ourselves be condemned to move, can be broken if we are in earnest about getting free.

(3) But if our desire and determination to work out our salvation be real, where shall we look for salvation? In some new area of hope and accomplishment? Or in the area of our ordinary duties? Probably the latter.

Suppose God’s mercy has led us out, through our repentance, desire and determination, from the smallness and perversity where we have lived. Will it bring us to church more often, looking more uplifted, singing more heartily? Yes, if that is real; but no, unless there is more to it. The great medical missionary to Labrador, Sir Wilfred Grenfell, once met Dwight L. Moody and told him that in a previous year he had been converted in one of Moody’s evangelistic meetings. Moody asked him: "What have you been doing since?" Grenfell did not have reason to be embarrassed for an answer, but it is not always so with everyone.

When Phillips Brooks went to theological seminary, he made an observation about which he later wrote in this fashion: "The first place I was taken to was a prayer meeting; and never shall I lose the impression of the devoutness with which those men prayed. -- Their whole souls seemed exalted and their natures were on fire. I sat bewildered and ashamed, and went away depressed. On the next day I met some of those same men at a Greek recitation. It would be little to say that some of the devoutest of them had not learnt their lessons. Their whole way showed that they had never learnt their lessons; that they had not got hold of the first principles of hard, conscientious study. The boiler had no connection with the engine. The devotion did not touch the work which then and there was the work, and the only work, for them to do."

Phillips Brooks knew that to do the work of the routine day honestly, carrying through till the last nail is driven, doing it wholeheartedly as though it were God’s assignment -- that is on the way to working out salvation.

This is true in study, in industry, in commerce, in the home, in the field, in the council chambers. Husbands and wives making a home where purity and peace may dwell together in happiness, mothers making the prosaic duties of the day radiate unselfish love for their family, men of business carrying forward the trying decisions and bargains with an attitude that makes others surprised that it could go as well as it has -- these are in the fore-court of God’s Kingdom.

Booker T. Washington learned an important lesson when just emerging from slavery. Docile and ignorant, he longed to get an education before he knew much about what an education is. Coming out of the coal mines he tried a job working for a former school teacher, who had just moved to a home long abandoned, and who first set him to cleaning a shed. Filthy rags, carcasses of dead small animals, chicken droppings had to be carried out of the shed to be burned of buried. He got out quite a bit of the refuse and went in to report to the lady that he had done the work. She inspected the shed and pointed out more to do. Sweating for fear he should fail, the lad went at it again, until he felt that he had removed the filth. Again she pointed out the unwashed window which he hadn’t even seen; the cobwebs hanging from overhead. Again he went at it in an agony of desire to do it right. He who had never thought much before, who had always been directed, as a teamster directs a horse, struggled to see and do what needed to be done in that dirty old woodshed. It was the third or fourth time that the lady had shown him the job to be done. He not only got down the cobwebs, but every speck of dust. He not only wiped off the glass window, but washed it a least 5 times until it shone. Finally he was rewarded by her assurance that the shed was clean - "Nobody could have done it any better," she said. He had never been proud of anything before. But he was proud of that job! It was the best that he could do. And it opened the door for his first step toward responsible, civilized living. Nothing is little when it represents an effort to do rightly the task at hand.

But there is more - "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." What does Paul mean by that? Why do we hear of fear in religion? Why do we speak of the fear of God? Isn’t that, after all, a craven attitude that simply makes one feel worse? -- Not in the sense usually meant in the Scripture. Here it does not mean a lack of courage nor a mournful depression of spirit. Paul is thinking of something not terrifying but tremendous; something that makes one’s whole being vibrate with suggestion intense and gripping.

Remembering the cross of Jesus, we understand the throbbing emotion of the Negro spiritual:

O, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble;

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?"

When we perceive the greatness of our Christ; when we sense the majesty of God; when we remember what God has given for us and what Christ has endured for us, our piddling little ideas of respectable behavior shrinks until we tremble before that which is great and long for something more noble. This is something of what it is to fear God and enjoy Him forever.

With this kind of "fear and trembling," work out your own salvation. If a sense of unworthiness overwhelms you, facing the cross and viewing it with awe and wonder and adoration, just let something greater lift you out of nice conventional correctness into a sense of mission for your own destiny and the destiny of others whom you have the power to help.

Let each one of us be thankful for the "fear and trembling" which sets our souls reaching and stretching and even agonizing. By the pattern of Jesus, we will never cease from stretching, nor find suffice while we hope to grow. When man contemplates Jesus and his expectation, he may be like Simon Peter who, finding Christ intolerable, exclaims: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." But through all of the trembling, he can be delivered from the loss of faith which is his only fatal fear.

"Work out your own salvation;" for, in other words of Paul, "God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." [Philippians 2: 13]. The glimmers of goodness, not ours but God’s, are the hope of our work and our salvation.

You can find God (1) in the beauty of His creation --- at sunrise; in the dusk of sunset; on a hill top, among the stately trees, by the brook, upon the lake, in the storm clouds, in the petal of a flower. You can see these things as the garments of God passing by.

(2) And if God be in the beauty of the earth, He is found also in the human souls that have touched yours. Great men have lived here, and their legacy is with us still. Good folk have made a home for us, and God has been there. Many there are who quite unpurposefully, have nonetheless revealed a bit of the Master. And through such souls we have seen sufficient of the light to walk by.

(3) And God comes into yourself through the grace of the Christ so that, with Paul, it is possible for you to say, "It is no longer I, but Christ, who lives in me." Particularly when you are in fellowship with others, likewise committed to Christ, can you find devotion kindled in Christian comradeship. That is what church can be like!

Be glad then and take courage. The salvation that you and I seek in fear and trembling can be worked out, and fulfilled in God.

-------------------------

delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, January 22, 1956;

and, in Wisconsin Rapids, July 28, 1963