How To Have A Clear Conscience

Alba 8-18-2024

HOW TO HAVE A CLEAR CONSCIENCE

I John 3:19-24

In 1960 there was a comic strip called Willie Lumpkin. He was a mailman in the made up small town of Glenville. In one strip, he’s slumped in front of the television set with a coffee cup resting on his pot belly. As he flicks his cigar ashes into his cup, he says to his wife, “You’re awful quiet this morning, Mamie.” And she says in return, “Willie, I’ve decided to let your conscience be your guide on your day off.”

In the next scene, Willie is surrounded by a lawnmower, and an edger, and a hoe, and a shovel. And he’s frantically washing the windows and muttering, “Every time I listen to that dumb thing I end up ruinin’ my relaxin’.”

Conscience. We can all relate. I am sure that each of us have experienced struggles with our conscience. Now conscience can be both good or bad.

Look how the conscience works. There was the time that men brought a woman caught in adultery to Jesus to see what He would do with her. The penalty should be death, so Jesus said that the one who is without sin could cast the first stone. As a result, it says in John 8:9 “Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last.”

It doesn't always work that way because a conscience can be hardened. Paul told Timothy in I Timothy 4:2 that there are some people “having their own conscience seared with a hot iron.” In other words, they have become so polluted in their thinking and actions that their conscience is not bothered by evil anymore. Titus 1:15 says, “To the pure all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; but even their mind and conscience are defiled.”

On the other side of things, when Paul was taken before the Jewish counsel after being falsely accused and attacked by his enemies, he was able to say in Acts 23:1, “I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day.’’ As people in Christ, what we want is to be able to stand before the Lord with a clear conscience. But there are times when we are aware of who we are and what we have done. And it does trouble us, and our conscience bothers us. So the question is: How can we keep a clear conscience?

The apostle John deals with this question in our text for today in I John 3:19-24. The first thing that John tells us is that we can have a clear conscience:

1. When We Are of the Truth

Look at I John 3:18-19 which says, “My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth. And by this we know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before Him.”

When we are of the truth, that “assures our hearts before Him”. Our conscience is clear. But there is a problem here. It's that most people think that they are in the truth, and that what they believe is the truth. And if anyone disagrees, they are liars. That is certainly true in politics, but it is also true in spiritual matters.

So what does scripture have to say about truth? There are two very specific things it says. First, God's Word is truth. And it says is that Jesus is Truth. Both are important. Because we can believe what scripture says ABOUT Jesus, and that we can, and need, to believe IN Him. That's where we find truth.

But in the context of these verses, there is something else. Verse 19 refers back to verse 18 which says that we are not to “love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth.” There it is again. John's theme is love. It is when we love the brethren, love one another, which is the evidence that we are in the truth. Because real love comes from God. To be of the truth, we need to be people who know what the love of God is, and show God's love to others in deed and in truth.

A relationship with Jesus, when He is our Lord as well as our Savior, should be seen in the way we treat others. We should not be like a woman who testified to the change in her life that had resulted through her experience in conversion. She declared, “I'm so glad I got religion. I have an uncle I used to hate so much, I vowed I'd never go to his funeral. But now, why, I'd be happy to go to it any time.”