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This is Your Conscience (part 4)
For the past few days I’ve been posting on the conscience. I’ve said it’s our moral sense, like a compass that guides you in matters of right and wrong. It comes from God, endorsed in a sense to teach you good and evil when you have no other guides like the Old Testament Law or the teachings of Jesus to tell you what to do. To be a Christian is to live by the conscience, being sure to run to the church rather than away from it when you run afoul of it. But all along I’ve hinted at a problem. It’s rather significant, actually, and it’s one of the…
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This is Your Conscience (part 3)
Last time I talked about the role of the conscience in condemning and confirming your actions. Your conscience is a gift from the Creator to help you know how to live. It’s not perfect (which we’ll come back to later) but it’s right enough that in the absence of other witnesses, to go against conscience is sufficient to condemn you before God. So it should come as no surprise that being a good Christian means listening to that internal compass God gave you for direction. We looked at a few passages where Paul talked about striving for a “good” or “clean” conscience. But before I move on to other factors…
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This Is Your Conscience (part 2)
Last time I began talking about the conscience. You may have noticed that while I said I was going to give a biblical talk and that the Bible has a lot to say, I didn’t actually reference the Bible at all. The reason is this: the Bible doesn’t actually define the conscience. That’s not at all strange; the Bible uses many words that it never defines because its original readers were expected to know them. This is one reason why it’s important to study the original languages, or at least to have trustworthy people you can rely on to do this for you. (Not everyone should take up the languages.…
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This is Your Conscience (part 1)
NPR reported this week that the Trump administration would be protecting health care workers in conflicts arising from matters of conscience or religious objection. I was relieved to hear this, but not everyone has been so excited. Since some find this move alarming, I thought it would be a good time to revisit my teaching notes from a Sunday School series on the conscience. “To go against conscience is neither right nor safe.” – Martin Luther Historically, the conscience has been a fair-weather friend of the Christian faith. Conscience has been a powerful tool at times for showing people that Jesus provides a better way than how they have been living.…
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Why We Need Theology
When you grow up in certain denominations, you aren’t always trained in theology. Some denominations are explicit about their doctrines and about the statements and creeds and confessions that help define who they are, why they are here, and how they should live. For others, the theology is still present, but implicit and unstated. The trouble with this is that an implicit theology is more difficult to defend and keep with any consistency. Doctrines that are implicitly held may be in greater need of upkeep without anyone realizing it. Of course, denominations that emphasize doctrine have their own troubles, such as the difficulty of modifying it when it, too, needs…