Series: Mythbusters
“Let Your Conscience be Your Guide”
1 Corinthians 4:3-4
Open
We turn back to our series called Mythbusters this morning. We’ve been looking at some spiritual myths that people believe and live their lives by. Spiritual mythology is dangerous. It will always lead you down the wrong path.
I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard people say the same thing in counseling sessions. I was ordained as a minister of the Gospel in June of 1986 – 30 years ago next month – so it’s been a bunch. They rationalize their bad choices by saying, “I let my conscience be my guide.” And then they ask, “Isn’t that why God gave me one?”
In the 1940 Disney animated movie, Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket sang a song to Pinocchio that said, “Take the straight and narrow path; and if you start to slide – give a little whistle, give a little whistle and always let your conscience be your guide.” That’s our spiritual myth for today: let your conscience be your guide.
Myth
Puritan Richard Sibbes who wrote in the seventeenth century defined the conscience as “the soul reflecting upon itself.” Conscience is at the heart of what distinguishes the human creature. People, unlike animals, can contemplate their own actions and make moral self-evaluations. That is the very function of conscience.
Your conscience is basically your understanding of what you believe is right and wrong. But here’s the problem – that voice in your head is not necessarily God’s voice. Sometimes your conscience may be theologically incorrect.
The apostle Paul told the Jewish leaders in Acts 23:1 – “My brothers, I have fulfilled my duty to God in all good conscience to this day.” Then, a short time later, Paul testified before the Roman governor and the Jewish king Agrippa in Acts 26:9 – “I too was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth.”
How could the apostle Paul say that he had served God well in all good conscience and yet oppose the very Son of God? It’s because our consciences are not always our best guide.
So many people have bought into the Jiminy Cricket School of Morality. They trust their own conscience above all else. They’re convinced that it is the best and most trustworthy guide to morality. As long as they have a clear conscience and a sense of inner peace about their decisions, to them the matter is closed.
Before we judge these people too hard, we should probably consider that we – you and I – have probably made many of our own decisions and moral judgments using almost the same rationale and core assumptions. It’s just that we’ve applied them to a different set of information and issues.
Many of us have been taught to trust our conscience as a God-given, internal indicator of right and wrong. Faced with a tough moral dilemma, we turn to it. If we have peace about our decision or action (what is really an absence of guilt), we assume it must be okay. Otherwise, our conscience would surely have let us know that something was wrong.
That kind of reasoning reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of our conscience and how it actually functions. The idea that our conscience is a trustworthy moral guide is a myth based on faulty assumptions. It’s another spiritual urban legend that, though widely believed, finds no support either in the Bible or in the way life really works. The myth is: I can trust my conscience at all times.
Misguided
The problem is that a lot of us imagine that our conscience is a spiritual thermometer. We assume that it can be placed into any situation and it will tell us the moral temperature – too hot, too cold, or just right. But that’s not how our conscience works. It’s not a spiritual thermometer, it’s a spiritual thermostat.
The difference between a thermometer and a thermostat is important. Thermostats don’t define hot or cold. They reflect our definitions of hot and cold. We set them to respond however we like.
I have a concept of what I think is comfortable in the temperature of a room. What I think is stuffy, you might think is too cold. What I think is nice and cool, you might think is an arctic blast. That’s why sometimes we find ourselves engaged in a thermostat tug of war.
You see, thermostats are designed to reflect the temperatures we program into them. I would program it one way. You might program it another. Whoever sets the thermostat defines what is warm and what is cool.
That’s how our conscience works. It’s a spiritual thermostat. We set it to the standards that we choose. We determine when it kicks on and when it stays idle. Our conscience doesn’t tell us if we’re violating God’s standards. It tells us when we’re violating our own standards. The problem is that we can reset our consciences at any time.
1 Cor. 4:3-4 – I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself. 4 My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.
How could the apostle Paul not be satisfied with a clear conscience? If there was anybody who could count on his conscience being aligned with Scripture and God’s value system, it should have been the apostle Paul. He didn’t just know the Bible. He wrote large sections of it! But the more you look at what he says here and compare it to the rest of the Bible, you see the wisdom of Paul’s words. He had lots of good reasons not to trust in his conscience as the head referee for right and wrong. And so do we.
The first reason we shouldn’t trust our conscience as our head referee on morality is because of our sin nature. Since Adam’s fall, we’ve all been born with what theologians call a sin nature. Rom. 5:12 – Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.
Paul described his sin nature in Rom. 7:22-23 – For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.
Then he says in vss 24-25 – What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? 25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.
Becoming a follower of Christ provides us with the power to overcome our sin nature, but it doesn’t eradicate it. As every longtime Christian knows, it’s not a battle that’s won overnight. It’s a step-by-step, stage-by-stage process, with some significant setbacks along the way.
To make matters worse, our sin nature doesn’t just show up as a desire to live selfishly and do wrong things. It also shows up in the way we think. It clouds everything, including our understanding of spiritual truth and God’s leading.
The apostle Paul understood this concept. He was a man who knew what it was like to walk in the Spirit, to experience miraculous healing power, and to know the mind of God well enough to write a large portion of the Word of God. But at the same time, he struggled with his own sins and had to wage a constant battle with the same powerful enemy within that we do.
What I’m saying is this: Paul was thoroughly human. He was completely saved, amazingly used, a spiritual giant – but thoroughly human nonetheless. It was his recognition of his humanity and fallen nature that caused him not to put too much trust in his clear conscience. If the apostle Paul didn’t fully trust his own conscience, I shouldn’t put too much stock in mine. Jer. 17:9 – The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
There’s another reason why we cannot trust our conscience as the final referee regarding morality. Like a computer, our conscience is no better than the data on which it relies.
Computer programmers used to use an acronym: GIGO. It stands for – Garbage In, Garbage Out. You see, a computer is only as good as its software – its programming. If the programming is wrong, the results will be wrong.
It works the same way with our conscience. It can be subjected to some pretty poor programming. Since our conscience is no more trustworthy than the standard it’s calibrated to, we can end up feeling very good about some things that are very bad.
GPS systems are quite popular. They’re designed to tell you how to get to where you need to go. But what happens if something about your GPS unit is not working right? It can lead you the wrong way.
Several years ago, while I was serving the church in Martinsville, one of the elders there and I went to visit someone in the hospital in Indianapolis. There was a lot of construction going on. Lucas Oil Stadium was being built. The way we would normally go to the hospital went right through this construction area and the traffic was all snarled up. It took us about 45 minutes longer to get to the hospital than under normal conditions.
This elder was driving and we decided to use his GPS system to get us out of the area and back on I-70 in a much faster way. The problem was that we turned it on while we were still in the parking garage. I guess all the metal and concrete confused the GPS and it showed us that we were in Martinsville traveling south on York Street headed toward Cumberland Street. We had to wait until we were out of the garage, turn the GPS unit off, and then turn it back on. We got the familiar message you probably get with your GPS unit: recalibrating. Once it recalibrated, it took us right out of downtown Indy and up onto I-70 much quicker than if we’d gone back the way we came.
When our conscience is not calibrated the right way, it will confidently tell us where to go and what to do. The problem is that most of what it will tell us is wrong. As a result, we make some dumb and even sinful decisions that are accompanied by a completely clear conscience.
Another problem is that we tend to take our moral cues from the people around us. We think that the majority can’t be wrong and if they are, God will surely understand. But that is what the Bible calls foolish thinking. Majority does not equal morality.
Nowhere in the Bible does God promise that if enough people take the wrong path, He’ll turn it into the right path. In fact, a case could be made that the best way to determine God’s will or the right course of action is to take an opinion poll and then do the exact opposite. Solomon warns us in Prov. 14:12 – There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.
One more reason we can’t trust our conscience as our head referee of morality is that over time, our conscience can become callused. A callus isn’t a bad thing if you’re a guitar player or a distance runner. It allows you to play the guitar for hours or run for miles because you’ve lost your normal sensitivity to pain.
A callused conscience is a different matter. Once our conscience loses its sensitivity, it’s not good for much. 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.
George O’Leary was hired as the head football coach at Notre Dame in 2001. It was the job he had dreamed about all of his life. After only five days on the job, he was fired. It came to light that he had lied about his background.
O’Leary claimed that he had a Master’s degree from New York University/Stonybrook University. This school is non-existent. They are actually two different schools over 50 miles apart. He claimed that he had lettered three years in football at the University of New Hampshire. New Hampshire said that he’d never played in one game there.
In a statement released on the same day he was fired, O’Leary said, “Due to a selfish and thoughtless act many years ago, I have personally embarrassed Notre Dame, its alumni and fans.” He added, “In seeking employment I prepared a resume that contained inaccuracies regarding my completion of course work for a master's degree and also my level of participation in football at my alma mater. These misstatements were never stricken from my resume or biographical sketch in later years.”
Most of us have experienced the callusing of our conscience to some degree. You do something that’s wrong the first time and you feel guilty about it. But if you continue to do it, your sense of guilt begins to fade away.
If you keep at it long enough, the guilt goes away for good. You will have a clear conscience about what you did but that doesn’t make it right. It just means that your conscience has been desensitized to the point where it no longer responds when prompted.
Just check out any prison. You’ll find that it’s filled with people who let their consciences be their guide – with dire consequences. Sadly, we can find the same thing in many of our churches.
Think about businesspeople who claim to be Christians but no longer give a second thought to breaking their word or even the law to make a deal work or to close a sale. They say it’s what they have to do to succeed. They see those of us who object to their behavior as being idealistic as they continue to pass out their business cards with a little fish in the corner.
Think about the functional drunks and recreational drug users who claim to be Christians who staunchly defend their right to relax – as long as they don’t hurt anybody. Meanwhile, they’re oblivious to the pain they inflict on those closest to them as their behavior destroys their marriage, family, or career.
Think about young Christian couples who claim that sexual purity is “unrealistic”. They see restrictions against living together as being “old school.”
All of these people have one thing in common. They defend their actions as being appropriate. They’re convinced that God understands – and maybe outright approves. Their consciences are genuinely clear. But most of the time, their consciences are only clear because they’re no longer working the right way.
Mission
So, if our conscience is so undependable, what’s it good for? First of all, we have to understand that it was given to us by God for a purpose – it is intended as an early warning system.
Prov. 20:27 – The lamp of the LORD searches the spirit of a man; it searches out his inmost being. The conscience is depicted here as a light burning in our innermost being. Unless our conscience has been neglected and ignored to the point where we have developed a thick callus, it reliably informs us when we’re about to violate our own moral standards.
Now, our own moral standards may not be aligned with God’s written standards but it can be valuable to know we’re about to do something we would consider questionable in a saner moment. The prompting of our conscience to stop and reconsider can save us lots of heartache later on. Every journey into the abyss starts with a few small steps into the canyon.
The second reason that our conscience is useful is because is it can be easily reset. That is a good thing. That means we can have the ability to continuously realign it to God’s Word if we so choose. The more we align our conscience with God’s Word we will increase our ability to recognize and avoid the deceptive lures of sin.
Ps. 119:9-11 – How can a young man keep his way pure? By living according to your word. I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands. I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.
When we rightly understand the purpose of our conscience and when it’s functioning properly, our conscience is a valuable early warning device. It’s like a yellow or red traffic light. It tells us to slow down, be cautious, or even slam on the brakes. When it does that, we need to take time to check the Scriptures before we move on.
However, our conscience is a terrible green light. Those who let their conscience be their ultimate guide get into trouble when they trust their conscience to tell them that it’s okay to go ahead and go.
Close
How do we get to where our conscience is in good shape? First we have to be cleansed by Christ’s blood. The Bible says that there is only one thing that can cleanse a dirty conscience.
Heb. 9:13-14 – How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!
The theme of the book of Hebrews is the superiority of Christ: His superiority to angels; His superiority to former methods of communication; the superiority of His sacrifice on the cross to the Old Testament sacrifices. Because Jesus died on the cross as the perfect Lamb of God, He is able to reset our consciences through the washing in His blood.
Second, we have to continually have our consciences corrected by God’s Word – the Bible.
2 Tim. 3:16-17 – All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. God’s Word always points you to Jesus who becomes your standard for right and wrong.
Third, we have to be continually counseled by the God’s Spirit. Jn. 14:16-18 – And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate [counselor] to help you and be with you forever—17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.
Because our conscience has been with us from the beginning, it will many times try to find ways to condone or excuse our actions when they are sinful. Our consciences are pliable but the Spirit of God does not change.
Let’s get this right. Let’s avoid the issues with our conscience by trusting in the work of Christ on the cross for our sins. Let’s trust in God’s instruction in the Bible. And let us trust in the leading of the Holy Spirit who is God and will never lead us astray.
(This series freely adapted from Larry Osborne’s book:
Ten Dumb Things Smart Christians Believe)
