Work out our own salvation

​“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” (Philippians 2:12-13)

It is so important that we take responsibility for our lives and the choices that we make. Just as important, is our willingness to get out of other people’s way and give them the space to do the same. Sometimes we can be so entrenched in rescuing other people, fixing people, or sheltering them from life, that we get in the way of them taking responsibility.

The need to fix and shelter people may also manifest as codependency. “Codependency is a “circular relationship” where we meet someone else’s needs because we enjoy being needed. Our sense of being and self-worth is tied to being a giver at our own expense. But the word of God teaches us that, before we can meet the needs of others, we have to first make sure that our own house is in order.

Charles Spurgeon admonished, “Your charity must begin at home. In order to spread the truth, you must first know the truth yourself, and you must daily seek to understand it better…“Work out your own salvation.” If you plow another man’s field, be careful that you don’t allow your own field to become fallow; if you attempt to remove the mote from someone’s eye, be careful that you don’t allow the beam that is in yours to blind you. You preach against the sluggard, let not the thorn and the thistle grow in your own garden. You testify of the medicine which Christ can give, but physician, see to it that you heal yourself.,,Your own salvation is your first concern.” 

Relationships, whether marriage, friendship, co-worker, etc., work best when each individual takes responsibility for their own “mood, happiness, self-esteem, needs, and well being.” Relationships suffer when one expects the other to do that work for them. Among believers, relationships suffer when we attempt to perform God’s work for him in the lives of others.

Working out our own soul salvation requires us to first, be seated and planted in Christ Jesus. Everything that God has put in us works its way from inside to the outside, “We work out, bring out, educe from within ourselves to our exterior life, that which God constantly works in us in the interior secret recesses of our spiritual being.”

Let us exercise our faith and trust and pray that those we love will work out their own soul salvation.

​GiGi❤️

---