Intro: Among the 5 senses, I’m most intrigued by our sense of smell. It amazes me how many memories are conjured up by smells for me – the way I can think of a smell because of a memory; the way a smell brings back a memory. Pretty amazing. They’re not all good smells. In fact, I can remember some pretty bad smells. I won’t bother sharing the stories behind them.
Just like the next guy, I don’t like bad smells. But if a bad smell can alert me to a problem, that’s not all bad. For instance, aren’t you glad that you smelled the sour milk before you took a big drink of it?
March 18, 1937. It was just 17 minutes before school was to dismiss in the little town of New London, TX. It was oil country, and the school board had decided to save some money by using natural gas siphoned off an oil company’s pipeline. It would allow them to fuel the school’s furnace for free. Natural gas is odorless. No one knew that a leak had developed and that gas had accumulated in the basement of the school. A spark from a classroom ignited it into a blast that raised the building off its foundation. Around 300 students and teachers were killed. One of the outcomes of that tragedy was a government regulation that now requires companies to add an odorant – methanethiol – to natural gas, in order to make it stink. It’s not a pleasant smell, but without it, people wouldn’t be alerted to the danger they’re in.
This morning we’re going to look at a part of our inner selves that’s kind of like that odorant. It may not seem pleasant to us, but it’s there for good reason. It’s our conscience.
Someone has said, "Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.” That can be good or bad, depending on your relationship to your mother-in-law. So, how’s your conscience? My goal today is to get all of us to leave here appreciating it and using it for the purposes God intended.
I. Conscience is a God-given Mechanism
Remember Pinocchio? In his pursuits in life, he was given a special gift by the fairy– a little, singing cricket with a top hat and an umbrella – Jiminy Cricket. And Jiminy Cricket periodically appears, talking to Pinocchio, trying to convince him to do what’s right. He was really representing himself when he sang that song, “Give a little whistle…and always let your conscience be your guide.”
What we’re talking about today isn’t something unique to the Christian experience. Conscience isn’t the same as the HS that comes to live inside us when we accept Jesus. Conscience is something God gives to everyone. It’s a mechanism. Like so many other good things God gives to everyone, conscience can be misused or neglected. To use it rightly, we need to understand it. First, we need to understand…
A. Conscience can be wrong
Right away, Jiminy Cricket’s song has a problem. Consciences aren’t always right.
1. False Innocence
Paul was put on trial. As he stood up to make his defense,
Acts 23:1 Paul looked straight at the Sanhedrin and said, "My brothers, I have fulfilled my duty to God in all good conscience to this day."
Paul was speaking the truth. He had kept a good conscience. He had done what he thought was right. And that included:
Acts 26:9-11 "I too was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth…I put many of the saints in prison, and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them. Many a time I went from one synagogue to another to have them punished, and I tried to force them to blaspheme. In my obsession against them, I even went to foreign cities to persecute them.
Now, how does a godly man look back at his former life, the horrible things he’d done, and say about all of it that he had done it “all in good conscience to this day”? How can you have that in your record and have a clear conscience? This same Paul said,
1 Corinthians 4:4
My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.
It tells me that the conscience, by itself, isn’t wholly reliable. Your conscience can be wrong. It can be drastically mistaken. Many a person has rationalized wrong living on the basis of it. “Well, I don’t feel guilty, so what I’m doing must be OK.”
Quote - Ernest Hemingway, quoted in Newsweek - "What is moral is what I feel good after, and what is immoral is what I feel bad after."
Ill – My dad had paid for a membership at Rainbow Falls – a fishing lake about 1 hour into the mountains from our home in C Springs. About our 2nd visit there, the fish just weren’t biting. That happens at stocked lakes. You could see them – right there in front of you, but they wouldn’t bite. So, my brother and I put on some great big bear hooks. We’d cast them just over a big fish, then snag him in the side and drag him in sideways. It was great! Here we were, catching some pretty big fish, while most everyone else there wasn’t catching anything. We were so elated, when the guy managing the place came by, we showed him our fish and told him of our ingenious idea. Oops. He kindly told us that was against the rules. There went that great idea! We had done it with a clear conscience, but it was wrong.
All you have to do is total the collective conscience of our nation and place it next to the 47 mil children who have been legally aborted here. That’s proof enough to me that we can have a false sense of innocence when we shouldn’t.
2. False Guilt
This works 2 directions. Suppose there’s something you’re doing and you feel bad about it, but by itself it’s not really wrong?
Ill – Bob Guarino comes home and finds cookies sitting in the kitchen. He figures that Anna Mae has fixed those to give to someone. But they look really good. Besides, they won’t miss just a couple of them, right? So, Bob sneaks off with a couple of cookies. Oh, they’re good cookies, but they just don’t seem as good. He’s feeling kind of bad about it. His conscience is alerting him to something. Anna Mae walks in the room, and just as Bob is about to fess up, she holds a plate of cookies in front of him. “Here, I made some cookies for you.” “What, those weren’t for someone else?” “Nope. Just for you.” Now, not only does Bob feel sheepish, but he has also realized an important lesson: an uniformed conscience can make you guilty where you don’t need to be!
Paul writes to the Corinthians about the things we’re free to do as Christians. One of these was eating meat that came from the marketplace that previously had been part of a sacrifice to idols. Idols are nothing. The meat wasn’t changed by this. But there’s still this issue of conscience. Paul says it’s OK to eat that meat…
1 Corinthians 8:7 But not everyone knows this. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat such food they think of it as having been sacrificed to an idol, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled.
It’s a matter of conscience. If you’re going to engage in something that you think is wrong, whether it’s wrong or not, and your conscience is eating at you, don’t do it! But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re right. It could mean that your conscience needs some better training. It could be you’re feeling guilty about something that shouldn’t make you feel that way.
Here’s the point: You can’t just “let your conscience be your guide.” If it isn’t guided by God’s truth, it can malfunction. Your conscience might be wrong. Just like a compass can be set wrong, your conscience can be wrong. In a few minutes I’ll talk about how to make sure that doesn’t happen.
B. Conscience can be disabled or ignored
Ill – You could compare your conscience to the safety or warning system in a car. Those lights that come on, those bells and buzzers that go off, are all there for a reason. Tell me, when you turn on your key, what’s the noise all about? Why all the lights? For just about every car, one of those lights is reminding you that you’re supposed to put on your seatbelt. Is that what it makes you think of? If you’re like me, you’ve heard it so many times, it’s not effective. With practice, you learn to ignore it.
Dad had a ‘76 Honda Accord. One day, the “service engine” light came on. He said, “Here, I’ll show you how we fix that,” and he pushed the key into a slot right below it that reset it. The light went off, but I’m not sure that was the point of it being there in the first place!
1 Timothy 4:2 Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.
Titus 1:15 To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted.
Ill - Our garage door at home has an automatic opener, and we use it a lot to go in and out. It stopped working. There’s a safety feature required on those doors. It shoots a beam of light across the floor at the bottom, so that, if there’s something in the way, or if the cat decides to run under the door as it’s closing, it stops and no one gets smashed. It’s a warning system. It won’t work without it. Well, ours quit working, so I bought some replacement parts to fix it. They came, and the wires weren’t long enough, and I needed to figure out the wiring and all, but I didn’t want to wait any longer. I wanted our door to work. So, I just stuck them together up on the closer. In other words, I bypassed the system. (It’s probably a federal crime, so please don’t repeat this.) But I wanted to get that door working without the extra 45 minutes it will take to get the safety feature done correctly. I’ll get around to it…someday. Till then, I just found a way around doing it the right way. It’s hazardous to the cat, but less work for me.
Ill - If you’ve ever picked up a guitar and tried to start playing, you’ll notice in a short time that it hurts. Those finger tips on your left hand get sore. You’re taking that little surface area of your fingertips and pressing it against hard, vibrating metal. Ouch. If you’re just starting out, that’s one of the hurdles you have to get past. But if you keep practicing, something happens. Over time, you get calluses. The twinges of pain go away. If you play all the time, you no longer worry about the pain, because it has stopped.
Here’s the point: With enough practice, you can turn off your conscience. Pinocchio did it. After a while, the twinge of pain goes away. Your awareness of cause and effect gets duller. Keep it up, and you’ll no longer worry about it. Imagine how having your fingertips seared with hot metal would affect your sensitivity. That’s how Paul describes a disabled conscience. Just keep in mind that feeding your conscience with excuses is like giving sleeping pills to your watchdog.
Conscience is a mechanism. It’s only as reliable as the way it has been trained and the way it’s working. With some effort, you can mess it up, if you really want to.
Trans – A person’s conscience prompted a letter to the IRS: "Dear Sirs: I cannot sleep. Last year, when I filed my income tax return, I deliberately misrepresented my income. Now I cannot sleep. Enclosed is a check for $150 for taxes. If I still can’t sleep, I will send you the rest!"
Now, let’s spend some time on the positive role that conscience is supposed to have for us. Yes, it is a mechanism – but it’s a God-given mechanism that has a real purpose in our lives.
II. A Clear Conscience is Something We Long For – It Can Help Us
Just as surely as your liver has a purpose for being in your body, this conscience thing has a great purpose that it serves in your inner self.
A. Conscience can warn of harmful situations
David wrote Psalm 32. Some scholars believe he’s describing the way he worked to cover up his sin with Bathsheba, after arranging for her husband’s murder. For some period of time, he just tried to ignore his conscience.
Psalm 32:3-5 (HCSB)
When I kept silent, my bones became brittle from my groaning all day long. For day and night Your hand was heavy on me; my strength was drained as in the summer’s heat. Then I acknowledged my sin to You and did not conceal my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and You took away the guilt of my sin.
David needed to deal with the wrongness of what he had done. Until he did, he couldn’t be real in his relationship with God. He couldn’t be a good leader to his nation. He couldn’t look at himself in the mirror. Something needed to change. He needed to stop the cover up.
If you conscience is bothering you today, thank God for it. Seriously. It may be alerting you to a problem in your life that you wouldn’t be dealing with otherwise. Listen to it. Why is the alarm going off? It may be that you’re headed for a crash and burn that could cost you heaven. That conscience is a good thing.
I’m also interested by the way our…
B. Conscience bears witness / testimony to others
Listen to these verses and the way a clean conscience gets called to the witness stand of life:
2 Corinthians 1:12a
Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, in the holiness and sincerity that are from God.
2 Timothy 1:3
I thank God, whom I serve, as my forefathers did, with a clear conscience, as night and day I constantly remember you in my prayers.
Hebrews 13:18
Pray for us. We are sure that we have a clear conscience and desire to live honorably in every way.
In each of these verses, the writer is pointing to his own conscience as a witness to his sincerity. It’s not the end of all arguments, but being able to say you have a clear conscience carries some impact.
C. Conscience can protect us from unfair attacks
Keeping a clear conscience is the outcome of a clean life.
1 Peter 3:16 keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.
Acts 24:16 So I strive always to keep my conscience clear before God and man.
If you’ve ever had someone make an unfair accusation against you, or spread an ugly rumor about you, you understand the value of being able to have a clear conscience. There’s a certain amount of help in that. But to have it, you have to have a clear life.
When we start to weigh the help a conscience can be, it starts to seem less like a mother-in-law that won’t leave.
III. A Clear Conscience is Something We Can Have
God wants you to have a clean conscience! Only, He doesn’t want you to get there by being convinced that you should just feel OK about anything you’ve done. He wants you to have a clean conscience by having a truly clean self.
(A. We can’t get it on our own)
Someone pointed out a few months ago how every world religion has built into it this realization that we’re responsible to some Higher Power that we’ve let down. They start with a guilty conscience. But Christianity is the only arrangement where God provides exactly what we need. Everyone else is trying to fix it on his own. God tells us we can’t!
Modern psychology deals with a troubled conscience by telling us we should just stop feeling guilty, or else, find something we can do to make us feel better. Forget whether guilt is a real issue or not. The focus becomes “how it makes me feel” rather than this is a real problem in my life.
I have good and bad news. The bad news is that it really is a real problem in my life and yours that really needs attention. The good news is that there is a way to deal with it that really works.
Joke - In The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, the cartoon character Calvin says to his tiger friend, Hobbes, "I feel bad that I called Susie names and hurt her feelings. I’m sorry I did it."
Hobbes suggests: "Maybe you should apologize to her." Calvin ponders this for a minute and says, "I keep hoping there’s a less obvious solution."
When it comes to restoring a right relationship with God, we need to remember that He has a liking for the obvious solution. When it comes to our conscience, it’s obvious that we need something more than just doing “something that makes me feel better.”
B. It comes from having the blood of Jesus sprinkled on us
God gave Israel a complicated system of sacrifices to deal with their sin. These were from God, but they aren’t designed to fix everything. Have you noticed? We don’t kill and burn bulls or goats as a part of our worship to God today. Something else needs to happen
Hebrews 9:9b
the gifts and sacrifices being offered were not able to clear the conscience of the worshiper.
Here’s why:
Hebrews 10:3-4
those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins, because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.
They couldn’t clear a person’s conscience because they didn’t remove a person’s sins. But if there’s something that can remove sin – if there’s something that’s more than just a reminder to me that I’m a sinner – that could clear my conscience.
Hebrews 10:19-22
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.
Conclusion:
I’ve heard a lot of people say they aren’t ready to accept Jesus just yet because they’re afraid they’ll slip back into their old ways.
Going back to the old way of living doesn’t make sense, because accepting Jesus is about gaining a clean conscience. That old, dirtied conscience is like a burning building that we’re running away from. Why would we go back to the very thing we’re running away from?
1 Peter 3:21 and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also--not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a good conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ,
You might have a margin note in your Bible that tells you this could be translated “an appeal for a good conscience.” That really is a better translation, since it comes from a word that means to ask or demand – not “to pledge.” You don’t come to Jesus and just pledge to have a good conscience before Him. You come to Jesus and ask Him to give you one.
That’s what baptism into Jesus is – it’s your appeal. It’s coming to Jesus and saying, “Lord, please, wash me clean. Take away the shame. Take away the sin. Take way the reason for my guilty conscience. Save me.”
