What does work out your salvation with fear and trembling mean?

Question 07007.

Paul’s command to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling has frightened more Christians than almost any other sentence he wrote, and the fright is entirely unnecessary once you see where the sentence sits. Read on its own it sounds as though salvation is a project we complete under threat. Read in its paragraph it says something quite different, and something a good deal better.

So let us put Philippians 2:12-13 back into its setting, look at the verbs Paul chose, and ask what fear and trembling actually meant to a first century believer in a Roman colony in Macedonia.

The Sentence in Its Paragraph

Philippians 2 opens with an appeal for unity. Paul asks the church to be of the same mind, having the same love, doing nothing from rivalry or conceit. Then comes the great hymn about Jesus, who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, took the form of a servant, and became obedient to the point of death on a cross. Only after that does Paul say, therefore, my beloved, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

The therefore is doing heavy lifting. The pattern that the church is to work out is the pattern just described: self-forgetting obedience of the kind Jesus displayed. This is not an instruction about how to get saved. It is an instruction to a congregation about how saved people are to behave towards one another.

Paul had a particular congregation in mind, and a particular problem. Two women in that church, Euodia and Syntyche, were at odds badly enough that he names them in chapter four. Unity was the issue. Fear and trembling belongs to that conversation.

Working Out, Not Working For

The verb is katergazomai, which means to bring to completion, to carry through, to work something all the way out to its finished state. It is used of producing a result from something already present. Paul does not say work for your salvation, and he does not say work at your salvation. He says work it out.

The image I use is developing a photograph in the old chemical way. Nothing new is added to the plate. What is already there is brought out where it can be seen. Or think of working out a sum: the answer is already contained in the figures, and the working simply makes it visible. That is the sense here.

Everything Paul teaches elsewhere requires that reading. Ephesians 2:8-9 could hardly be plainer that salvation is by grace through faith and not a result of works. Paul does not spend eleven chapters of Romans establishing justification by faith and then quietly reverse himself in a letter from prison.

What Fear and Trembling Meant to Paul

Modern ears hear fear and trembling and think of terror, as though God were standing over the believer with a raised hand. But watch how Paul uses the phrase elsewhere and the picture changes. In 1 Corinthians 2:3 he says that he came to the Corinthians in weakness and in fear and much trembling, describing his own sense of inadequacy for the task of preaching. In 2 Corinthians 7:15 Titus is received by the Corinthians with fear and trembling, which plainly means with respectful eagerness rather than with dread.

In Ephesians 6:5 servants are told to obey their masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as they would obey Jesus. Nobody thinks Paul is prescribing panic in the workplace. He is describing seriousness, care, the absence of a casual attitude towards something that matters.

So fear and trembling in Philippians 2:12 is the posture of someone handling something precious. It is how you carry a newborn down a staircase. Alert, careful, unhurried, entirely aware that this is not the moment to be flippant.

The Very Next Sentence Settles It

Verse 13 gives the reason: for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. The word translated works there is the one from which we get energy. God is the one generating both the desire and the doing.

That is why fear and trembling is not anxiety. If my obedience depended on my own reserves, trembling would be the only sane response and it would be despairing trembling. But Paul grounds the command in the activity of God inside the believer. We work out what he works in. The trembling is reverence in the presence of that activity, not fear that the activity might fail.

It also removes any grounds for pride. When a believer grows, the credit does not belong to the believer. God gets the will and the work, and we get the joy of watching it happen in us. I have written more about this process in what sanctification is.

There is a sturdy old distinction that helps here, and I keep coming back to it. Salvation has a past tense, a present tense and a future tense. I have been saved from the penalty of sin, I am being saved from the power of sin, and I will be saved from the very presence of sin. Philippians 2:12 sits squarely in the middle tense. Paul is not asking the Philippians to secure the first or to guarantee the third. He is asking them to get on with the second, which is the only one that has any daily work attached to it.

A Church Command Before It Is a Personal One

The your in work out your own salvation is plural in the Greek. Paul is addressing the congregation at Philippi as a body. That does not exclude personal application, but it does correct a very individualistic way of reading the verse.

A church works out its salvation together. Rivalry gets put down. Grumbling and disputing, which Paul mentions two verses later, get named and dealt with. People who have been avoiding each other in the car park start speaking again. The salvation that God has given to a congregation is worked out in the ordinary friction of shared life, and it takes reverent care to do it well.

I suspect this is why the phrase carries such weight. Handling other believers carelessly is not a small thing. It is handling people for whom Jesus emptied himself, and that is properly a matter of fear and trembling.

What This Does Not Mean

It does not mean that your eternal standing is under review. Paul writes to these people in chapter one as those in whom God began a good work and whom he is confident God will complete. You cannot hold verse 6 of chapter one and read chapter two as a threat.

It does not mean that fear and trembling should feel like dread in the conscience. Romans 8:15 says that we did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but the Spirit of adoption as sons. Whatever fear and trembling is, it is not the fear that Romans 8 has abolished.

And it does not mean that effort is unspiritual. Some believers, reacting against legalism, treat any exertion in the Christian life as fleshly. Paul plainly expects effort. He simply insists that the effort is powered from within by God rather than mustered from within by us. See whether faith alone is enough or works matter for the wider question.

What Working It Out Looks Like on a Wednesday

I like to make this concrete, because Philippians 2 was never meant to stay theoretical. Working out your salvation with fear and trembling looks like apologising first when you were only forty per cent in the wrong. It looks like doing the unseen job at church because it needs doing. It looks like refusing to repeat the interesting piece of information that would damage somebody’s reputation.

None of that earns anything. All of it expresses something. And all of it is done in the awareness that God is at work in you while you do it, which is why the seriousness never tips over into strain. You are not carrying the weight. You are carrying something precious that someone else has already paid for.

So, now what?

So take the pressure off and put the seriousness back on. Your salvation is not a wage to be earned, and Philippians 2 is not a warning that you might yet lose it. It is a call to bring out into daylight what God has already put into you, and to do it with the care that such a gift deserves.

If you have been reading fear and trembling as a threat, would you try reading it this week as reverence instead? I think you will find that the paragraph, and the God behind it, are far kinder than you had assumed.

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Philippians 2:12-13 (ESV)