Work It Out

Message in the Be Joyful series through Philippians. Pastor Robert Rohlin takes up one of the most misunderstood commands in the New Testament: "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12). Paul says work OUT, not work FOR, and that one word makes all the difference. Writing under house arrest in Rome, 800 miles from Philippi, Paul commends a church whose obedience never depended on his being there. So who are we when the teacher steps out of the room? Joseph in Potiphar's house shows what obedience without an audience looks like. Heaven cannot be earned. Our best righteousness is "filthy rags" (Isaiah 64:6), as Martin Luther learned on his face in the monastery at Erfurt, and salvation runs in three tenses: penalty, power and presence. The Greek verb pictures working a mine you already own. A rich uncle leaves you a gold mine, and you can frame the deed and stay poor, or go dig out the gold. God got Israel out of Egypt in one night, but it took forty years