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This is Your Conscience (part 5)
We’ve been talking about the conscience, and last time we focused on the idea that your conscience is like an instrument that can be tuned. It’s supposed to tell us right from wrong, but it’s not perfect. We can pursue actions that bring it into alignment with reality, or we can pursue actions that draw it further out of tune. Besides the “seared” conscience that we mentioned last time, there is another category of conscience referenced in Scripture. It’s called the “defiled” conscience. And it’s probably not what you think. The seared conscience has become dead to sin, insensitive to evil. But the defiled conscience actually has the other problem:…
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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.…