Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide Series

The Bible says, “To those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted. They claim to know God, but by their actions, they deny him.” (Titus 1:15-16)

Have you ever told a lie? The first time you told a lie, you felt badly about it. But the next time you told it, the lie came a little easier. We have all known people who were so good at lying, they could look you right in the eye and lie without any sign of moral compunction or remorse. They have convinced themselves that telling a little lie is actually not so bad.

In 2001, George O’Leary was hired as head football coach for Notre Dame, the job he had always dreamed about having. Five days later, he was fired when it was discovered he lied about his background. He claimed to have received a Masters degree and to have lettered in football three years at New Hampshire. He had neither. Early in his coaching career he fabricated these lies and as the years passed he found it easier and easier to repeat the claims, until someone at Notre Dame checked!

Step Two: Moral guidance is deadened

The reason you can’t just let your conscience be your guide is because not only can your conscience become distorted and dull, it can actually become deadened. A person can commit sin so often over a period of time, his conscience can basically die. The Bible makes this possibility clear in I Timothy 4:1-2, “The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared (Greek: kauteriazo) as with a hot iron.”

When I was teenager, I had a friend who suffered a terrible burn on his arm as a child. There was a terrible scar there, and he used to brag about how tough he was by sticking the end of his pocketknife into the scar, or even putting a lit cigarette against it without burning. Of course, he could do that because all the nerve endings were cauterized–burned. He didn’t have any sensitivity there. The Bible says the same thing can happen to a person morally. Someone can ignore their conscience so long until it becomes completely desensitized to conviction. That’s a terrible place to be. Someone once said the worst sin is consciousness of no sin!

You wonder how the Nazi prison guards could participate in the wholesale slaughter of Jewish prisoners during WWII? Their consciences had become so deadened some of them thought they were doing the world a favor by killing Jews.

You wonder how a serial killer like Ted Bundy could smile and carry on a life that seemed outwardly normal when he brutally killed at least 36 women? Psychiatrists have a term for them: psychopaths. Basically, their moral restraint has disappeared. Their consciences have been seared with a hot iron. Sigmund Freud described this as “an iron curtain that is constructed between the ego and the id...and ‘repression’ is said to be in force. Neurosis occurs when the id breaks through the wall and overwhelms the ego.” (John Drakeford, Integrity Therapy, p. 29)