Brief Notes
Peter, Paul, & Working Out Our Own Salvation (1)
So then, my beloved,
just as you have always obeyed,
not only in my presence but now
much more in my absence,
work out your own salvation
with fear and trembling,
for it is God who works in you both
the willing and the working
for His good pleasure.
— Philippians 2:12-13 —
This portion of the New Testament tends to cause Christians a good deal of trouble; as Robert Govett states in his book, Kingdom Studies,
Calvinists know not what to make of it. Arminians seize on it as proving their views. Here is the knot. How is it to be untied?
(See the Note on our website, “Govett: Reward or Loss in the Coming Kingdom.”)
Indeed, many Christians, when then come across these verses, feel, “What? My salvation is eternally secure in Christ already! Why then do I still need to ‘work out’ my own salvation?”
Yet, this is the word of the apostle, and part of the divine revelation in the New Testament, and thus we cannot simply dismiss it, as, in practice, so many Christians do.
The key to dealing with these verses in a proper way is to understand that Paul is not speaking here of salvation as it relates to our eternal destiny, that is, whether we will be with the Lord for eternity or go to the Lake of Fire; rather, he is speaking here of the salvation that ultimately results in our being conformed to the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29-30). That is, as the believers in Christ, we need to be saved not only from eternal damnation, but from ourselves, so that, instead of living according to our natural life, we allow Christ to live in us and be expressed through us, just as the apostle did (Gal. 2:20, Col. 1:27).
The context of these verses illustrates this very well. That is, just before he says this, Paul points the believers in Philippi to the example of Christ, and how He emptied Himself to the point of being a slave, and even to the point of dying on the cross, so that God gave Him the highest name of all (Phil. 2:5-11). As Paul says, we need to “let this mind” be in us (v. 5), so that we follow the example of Christ in our living; this is what “salvation” means in Philippians 2:12-13.
Yet, while Paul gives us the example of Christ as our pattern, he says very little about how this salvation is to be practically worked out in our experience. For that we must turn to a very similar section in the writings of the apostle Peter, which we will do in the next Note in this series.
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— 2 December 2025 —
