Thanks to my brother in Christ for guiding me and encouraging me to study more to find out what this 6th verse in Philippians is about - "being confident of this very thing, that he who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ." My study bible reveals that this phrase "has begun" is used in the Bible only in reference to salvation. When God begins a work of salvation in a person, He finishes and completes that work. This would seem to support the fact that once you're saved, you're always saved. I don't doubt that saved people can fall back into sin, but the truly saved - because of the Holy Spirit within them - will repent & come back to the Lord. I don't think God's confused about who is or isn't saved. Once you're found in Him, once you repent and are baptized by the Holy Spirit, this verse doesn't leave much wiggle room for anything else but the fact that God will complete what He has begun.
It's an awesome thing for us who believe to reflect on the fact that God is continually working on us. One of my favorite resources is desiringgod.org from the ministry of John Piper. In this article from that site, Tom Steller writes:
The fact that God is at work in his people, changing the thought patterns and preference of our sinful nature, so that we love what he loves, re-tooling the grooves in our brain, knitting together the complex strands of our emotional wounds with infinitely greater skill than the world's foremost micro-surgeon—there's no greater promise than this. It is nothing other than the New Covenant promise of Ezekiel 36. "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you, I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes."To me that sounds like a lot of work, especially when this work is duplicated for every believer, but its a great witness to God's amazing love. This process of refining and transforming us isn't always pleasant. It's hard giving up the things that gave us so much pleasure before we were saved or before we knew any better.
Philippians 2:12-13 - "...continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to His good purpose." God works in us, after our salvation, a process of sanctification which involves much of what Steller writes in the aforementioned paragraph. So this shouldn't be an opportunity for us to be complacent & rely on the fact that God is going to complete what He started. It requires our full participation and a healthy fear of offending God and a righteous awe and respect for Him.* I know there's nothing we can do to earn our salvation but we can seek to please our Saviour because He's worthy.
*from John MacArthur Study Bible
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