After telling us we need to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12), Paul goes on to say in the next verse,

For it is God who works in you both the willing and the working for His good pleasure.
— Philippians 2:13

When we read here of how God works in us “for His good pleasure,” we may feel it means He desires to use us in some way to carry out His work. But, while we may able to apply these verses in such a way, if we look at them carefully and consider their context, we will see that Paul is specifically referring here to how we ourselves need to be conformed to the image of Christ.

Just prior to this, Paul has given the example of Christ humbling Himself and being exalted by God, so that we would learn to have His mind within us (vv. 5-11), and thus humble ourselves just as He did. This is to be conformed in our living, practically speaking, to the image of Christ.

Moreover, Paul is telling us here to “work out your own salvation,” rather than to focus on the salvation of others; again, this shows he is focused in these verses on our conformity to Christ, not on how we are serving the Lord in bringing others to Christ.

But at a deeper level, we need to understand that God’s “good pleasure,” which Paul speaks of in verse 13, is not merely that we would do some work for God, but that Christ would be revealed and expressed through us. In other words, it is not so much what we do, but Christ Himself, and Christ manifested in us, that is so “well pleasing” to God.

When the Lord came up out of the waters of baptism, the Father declared,

This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased!
— Matthew 3:17; cf. Mark 1:11, Luke 3:22

Later in his Gospel, Matthew quotes the Old Testament to show how God was “well pleased” in Christ as His servant (Matt. 12:18; cf. Isa 42:1-3); and on the Mount of Transformation, the Father again declared,

This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased; hear Him!
— Matthew 17:5

So, it is Christ the Son who Himself is always so “well pleasing” to God the Father, and God the Father’s “good pleasure” is always in the manifestation of Christ. Thus, God is also “well-pleased” when His Son is revealed in us. This is exactly what Paul told the Galatian believers:

God…was well pleased to reveal His Son in me.
—Galatians 1:15-16

In brief, God’s “good pleasure” is always focused on Christ, whether in the person of Christ Himself, or in the revelation of Christ in His children. So, when Paul says that God is working in us “for His good pleasure,” His meaning is, that God is working to bring us into conformity to the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29-30), so that He would be manifested though us in our daily living. This is to “work out your own salvation” according to Philippians 2.

And this is also what the apostle Peter shows us in his epistles, as we shall consider in the next Note in this series.

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—  23 December 2025 —