A few months ago, Clay examined Philippians 2:12-13 in a sermon, dwelling especially on v. 13.  I’ve known for years that brethren have a bad habit of focusing on “Work out your own salvation,” to the exclusion of “It is God who is working in you.”  However, Clay’s study of the latter point brought home something I had never realized before.

God is working in every obedient Christian.  Right now.  He is working in me.  Right now.  He is working in you.  Right now.

To describe this as heartening would be an understatement!  Like many preachers, I struggle with the temptation to believe the insidious lie of Malachi 3:14.  The devil very much wants us to believe that it is useless to serve God.  In this pandemic era of social isolation, reduced or nonexistent assembling, and Christians fighting and splitting churches over dumb stuff like wearing masks, he seems to have a stronger case than normal.  Why not give up?  It won’t make any difference, right?

Wrong.  Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.  Even if it is not obvious to us, the arc of history bends toward God.  He will work out His will, He will accomplish His purpose, and He will glorify Himself through His people if they will let Him do it.

The health-and-wealth preachers have a point, kind of.  God does have a plan for your life.  However, His plan is not for you to enjoy earthly happiness.  It is for you to put your nose to the grindstone and do right every single day, cheerfully, unfailingly.  If you do, He will use you to accomplish what He wants to accomplish.

We cannot know what that is, not this side of Jordan, at least, and there is no point in speculating.  If you preach the gospel and nobody listens, that does not mean you have failed.  If you fight to raise godly children but they fall away, that does not mean you have failed either.  God knew that His people wouldn’t listen to Jeremiah and Ezekiel, but He sent them anyway.  Sometimes the Spirit convicts rather than converting, but that too is in accord with His purpose.

Throughout history, it always has seemed as though the cause of righteousness is failing.  It seemed so when the wicked rejected Noah, when Israel sank into corruption in the time of the judges, when Solomon forsook the Lord, when the Israelites were carried captive, when Jesus was crucified, and when Saul shattered the Jerusalem church.  God’s people always appear to be given over to death.  If it seems so in the present time, that should not surprise us.

Of course, the cause of God never actually does fail.  Repeatedly, He brings about salvation in ways that no one else could have foreseen.  He accomplishes His most spectacular works in the hours that seem darkest.

So it will be for us, if indeed we do not grow weary and lose heart.  If we work, God will be at work in us, and He will succeed in His purpose.  Go then, and work, whether preaching or teaching or supporting your family or raising your kids or watching your grandkids.  Even if nobody else notices or cares, you can be certain that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.

Acts 16:13 describes one of the humblest locations in which Paul ever preaches the gospel to a group of people.  He and his companions have come to the city of Philippi, a Roman colony.  Probably because of its largely Gentile composition, Philippi doesn’t have a synagogue, so those who wish to worship the God of Israel on the Sabbath must do so by the bank of the River Gangites.  There, Paul proclaims Christ and makes his first converts in Europe.

Though picturesque, this riparian setting is only one of many places where we see Christians assembling in Acts.  They honor God in the upper rooms of houses (Acts 1:13), a portico of the temple (5:13), synagogues (13:14), the marketplace (17:17), a stony hilltop (17:17), a lecture hall (19:10), a beach (21:5), the deck of a ship (27:35), and rented quarters (28:28).  The most specific inference that we can draw from this is that early disciples met together whenever and however they could.  In this area, the New-Testament pattern appears to be “Whatever works”.

This observation becomes relevant in our discussions of Bible authority with others.  If we criticize some use of church funds as unauthorized, frequently, someone will fire back with the reply, “Well, what about church buildings???”  Of course, none of these people really have any problem with church buildings.  Instead, their goal is to establish that we are inconsistent in our adherence to the first-century pattern.

I see two problems with this argument.  First, as noted above, there is no discernible pattern with respect to the meeting places of first-century Christians, and not even a discernible pattern when it comes to spending money on meeting places.  The riverbank was free.  The school of Tyrannus probably wasn’t (at least, churches today that meet in schools generally have to pay for the privilege).  Paul’s rented quarters weren’t; indeed, they were paid for by support from churches. 

The synagogues weren’t free either, rather being built and maintained by the Jews of the community.  Did the people of Iconium who believed in Acts 14:1 stop showing up at the synagogue the next week because it was A Misuse Of The Lord’s Money?  Instead, throughout Acts, we see brethren taking advantage of purpose-built meeting places as long as they can.

Second, as per Hebrews 10:25, assembling is part of the work of the church.  How can we do this?  The Jerusalem church could meet in the massive colonnades of the temple for free; but the Jackson Heights church can’t even meet in a pavilion in a city park without paying for it.  No member of the congregation owns a house where even half of us can gather.  Either we spend money on meeting, or we become, quite literally, fair-weather Christians.  Under these circumstances, the use of the Lord’s money to ensure that we can come together and build one another up every first day of the week is entirely appropriate.

Psalm 44 (LMD)

O God, our fathers told Your works;
You planted them within the land;
They did not conquer by the sword,
But by Your favor and Your hand.
Today You still push back our foes
And keep Your holy ones from shame;
Thus we have boasted all day long,
And we will always bless Your name.

But now You have rejected us,
And You have made our hosts retreat;
You scatter us to foreign lands
And sell us cheaply in defeat.
You let our neighbors scoff at us;
You make the nations laugh to see;
All day I hide my face in shame
Before the boastful enemy.

Yet we have not forgotten You
Nor with transgression sought our doom;
Although our steps were in Your ways,
You covered us with deathly gloom.
If we had sought another god,
The God who searches hearts would know,
But for Your sake Your own are slain;
All day Your sheep are slaughtered so.

O Lord, awake!  Why do You sleep?
Do not reject us in disgrace;
Before our grief and misery
Why do You still conceal Your face?
Our soul has fallen to the dust,
And to the earth we press our face;
Rise up and be our help, O God;
Redeem us in Your faithful grace.

Suggested tune:  “Lamb of God”

Hebrews 2:1 contains one of the most sobering warnings in the entire Bible:  “For this reason, we must pay attention all the more to what we have heard, so that we will not drift away.”  A couple of verses later, the writer uses a rhetorical question to make the point that if we neglect the great salvation we have been given, we will not escape.  Nobody turns their back on Jesus and gets away with it!

This is deeply relevant to us for a couple of different reasons.  First, it shows that falling away is possible.  This truth is bound up in the very language of the text.  It is impossible to drift away from a place where you aren’t, and it’s impossible to neglect a salvation you don’t have.  Those who teach, then, that true Christians can’t fall away are misguided.  We can be in a state of grace now and fall from it later.

Of course, this concept is significant not merely in an abstract, doctrinal sense, but in a personal, concrete sense.  I can fall away.  You can fall away.  The godliest Christian any of us know, the distinguished preacher, the elder of the church, or the devout widow, all of these can fall away. 

The fault here is not in Jesus.  He has promised that no one will snatch us out of His hand.  We are immune to danger from outside forces, but we are not immune to danger from within.  We can willingly abandon the safety from which no one can remove us.  Indeed, unless we acknowledge the risk and humbly resolve to remain faithful, we infallibly will bring this disaster upon ourselves.

Second, the writer’s word choice also tells us how disaster will arrive.  Drifting away is not a sudden, violent activity.  Instead, it happens gradually, slowly, wavelet by wavelet. 

Neither is neglect.  Neglect is the result of failing to make an effort when the need to act doesn’t seem pressing or important.  The lawn doesn’t look much worse today than it looked yesterday, it’s hot out there, and I’d rather spend my Saturday in the woods than behind a lawnmower anyway.  However, if I continue to defer exertion, soon the front door is covered in nastygrams from the HOA, and they’re filming episodes of Tarzan in my front yard!

Spiritual disaster advances upon us in the same slow, subtle way.  It is the fruit of coming home from a long day of work on Wednesday and deciding that it’s too much effort to round up the kids and get everybody out to Bible class.  It is the result of closing our eyes metaphorically to the trashy side of that TV show we love to watch—but not closing them literally.  It is the outcome of a thousand tiny enticements to depart from Jesus in a way that still seems safe.  Nobody’s going to lose their soul over a Wednesday night or a Netflix drama, are they?

The problem is, though, that the more we draw away, the more reasonable extreme departures become.  Maybe a steamy period romance isn’t that far away from godliness, but neither is pornography that far away from steamy romances, nor an affair from porn.  It’s extremely easy for us to find ourselves in a spiritual position where we never intended to be.  The only way to make sure that we don’t drift away is to make sure that we don’t drift.

The epistle to the Hebrews might be the most tightly reasoned book in the whole Bible.  Sentence by sentence, clause by clause, the Hebrews writer constructs intricate arguments that establish the superiority of Christ over Moses and the folly of Christians returning to Judaism.  The more closely we read Hebrews, the more we will learn.

The care with which Hebrews is written makes the apparent logical disconnect in Hebrews 3:18-19 all the more surprising.  In context, the writer is discussing the Israelites who died in the wilderness during the time of Moses.  He says, “And to whom did [God] swear that they would not enter His rest, if not to those who disobeyed?  So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.”  

Hold on here, Hebrews writer!  You’ve given us evidence that God kept the Israelites from entering Canaan because of their disobedience.  Why are you acting like you’ve shown us that they had an unbelief problem instead?

The writer, and indeed the Holy Spirit, make this logical jump because they want us to realize that they aren’t making a logical jump at all.  Once the writer has established that the Israelites had a disobedience problem, he doesn’t have to prove that they had an unbelief problem—because disobedience and unbelief are THE SAME THING.  If we don’t believe God’s promises, we will not obey His word.  If we don’t obey His word, fundamentally, it is because we do not believe His promises.  Faith and obedience are inseparable.

This understanding is vital to us for at least two reasons.  First, it answers the tedious argument that we are saved by faith, not by works, so we don’t have to be baptized to be saved.  In reality, baptism is not an attempt to justify ourselves at all.  Instead, it is an expression of faith in the promises of God.  We believe that when the Holy Spirit says that baptism saves, He means it.  Accordingly, we obey the gospel.

 Second, it shows the importance of preaching, teaching, and study that builds faith.  Some brethren are interested only in preaching that is practical.  They want to be told about some godly thing that they can go home and do.

Instruction in righteous living is invaluable, full stop.  However, if we’re not careful, too much focus on the nuts and bolts of practical discipleship can leave us short on the motivation to be disciples.  Obedience is not and cannot be a just-because thing.  If hearing is not united with faith in us, we will not obey.

Instead, if we want to be obedient, we must look too to the parts of the Bible that build faith.  However remote the stories of the righteous men of old may seem to us, they all proclaim the same lesson:  God is a God who keeps His promises, so if we rely on Him, we will not be disappointed.  So too, the stories of the miracles of Jesus and His apostles, particularly the story of His resurrection, assure us that what He has promised, He is able to perform.  When our minds are filled with these things, it becomes much easier to make the right choices—because we know how deeply they matter.