Waiting to Be Handed a Faith You Can Feel

He has been waiting since about seventeen and could not tell you what for.

If you pressed him he would say something about it becoming real, and he would know while he was saying it that this is not a description of anything. He does not mean an emotion, exactly; he is suspicious of emotions and has watched people mistake a Sunday for a change. He means something more like a click, an arrival, a moment where a thing that has been true on paper becomes true in the way his own name is true.

He has been to the events. He has responded at several of them. He has prayed for it, specifically, for years, in the plainest terms he can manage.

And it has not been handed to him, and he has drawn the reasonable inference, which is that it is either not coming or not coming to him.

Paul writes one sentence about this that has been misused in both directions, and the second half of it is the half that answers the man.

The instruction is to work it out, not to work it up

Here is the first half, and one word in it decides everything.

Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. (Philippians 2:12, King James Version)

Work out. Not work for and not work up.

Working something out is what a person does with something they already have. A man works out a sum he has been given, or a route on a map in his hand, or a stiffness in a shoulder. The material is present, and the working is the process of getting it into the open where it can be used.

That is a completely different instruction from earning anything, and it is also different from waiting for something to arrive. It presumes possession and asks for activity.

You are asked to work out something already in your possession. Philippians 2:12 says work out rather than work for, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:16, whose witness with a person's spirit is the possession being worked out.

And your own

The other word in that clause is the one that belongs to this category.

Your own salvation.

Paul is writing to a congregation and he could have written about theirs collectively; he does not. He individualizes it, in a letter read out loud to a room, which means each person heard the word own applied to themselves in a public setting.

That is the exact thing a person from a background like mine has never had done. Everything is collective. The room says things in unison. The faith is a family possession and a congregational one, and a man of thirty can find that he has never once been addressed in the singular about it.

You are addressed in the singular about something described as your own. Philippians 2:12 individualizes it in a letter read to a whole room, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:16, that the witness is borne with your own spirit rather than with a congregation's.

The next verse says who is working

And then, immediately, without a pause, the half that stops this becoming a burden.

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:13)

For. It is a reason word. The working out in verse 12 is possible because of what verse 13 says.

Both to will and to do. Two things, and the first is the striking one. He works the willing. The wanting to is described as His product rather than as the qualification a person brings.

So the man who has been waiting to feel something has been waiting for the wrong item to arrive by the wrong route. The willing is not a prerequisite he lacks; it is described as something being worked in him, and it is worked in the middle of the working out rather than before it.

You have God working in you both to will and to do. Philippians 2:13 puts the willing as well as the doing on His side of the sentence, and it is by the Spirit, Ephesians 3:16, that the strengthening happens in the inner man where the willing lives.

Paul describes his own experience of this and it is a strange sentence

There is a verse where Paul describes the same arrangement from the inside, and it should not make sense.

Whereunto I also labour, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily. (Colossians 1:29)

I labor, striving. Two words about real effort, and he is not being modest about it.

According to his working, which worketh in me mightily. And the effort is described as running on a supply that is not his.

Those two halves should cancel each other and in Paul's experience they evidently did not. He is describing something that felt like work, from the inside, and that he knew was being powered from elsewhere, and he does not appear troubled by the arrangement.

That is what is available. Not a feeling handed over. A labor that turns out to be running on something else, which a person usually only notices afterward.

You are able to labor and have it be running on something that is not yours. Colossians 1:29 holds both halves together without resolving them, and it is by the Spirit, Ephesians 3:16, that a person is strengthened with might in the inner man.

Peter gives a list of things to do

If working it out sounds abstract, Peter makes it concrete and the verb is a building one.

And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness. (2 Peter 1:5-6)

Add to your faith. Which presumes the faith is there and asks for things to be built on it.

And the list is unglamorous. Virtue, knowledge, self-control, endurance. None of these is a feeling and none of them arrives in a moment; every one is the kind of thing a person does over a period, in the ordinary week, with no sensation attached.

Peter says a few verses later that a man who does these things shall never fall, and the striking part is that the assurance is attached to the doing rather than to an experience.

You are able to build on something rather than wait for something. 2 Peter 1:5 says add to your faith, which presumes it is there, and it is by the Spirit, Galatians 5:22, whose fruit includes the temperance and patience on that list.

And the tension does not resolve

I want to be honest about what this article cannot do.

It cannot produce the click. Nothing on this page will make anything feel like anything, and if the man at the top of it reads it and waits for a different sensation he will be in the same position next year.

What is on offer is a reframe and an activity, and both are smaller than what he wanted. The reframe is that the willing is being worked in him rather than withheld from him. The activity is working out something he has rather than waiting for something he lacks.

He will still not be able to say when it became his, and he will still be in the same building next to the same people. That is his actual life and this site does not tidy it.

You are able to work with what is present rather than wait for what is not. Philippians 2:12 asks for activity on a possession, and it is God which worketh in you, verse 13, by His Spirit rather than by a moment.