Work Out What God Works In

I. As You Have always Obeyed 12a

II. Various Interpretations of Verses 12b-13

A.  What these verses can not mean.

    1.  Salvation by works

    2.  Easy-Believism or modern decisionism

    3.  You are saved by grace – but you keep your salvation by works.

    4.  Hyper-Calvinism – Antinomianism – the Keswick error


B.  A simple remedy to these and other errors?
    Verse 12 exists – don't ignore it.
    Verse 13 is vital to understand and complete verse 12.

C.  What these verses do mean
    
    1.  Work out your own salvation
        
    2.  With fear and trembling
        
    3.  For

    4.  It is God who works in you
        
    5.  Both to will and to do for His good pleasure
        
John Murray
God's working in us is not suspended because we work, nor our working suspended because God works.  Neither is the relation strictly one of Co-operation as if God did his part and we did ours so that conjunction and coordination of both produced the required result.  God works in us and we also work.  But the relation is that because God works we work.  All working out of salvation on our part is the effect of God's working in us, not the willing to the exclusion of the doing and not the doing to the exclusion of the willing, but both the willing and the doing.

Ephesians 2:8-10