“. . .for it is God who works IN you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. ” – Phil 2:13

Herein lies the difference between the behavior of the the People of God under the Old Testament “legal” system and the Covenant of grace for the life of a disciple of Christ. The God of all creation is at work IN each and every believer! Does that describe His omnipresence, or what?!

HOW God works IN us is a glorious display of His awesome power in our lives. When the Holy Spirit takes up residence in our lives, God bends our selfish natural will towards himself so that when before we believed we desired to please ourselves, while from the moment of belief in the Risen Lord, we have an inner compulsion to please Him.

And since mere desire to do a thing is insufficient to actually perform it, we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to ‘get the job done’, whatever that might be!

What does that look like? In some ways it is different in the life of every believer. We end up serving God in different ‘life’ circumstances, and in different roles in the Body of Christ. One thing is, or should be the same in the life of every believer. We all should be growing in grace and truth, becoming more like Christ inwardly and outwardly, as the ‘old’ is stripped away and cast aside, while the ‘new’ becomes more and more apparent inwardly and outwardly.

Inwardly, the assurance of our salvation becomes stronger and stronger in the face of the enemy who would have us doubt what God has done – saved us and freed us from the bondage of sin. Outwardly, as the inner changes in our ‘will’ result in changes in our ‘doing’, those who observe our lives take notice, both believers and those who have not yet trusted Christ for their salvation.

What this means is that if I hold on to the ‘garbage’ in my life, I am fighting against God!