2. The salvation has to be wrought out. It must come to pass in your case in the line of your own endeavour. Having its power and fulness in Christ, and bestowed by Him on you, yet this deliverance from distance, estrangement, darkness, unholiness, is given to believers to be wrought out: it comes as a right to be realised, and as a power to be exercised, and as a goal to be attained. Think of this,--you have in hand your own salvation--great, Divine, and wonderful--to be _wrought out_. Can you go about it without fear and trembling? Consider what you are--consider what you believe--consider what you seek--and what a spirit of lowly and contrite eagerness will pervade your life! This holds so much the more, because the salvation itself stands so much in likeness to Christ--that is to say, in a loving lowliness. Let a man think how much is in him that tends, contrariwise, to self-assertion and self-seeking, and he will have reason enough to fear and tremble as he lays fresh hold on the promises, and sets his face to the working out of this his own salvation. 3. This very working out, from whom does it come? Are you the explanation and last source of it? What does it mean? Wherever it takes place, it means that, in a very special sense, God's mighty presence and power is put forth in us to will and to do. Shall not this thought quell our petulance? Where is room now for anything but fear and trembling--a deep anxiety to be lowly, obedient, compliant? Whether, therefore, we look to the history of the Saviour, or to the work to which our own life is devoted, or to the power that animates that work and on which it depends--in all alike we find ourselves committed to the lowly mind; and in all alike we find ourselves beset with a wealth of free beneficence, which lays obligation on us to be self-forgetting and loving. We are come into a wonderful world of compassionate love. That is the platform on which we stand--the light we see by--the music that fills our ears--the fragrance that rises on every side. If we are to live here, there is only one way for it--there is only one kind of life that _can_ live in this region. And, being, as we are, alas, so strangely coarse and hard--even if this gospel gladdens us, there may well thrill through our gladness a very honest and a very contrite "fear and trembling."