Order Matters

Do you remember learning about “order of operations” in middle school? Maybe the mention of PEMDAS just gave you PTSD! We suffered through countless homework assignments designed to remind us that it wasn’t enough to know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. The order in which we performed those operations could create drastically different outcomes. There needs to be a standard pattern to arrive at the proper answer.

This principle applies to other areas of life as well. You put your socks on before your shoes. And unless you’re Superman, the way you put your pants on is pretty standard too. We make our way through elementary school before high school. Most companies that want to be successful do not hire their CEOs directly from the mail room. (Do mail rooms still exist? Or is there just one poor guy named Dave monitoring an inbox somewhere?) In most areas of life, we understand the principle of “first things first.”

The passage we’re exploring this Sunday, Philippians 2:12–13, has a particularly important antecedent. Without it, we can arrive at the wrong answer entirely!

Paul tells the Philippian church to “work out their salvation with fear and trembling.” Pulled from the context of its scriptural neighborhood, we could easily believe that our eternity requires our own work. Paul says it right in the Bible! But to believe that would be to completely ignore our sermon last week and the verses that immediately precede them. These are the verses that tell us Jesus emptied himself by taking the form of a servant and humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death on the cross. We can’t work out our salvation unless we’re first saved. Only Jesus does that.

The order matters.

We don’t work to earn salvation. We work because Christ has already saved us. Our obedience is not the cause of our salvation; it’s the fruit.

This week, we’ll look at the important relationship between God’s work and our response, between faith and obedience, and between what Christ has done for us and what He now desires to do in us. I hope you’ll join us as we discover what it means to work out what God has already worked in.