Biblical Salvation 6

6. Working out Salvation Together

Western culture pushes us to think of salvation and sanctification as an individual experience, but the Bible thinks about most of these things as much in corporate as individual terms. So while we tend to think of our individual bodies as the temple of the Holy Spirit, Paul uses the plural word for you:

"your [plural] body is a temple of the Holy Spirit in you [plural]" (1 Cor. 6:19).

The Holy Spirit inhabits the church as his body even more than our individual bodies.

Similarly, Paul's prayer for the Thessalonians is "May the God of peace Himself sanctify you [plural] completely, and may your [plural] whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thess. 5:23). Paul equates belonging to God and thus being holy (being sanctified) to being free of blame. He prays that the Thessalonians will be this way collectively even more than for each one individually.

And so we are not surprised that Paul also encourages his churches to work together so that they are all saved on the Day of Judgment:

"So, my beloved ones, just as you always obeyed, not only when I was there but now even more now in my absence, work out your [plural] salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12).

As usual, Paul is speaking in the plural. The Philippians are to work together to help each other make it to the day of salvation.

The idea of "working" having anything to do with salvation goes against the grain of much Christian thinking today, but it was an essential element in Paul's understanding. Here it is important to point out the difference between justification--becoming right with God--and salvation--escaping God's wrath on the Day of Judgment because you remain right with Him. Only faith or trust is operative in justification. But God expects us to honor Him in response to His grace in order to be saved ultimately.

Paul only contrasted faith and works when he was writing about becoming a Christian. Even then, he primarily contrasted faith in Christ with works of the Jewish Law (e.g., Gal. 2:16). At the same time he made it clear that faith will yield a certain kind of "fruit" in one's life (e.g., Rom. 6:22). In 1 Thessalonians, Paul commends the Thessalonians for their "work of faith" (1:3).

Further, the same passage in Ephesians that says "by grace you have been saved through faith... not on the basis of works so that no one can boast" goes on in the very next verse to say,

"For we are his creation and we have been created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared ahead of time so that we might walk in them" (Eph. 2:10).

It is thus God's will that Christians walk together ("we") in a certain way after they are justified, a way that Ephesians calls "good works."

We can gain great clarity on these things if we realize that one way in which the original audiences of the New Testament would have understood grace, which is often defined as "unmerited favor," is in terms of what scholars call patron-client relationships. Patrons were wealthy individuals with excess resources. Clients were individuals who could use these resources. Patrons often gained honor and prestige in the ancient world by accruing clients to themselves. The clients of course did not earn or merit such hand outs--the giving was much greater than anything the client could return. But at the same time, the client was usually expected to do various things for the patron in turn, not least of which was give them honor for their giving. If they did not appropriately honor their patrons, the giving would of course stop.

While this model is not the only way early Christians would have understood their relationship with God, grace and gift language pushes us to see it as one way they did. God was a divine patron who freely gave to those who sought Him. No one could earn His divine patronage. On the other hand, the idea that such patronage came with no strings attached would have made no sense at all to any of the New Testament authors or audiences. After all, this is the same God who made a covenant with Israel in the Old Testament. Deuteronomy 28 leaves no doubt that such a covenant involved clear expectations of God's people or else the relationship with specific individuals was severed.

Thus in the New Testament, God expects His people to serve Him in return for His gracious gift of justification and salvation. If they do not serve him, 1 John 5:16-17 speaks of a "sin unto death" that severs our relationship to God. Similarly, Hebrews 10:26-27 says,

"If we continue to sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, the sacrifice for sins no longer remains, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment and of the eager fire that is about to eat God's enemies."

Paul himself expresses the need for faithfulness when he says things like

"So I run not as if I did not have a goal. So I box not as if I were beating the air. But I keep my body under control and I lead it as a slave so that I myself might not become disqualified somehow after I have preached to others" (1 Cor. 9:26-27).

And

"I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings as I am conformed to his death, if somehow I might attain to the resurrection of the dead" (Phil. 3:8-11).

Even Paul himself did not believe his acceptance in Christ was unconditional. It demanded an appropriate response, a response Paul was determined to give.

Paul had not yet attained the resurrection. The next verse in Philippians 3 continues:

"Not that I have already received [resurrection] or have already been perfected [as I move into the next age], but I pursue [the resurrection] if also I might take hold of that for which I was even taken hold of by Christ. Brothers, I do not consider myself to have taken hold of [this resurrection]. But one thing [I do], forgetting the things behind and reaching out to the things before me, I pursue with my eye on the goal the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 2:12-14).

It is common to think of Paul as forgetting his past sins and failures here when he says he is forgetting that which is behind. But we can only do that if we rip these words from their context. The earlier part of the chapter is a rehearsal of Paul's accomplishments on a human level--that which was "to my gain" (Phil. 3:7). Indeed, Paul here says that he had been blameless as far as the righteousness that was in the Jewish Law (3:6). This comment debunks the all too common notion that Paul felt like a failure at keeping the Law before he became a Christian. On the contrary, Luke 18:9-14 probably is a better picture of the pre-Christian Paul.

It is also common to see Paul's comments in Philippians 3:12-14 as a basis for the idea that "I'm not perfect, just forgiven." Again, you have to ignore what Paul has been talking about to interpret it this way. The verse that precedes this passage is talking about resurrection. Paul is saying he is not yet absolutely guaranteed a place in the resurrection and thus, salvation. I don't think Paul ever had serious doubts or felt insecure--nor should we. But he reminds the Philippians that they must remain faithful to God even after He has graciously made us right with Him through Christ (cf. Phil. 3:9).

Paul ends the section in this way:

"Therefore, as many of us as are perfect [mature], let us have this attitude. And if you think differently on something, God will also reveal this fact to you. However, let us walk appropriately to that which we have already reached" (Phil. 3:15-16).

After Paul has mentioned perfection as something that will happen at the resurrection (Phil. 3:12), he refers to the Philippians as already perfect or complete in a sense (3:15). The mature attitude is for them to continue together on their journey toward salvation. God will reveal areas of growth. But far from saying, you will mess up continually on things you've already mastered, Paul says not to fall back on those things. Move forward without falling back from where you are.

How can we move forward toward salvation together?

There are any number of obvious answers. We can pray for each other (1 John 5:16). We can carry each others burdens (Gal. 6:2). We can confess our sins to one another (James 5:16). We can intercede for others that we see sinning and work for their reconciliation (James 5:19-20).

There are any number of enslavements we know of today that most often seem healed through the care of others. We hear testimonies of instantaneous healing from various addictions in the past. Is it our lack of faith that keeps us from seeing them today? Regardless, God seems to work often today through the body of Christ and through others to bring us to healing on various enslavements in our lives. We should not shun each other. The person who tries to be victorious over some temptation alone today is often someone who repeatedly fails. The Bible urges us to bear each other's burdens, and this can only take place if we share them with people we trust and to whom we can be accountable.

Many Protestants are also prone to ignore various "means of grace" that God has given the church as a way of experiencing His presence and strength. If communion is practiced correctly, we should feel an extra shot of God's power after we have received it and be invigorated by the "communion" with the rest of the church.

Prayer and devotions have become means of grace in our time. But we've forgotten things like fasting, hospitality, and confession. Some of these things we can do in private to find God's strength in our struggle against sin. But the Bible urges us not to forget the corporate ones as we work toward salvation. We should "not abandon meeting together, as is the habit of some, but we should [come together] to encourage each other"(Heb. 10:25).

We can celebrate the return of the small group in recent years. John Wesley organized small groups like these with a rigor we would feel uncomfortable about today. But the idea was exactly what we need to work out our salvation together, not as a group afraid or insecure, but secure and optimistic in the love of God for us. When we think that the Corinthian church may have only constituted a group of about 40-50 people, we realize that they were far more accountable to each other than many of us are in our churches today.

We probably should not close our discussion without some mention of corporate sin. The goal is of course for us to find ourselves before God as a "glorious church, without spot or wrinkle" (Eph. 5:27). But it seems unfathomable that we will ever find the church on earth to be entirely pure. There is a place for the church as a whole to confess its corporate sin, particularly those things that we have left undone.

Luke and Acts especially speak of salvation in terms of the restoration of God's people and the forgiveness of their sins. To be sure, Luke-Acts think of this salvation firstly in terms of the forgiveness of Israel's sins and the restoration of Israel (formulated on the Israel of that day). But we find in these books a model for the forgiveness of the church today as it moves toward ultimate salvation.

The church is also meant to be God's yeast in the world, changing it by God's grace to be more and more like Him. It will not always be possible in every time and place for us to have great impact on our worlds. At least it may not seem that we are. But God calls the church to go and to make disciples. Acts does not model a pessimistic view of the success we will have in this task. We must keep in mind that the church that wrote Revelation and 1 Peter was a suffering church. In some times and places God does not foresee the times getting worse and worse. In some periods of history God has used the church to make things better and better.