work out your salvation with fear and trembling.
We can't simply coast to salvation on autopilot. We are called to work to let God work in us. It isn't a matter of earning our salvation by our own effort or even our own diligence. It is ultimately true that "God is the one who, for his good purpose, works in you both to desire and to work." God is the one doing the real work and we are called to awe about this fact. He is working in us to desire what we ought to desire and to work for those things which we ought to work. May we not present obstacles to him. Insofar as we can may we let his work in us be the guiding force in our lives.
What sort of obstacles might we place in the way of the work God is doing in us? "Do everything without grumbling or questioning". Grumbling and questioning stem from a lack of trust. It is as though we complain about the noise and the mess because we lose sight of the building that the Lord is constructing. We get fixated on small but repetitive annoyances and forget the larger work that he himself is working. We become so focused on these annoyances that we forget who is really doing the building and risk trying to take over the project ourselves.
Otherwise, after laying the foundation
and finding himself unable to finish the work
the onlookers should laugh at him and say,
‘This one began to build but did not have the resources to finish.’
The Lord himself is the only one who has the resources to build the tower or to oppose the enemy king. When we try to do these things ourselves onlookers begin to laugh and we naturally begin to complain about projects which reveal themselves to be impossible. This is why Jesus tells us that he himself must have absolute centrality in our lives. Even family cannot be more important to us than he. If anything else does come first we will try to build and protect that apart from God's working in us to do it. And such efforts always come up short when they are matched against the circumstances of "a crooked and perverse generation" in which we live.
among whom you shine like lights in the world,
as you hold on to the word of life
In place of grumbling or questioning let us hold fast to the word of life. Let that word fill our hearts and be ready on our lips so that we can shine like lights in the world. If we rely on that word more than our possessions, more even than our families, the Lord himself will build the house in which we are meant to dwell, with ourselves as the living stones he uses.
One thing I ask of the LORD;
this I seek:
To dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
That I may gaze on the loveliness of the LORD
and contemplate his temple.
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