If you could be taken instantaneously into the immediate, unfiltered presence of God, face to face, for only sixty seconds, and then returned to Earth, you would at once
- lust feverishly for Purity
- writhe and wrestle impatiently for Patience
- mourn with the look of an ignoramus for your own lack of Wisdom
- yearn with all the rebelliousness of history’s fiercest outlaws for Obedience
- feel your heart vault skyward in a leaping search for Humility, and
- feel your soul struggle like a trapped weasel for Peace.
This is what is meant by those great Christians of the past who tell us that a believer is “at war with his sins but at rest with his God”. “It is well with my soul” simply means that the saved individual knows — despite all the turbulence of his fight against personal sin — that he or she is saved. When your conscience and the Holy Spirit are in agreement about a particular action of yours, it does not mean that you have achieved that perfection Christ tells us to strive after. When you are working out your salvation “in fear and trembling”, you are (under the influence of the Spirit) experiencing those fervent emotions I have listed and numbered above. It’s not that you are struggling to keep a frantic hold on your salvation, lest it slip away while your back is turned; no, it’s more in the nature of a struggle to re-taste a delight that you must have more of — or perish. We have gotten a glimpse of God, and we are now longing for sanctification, and at war with our iniquities. But it is only the grace of having received the gift of that glimpse — of having “tasted the heavenly gift”, of having “shared in the Holy Spirit” — that makes the strong ghostly striving possible.
If I am trudging wearily through a blizzard in heavily-forested foreign lands, and glimpse far ahead of me a large cabin with windows aglow and smoke rising from its chimney, then I am going to double my efforts to go forward — to march ahead in “fear and trembling”: fear that I might not “run the race” to its conclusion, and trembling with wholehearted, half-anxious, joyous anticipation. The closer we get to an oasis in the desert (to alter the scene completely), the more carefully and cautiously we will make sure we avoid tripping, measure our strength, ration our remaining water, and judge the distance. The more, in other words, we will hunger and thirst after righteousness, which is another word for right conduct. If I am dying — as we all are — and I see the Land of Bliss ahead, and the terms for admittance include doing good — well, then, I am going to be as good as I and my Maker can make me.
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