Is Your Conscience a Safe Guide?
“I’m in a real dilemma,” Bertha explained to Roy. “I don’t know what to do. I want to but I have this uncomfortable feeling inside.”
Roy asked: “Well, what’s your conscience telling you?”
It sounds good: ‘Let your conscience be your guide.’ It sounds reassuring when we say: ‘Well, I don’t have a conscience about wearing this or going there.’ It sounds good, but…..
Centuries ago there was a man who lived for one thing: get rid of every Christian on the planet. Seething with rage and threatening to slaughter them, he got his big rushes from handcuffing Christians and hauling them off to the authorities for execution. He didn’t toss and turn at night trying to get to sleep. He slept like a baby believing he was doing the right thing for God. He had a perfectly clear conscience about what he was doing. It wasn’t until he trusted Christ that the Apostle Paul realized he had actually been fighting against God. (Acts 23:1, John 16:2)
Your conscience is a powerful internal instrument designed by God and implanted in every human being. God’s intention for the instrument is that it be calibrated, aligned and indexed to His Holy Standard. The extent to which my life is NOT regulated by my Bible is the degree to which my conscience will be out of whack.
After he was saved, the Apostle Paul said:
Therefore I always exercise and discipline myself
mortifying my body, deadening my carnal affections, bodily appetites, and worldly desires, endeavoring in all respects
to have a clear, unshaken, blameless conscience,
void of offense
toward God
and toward men.
Act 24:16 Amplified
Constantly, every day, Paul did his best to make sure his accountability instrument (his conscience) was clear before God and before men. It’s an amazing instrument to help us live for the Lord when we are daily indexing it to what we read in the Word of God. Never ignore the alarm signals generated by your conscience. And remember the instrument needs DAILY alignment.
Someone has suggested three phases of conscience activity. When is this alarm system triggered?
1) BEFORE a contemplated action is begun, your conscience will attempt to tell you whether it is right or wrong. A battle rages within. The battle of the mind. The voice of conscience may be drowned out by all the other voices and influences we’ve been responding to lately. The voices of friends as well as our own impulses and desires to which we have been catering recently. This is where the battle for purity, morality and honesty must be won.
2) DURING an action the conscience is at its very weakest point of influence – because of the strength of the desire to do whatever we have chosen to do. Once an act of wrong has begun, stopping it is extremely difficult. There is momentum and intensity in action. Rarely can you put the brakes on or reverse direction, once you have headed down a certain path.
3) AFTER the fact – the siren of your conscience is deafeningly loud and shrill. The fun is over. The deed is done. The rage has been exhausted. The mind has been defiled. The noise of fun and bravery has subsided; your friends are gone and all you can now hear is the scream of conscience that has judged you to have done wrong.
Unless the wrong is made right, the sin confessed and communion with the Lord is restored, the conscience will continue to hound you with guilt – even 20 years later, just like Joseph’s brothers. (Genesis 42:21)
Never ignore the alarm signals of your conscience – that’s a given. But also, don’t let your conscience be your only guide. Your Bible is the unchanging standard by which God measures our performance. The Word of God is the only safe guide.
Take an extra two minutes just now and try singing prayerfully one of Charles Wesley’s lesser known hymns to the tune of Amazing Grace or Three Crosses Standing Side by Side:
I want a principle within
Of watchful, godly fear,
A sensibility of sin,
A pain to feel it near.
I want the first approach to feel
Of pride or wrong desire,
To catch the wandering of my will,
And quench the kindling fire.
From Thee that I no more may stray,
No more Thy goodness grieve,
Grant me the filial awe, I pray,
The tender conscience give.
Quick as the apple of an eye,
O God, my conscience make;
Awake my soul when sin is nigh,
And keep it still awake.
Almighty God of truth and love,
To me Thy power impart;
The mountain from my soul remove,
The hardness from my heart.
O may the least omission pain
My reawakened soul,
And drive me to that blood again,
Which makes the wounded whole.