Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 83 · March 24
Both to Will
“For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.”
Paul writes, "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." Then, in the very next breath, he adds: "For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure." That raises a fair question. If God supplies both the wanting and the doing, what is left for me to work out, and why fear and tremble? It can sound as if Paul takes back the command as he gives it.
Look at the small word that joins the two sentences: "For." Paul gives God's working as the reason for the command. God working in you is the very thing that makes your effort worth anything at all.
Paul lived this way himself: "I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me." In another letter he says of his own work, "striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily." The work is real, and God supplies it. Paul never blends the two into one.
Then look at what the working out is for. In the very next verse Paul says, "Do all things without murmurings and disputings." He is writing to a church with a quarrel in it, and later in the letter he names two women who need to "be of the same mind in the Lord." In its own setting, working out your salvation looks like a church that has stopped grumbling at each other. Meanwhile the man who planted that church is in prison, unable to come and settle it himself. That is why he asks them to obey "now much more in my absence."
So ask yourself one plain question: in the last two weeks, where did you feel a desire to do something good and then quietly let it go? That desire did not come from nowhere. It was God at work in you, and He has not stopped. Paul says so at the start of this same letter: "he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ."
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 83 is Working Together (Romans 8:28).