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.”
Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, and then, in the very next breath, For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. If he supplies the wanting and the doing, what is left for me to work out, and why the fear and trembling? The instruction seems to be withdrawn in the act of giving it, and the objection is a fair one.
Take the small word joining the two. For. God's working is given as the ground of the command, the reason attempting it is worth anything at all.
Paul lives on that arrangement himself and says so without embarrassment: I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. And of his own effort again, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily. The labour is real, and it is supplied. He never dissolves the two into one.
Then look at what the working out is for, because the paragraph is not about the inside of your head. Three lines on: Do all things without murmurings and disputings. Paul is writing to a congregation with a quarrel running through it, and later in the letter he names the two women by name. Working out your own salvation, in the sentence where it actually appears, looks like a church that has stopped grumbling at each other while the man who planted it sits in prison and cannot come and referee.
One question is left standing in the paragraph. Where in the last fortnight did you feel the will to do something good and quietly let it go?
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 83 is Working Together (Romans 8:28).