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

"We will never be able to understand these words if we see the divine preservation and our preservation of ourselves as mutually exclusive or as in a synthetic cooperation. Preserving ourselves is not an independent thing that is added paradoxically to the divine preservation. God's preservation and our self-preservation do not stand in mere coordination, but in a marvelous way they are in correlation. One can formulate it best in this way: our preservation of ourselves is entirely oriented to God's preservation of us...There is therefore no reason to see a tension between God's preservation and our preservation of ourselves if we do not view the latter as something complementing the divine preservation. In such a case the divine keeping would be only the starting point for perseverance and perseverance would be realized by an independent preservation of ourselves. This, however, is a train of thought that is foreign to the entire Scriptures...Preserving ourselves does not imply that we contribute our part and that God contributes His. Our preserving is oriented to His, and it is included in it. Faith can never say, and will never say, 'This is our part.' It is the mystery of faith that it cannot speak in this way. It understands the connection of promise and demand, of grace and admonition. The mystery of this connection is the profound content of the doctrine of perseverance. Apart from faith this doctrine petrifies into a meaningless train of argument; but in faith the correct view of God's sovereign grace and His loving mercy is maintained. Amidst all weakness and instability, faith confesses this mercy as the alpha and omega of life." (G. C. Berkouwer)