Catalyst Faith (Tom Cox) has raised a series of questions in his recent post "Time Out!" stemming out of Philippians 2:12. I joked with him that I could not answer these questions in the little box that we are given to respond in. So I am going to post them here and link to his site to hopefully expand this conversation and give more room to do so, because my thoughts got really long. Here is the first.
If we believe salvation is by grace and not works, what does it mean to work out your salvation?
Work “out” is different than work “for.” To work out your salvation, I believe Paul is telling us that, we need to resolve within ourselves what this salvation really means, and allow that to change us. Salvation is not about us, it’s not about what we need to do to get it. Salvation is a heart issue – not a math issue. If Jesus has truly gotten your heart, and in fact you fully experience and embrace His love for you, then life should look different through the eyes of your heart. And as a result, you would live your life differently and put into practice in your daily living your response to Jesus for the salvation that he has given you. This true, full understanding of whom Jesus is and what he did and what he is asking of us takes time. Our finite minds are unable to instantly comprehend God and what He did. Saying a simple prayer is not the end all (although most churches notch their belts and move on – “one more in the kingdom”). Peter worked out his salvation and became the rock in which God built his church (Matt. 16:18). Paul worked out his salvation and took the good news of “the way” to the Gentiles (Acts 9:15). I have been a “Christian” for 19 years and just now I feel that my heart is waking to understand this. I have been working out (or resolving within myself) that my salvation is no longer about me. But it is about God. And as a result my life – how I spend my time and what is important to me – is changing.
What I’m getting at is that this is an inner change that takes place; it is not about how you look on the outside to other people, whether we are nice or polite, whether we are working “for” our salvation. Some think that if you start on the outside and work your way in that you can be changed. Or they don’t really care if you are being changed because you appear to look good on the outside and that’s easier to measure. This is the opposite of what Jesus is after when he talks about life transformation, just ask the Pharisees of that day. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis talks about salvation in this way:
“We must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their niceness, looking further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world – and might even be more difficult to save.
For mere improvement is no redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.”
So, if we resolve (or work out) our own salvation then aren’t we really allowing God to transform who we are into who we are meant to be?
