Practising Godliness
Practising Godliness
Work out your own salvation. . . . For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure. Philippians 2:12-13
When Our Lord is presented to the conscience, the first thing conscience does is to rouse the will, and the will agrees with God always. You say—“I do not know whether my will is in agreement with God”—look to Jesus, and you will find that your will and your conscience are in agreement with God every time. The element in you which makes you say “I shan’t” to God is something less profound than your will, it is perversity, or obstinacy, which are never in agreement with God. Obstinacy is a remnant of the disposition of sin, and it fights against that which a man’s will and conscience indicate to be right. If we persist in being perverse and obstinate, we shall ultimately get to the place where the emotions of will and conscience are stultified.
Will is the essential element in the creation of man; sin is a perverse disposition that has entered into man. The profound thing in man is his will, not sin. Human nature as God made it was not sinful, and it was human nature as God made it that Our Lord took on Him. Obstinacy is an unintelligent “wodge” that refuses to be enlightened. It continually surprises you—“Why didn’t I do that thing?” The only cure for obstinacy is to be blown up by dynamite, and the dynamite is obedience to the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit comes into my human spirit, He makes me one with Jesus as He was one with His Father, it is an identification that raises the personality to its right place.
1. The Way of the Working of God
For it is God which worketh in you to will. . . .
Before a man is rightly related to God, his conscience may be a source of torture and distress to him, but when he is born again it becomes a source of joy and delight because he realises that not only are his will and his conscience in agreement with God, but that God’s will is his will, and the life is as natural as breathing, it is a life of proving, or making out, what is “that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”
Is it possible for human nature to get to such a standard that it can work out actually what God wills? God’s word says it is. God not only gives me supernatural grace, but He is in me to will and to do of His good pleasure, and that means I can do all that God’s will and my conscience indicate I should do. If I am a child of God, I realise not only that God is the source of my will, but that God is in me to will. I do not bring an opposed will to God’s will, God’s will is my will, and my natural choices are along the line of His will. Then I begin to understand that God engineers circumstances for me to do His will in them, not for me to lie down under them and give way to self-pity. We are called to do God’s will here and now; are we doing it or are we murmuring—“Why should I be in these trying circumstances?” “Why should I have these disabilities?” That is murmuring. Do God’s will. God not only expects me to do His will, but He is in me to do it.
Doing God’s will is never hard. The only thing that is hard is not doing His will. All the forces of nature and of grace are at the back of the man who does God’s will because in obedience we let God have His amazing way with us. If some of us were taken to be specimens of doing God’s will, we should be sorry recommendations! We ought to be superabounding with joy and delight because God is working in us to will and to do of His good pleasure. The “goodest” thing there is is the will of God. God’s will is hard only when it comes up against our stubbornness, then it is as cruel as a ploughshare and as devastating as an earthquake. God is merciless with the thing that tells against the relationship of a man to Himself. When once God does have His way, we are emancipated into the very life of God, i.e., into the life that Jesus lived. The only estimate of a consistent Christian character is that the life of the Son of God is being manifested in the bodily life.
2. The Way of the Working of the Godly
Work out your own salvation. . . .
If we are practising godliness, i.e., practising in our life day by day and week by week, working out what God works in, then we shall find when the crisis comes that our nature will stand by us, because we have disciplined and trained our nature to work out what God works in. We make what we practise second nature, and in the crisis as well as in the details of life we find that not only does God’s grace stand by us, but also our own nature, we have made it an ally. If we have not been practising in the daily round, it is not God’s grace that fails when the crisis comes, but our nature that deserts us, and we fail. God does not make our habits for us or do the practising—God alters our disposition and we are left to work out the new disposition He has put in, by practice and the forming of habits. If we have had a great illumination of God’s grace, we have to go on to work out all that God has worked in; the danger is that we become stationary.
“Work out your own salvation. . . .” We have not to work out that which tells for our salvation, but to work out in the expression of our lives the salvation which God has worked in. What does my tongue say? What things do my ears like to listen to? What kind of bodily associates do I like to be with?
These things reveal whether we are working out the salvation God has worked in. The inward working is God’s; the outward working is ours. In regeneration God puts us into line with Himself so that by the expression of that union in our bodily lives we may prove Whose we are. The first lesson to learn is that God works on the inside, and we have to work on the outside what He has wrought inside. The place for yielding and surrendering comes just there. We hinder God when we try to work on the inside. So many of us put prayer and consecration in place of God’s work; we make ourselves the workers. God is the Worker, and He is after spirituality. God does nothing other than the profound; we have to do the practical. We have to see that we continually work out with concentration and care that which God has worked in, not work our own salvation, but work it out. We have to work out what God works in whilst we base resolutely in unshaken faith on the complete and perfect Redemption of the Lord Jesus Christ.