Philippians 2:13

For it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure.

God indeed works in and through the obedient, but this is far from being a denial that people must obey God. Through the ages the problem has been this: if one must (in addition to believing in Christ) be baptized in order to be saved, that, in the view of some, would make man his own Savior; but such a view is not justified. For example, when the man born blind washed in the pool of Siloam (John 9:1-12), that did not make him his own healer; although none can deny that he could not have been healed without doing what Christ commanded. The same principle applies to the Scripture: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved" (Mark 16:16). See comment in this series of commentaries on both of these passages.

This verse was called a paradox by Barry, thus:

In this famous paradox, Paul calls men to work by their own will, just because only God can grant them power both to will and to do. The origination of all in God, and the free action (which is in some sense origination) of man, are both truths recognized by our deepest consciousness, but to our logic irreconcilable.[44]

Scholars are entirely too sensitive about "work" and sinners, or Christians either, "saving themselves." No apostle, or other New Testament evangelist, had any of the foolish notions on this subject which clutter the minds of so many today. In the first sermon ever preached, the apostle Peter said, "Save yourselves from this crooked generation" (Acts 2:40). Paul's mention here (almost immediately) of "crooked and perverse generation" shows that his thinking here was exactly parallel to that of Peter on Pentecost. In fact, these two verses supplement and explain each other.