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by
D.A. Carson
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December 31, 2017 - January 6, 2018
There’s a misperception that conscience-related controversies occur only in strict churches. But really all of us are incurably judgmental. As creatures made in the image of a moral God, we are incapable of not making moral judgments, whatever our situation.
Conscience issues will remain an important part of your personal life, your church life, and your ministry life for the rest of your life.
Notice we said conscience is a capacity. Like other human capacities such as speech and reason, it’s possible for a person never to actualize or achieve the capacity of conscience.
And what is conscience if not shining the spotlight of your moral judgment back on yourself, your thoughts, and your actions. A moral being would expect to make moral self-judgments. So conscience is inherent in personhood. It is not the result of sin. It is not something that Christians will lose after God glorifies them. This means that Jesus, who is fully human, has a conscience. Unlike our consciences, though, Jesus’s conscience perfectly matches God’s will, and he has never sinned against it.
though we all have a sense that what’s going on in our conscience is secret, we also have a sense that an all-powerful, all-knowing God is in on the secret and will someday judge those secrets at his great and terrifying tribunal.
Because conscience wants to make such stark pronouncements, it is of utmost importance that you align your personal conscience standards with what God considers right and wrong, not just with human opinion.
As we come to understand God’s revealed will more and more, we will have opportunities to add rules to our conscience that God’s Word clearly teaches and weed out rules that God’s Word treats as optional. This will take a lifetime, but we have the Spirit of God, the Word of God, and the church of God to help us.
You can damage the gift of conscience, just as you can damage other gifts from God. Oddly enough, you can damage it in two opposite ways: by making it insensitive and by making it oversensitive.
Of all the principles related to conscience, two rise to the top: (1) God is the only Lord of conscience, and (2) you should always obey your conscience.
Whenever “obey conscience!” collides with “obey God!,” “obey God!” must come out on top—every time.
The conscience is your consciousness of what you believe is right and wrong.
Conscience produces different results for people based on different moral standards.
Conscience functions as a guide, monitor, witness, and judge.
What can we say to people who carry with them such terrible secrets and unbearable burdens? What word of hope do we have? This word: God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son to redeem all who trust in Christ. God forgives and covers all their sin, and he never counts that sin against them for all eternity because he counted that sin against Christ instead. Only this message can comfort a non-Christian’s guilt-racked conscience.
When the Holy Spirit comes in, he supercharges your consciousness of sin by writing his laws on your heart (Jer. 31:33–34). He opens your eyes to see sins that you didn’t even know were sins, like pride, greed, and covetousness. He reveals to you all the little idols in your heart’s idol factory. As you read the Bible every day, you see more and more how good and holy God is and how filthy you are.
There is generally a proportional relationship between how mature you are as a Christian and how aware you are of your sinfulness. The more you grow by means of grace, the more sensitive you become to your sinfulness.
Only an ever-increasing trust in Christ’s work on the cross can fill this ever-widening gap and keep us from despair. God’s solution for us to have a clean conscience throughout our lives is simple and profound: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). The sentences before and after this solution capture the world’s solutions for a defiled conscience, namely, to deny that we have any sin at all and to defend our sin (vv. 8, 10). These solutions are still popular today in secular counseling.
Propitiation is a sacrifice that turns aside the justly deserved wrath of God and completely satisfies all of his righteous demands for justice. Christian, Christ is your propitiation. He has already turned aside God’s wrath against you by absorbing all of it into himself on the cross. If you, then, as a Christian commit a sin (which you do every day) and repentantly confess that sin to God, God would be unfaithful and unjust to refuse to forgive you. God not only promises to forgive you but also promises to cleanse you! So when your conscience condemns you, go boldly before God’s throne of
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As a general rule, you should assume that your conscience is reliable, even if it isn’t perfect. And since conscience is usually right, the Bible says that we should do what our conscience says until we are convinced from Scripture that it needs adjusting.
Because God is the Lord of your conscience, he expects you as a mature believer to gradually adjust or calibrate your conscience to match God’s will as Scripture reveals it. To train and educate your conscience is not to sin against it but to put it under the lordship of Christ. To live according to your conscience brings blessing. To train your conscience to more nearly match God’s truth brings even more blessing.
Disputable matters aren’t unimportant, but members of the same church should be able to disagree on these issues and still have close fellowship with each other. Disagreement on third-level issues shouldn’t cause disunity in the church family.
Our ultimate goal is not simply to stop judging those who are free or to stop looking down on those who are strict. Our ultimate goal is to follow the example of our Lord Jesus, who gave up his rights for others. He joyfully renounced his unbelievable freedom in heaven to come to earth and become an obedient Jew in order to save his people (Rom. 15:3–9).
We believe that the more you understand what faith in Christ means, the more you will be set free from unnecessary regulations in your life. But we must stress again that those with a strong conscience do not necessarily please God any more than those with a weak conscience. Both can glorify God, and both can sin against God.
In their book Ethics for a Brave New World, John and Paul Feinberg suggest “eight questions (tests) that each Christian must face when deciding whether or not to indulge in a given activity”:14 1.Am I fully persuaded that it is right? (Rom. 14:5, 14, 23) 2.Can I do it as unto the Lord? (Rom. 14:6–8) 3.Can I do it without being a stumbling block to my brother or sister in Christ? (Rom. 14:13, 15, 20–22) 4.Does it bring peace? (Rom. 14:17–18) 5.Does it edify my brother? (Rom. 14:19) 6.Is it profitable? (1 Cor. 6:12) 7.Does it enslave me? (1 Cor. 6:12) 8.Does it bring glory to God? (1 Cor. 10:31)
In these matters where good Christians disagree, we just need to mind our own conscience and let God be the judge of others.
Christians with a strong conscience must not allow their freedom to embolden a weaker brother or sister to sin against their conscience.
We must never allow the conscience of others to determine our own conscience. But we must always consider the conscience of others when we determine our own actions.
Christian freedom is not “I always do what I want.” Nor is it “I always do whatever the other person wants.” It is “I do what brings glory to God. I do what brings others under the influence of the gospel. I do what leads to peace in the church.
When you, through your influence, make enough small things into big things in the hearts of the local believers, you will only be setting them up to overlook something huge that will truly harm their life and family. If they learn to strain out enough gnats, they’ll eventually choke to death on a camel.
If you want the hearer’s conscience to powerfully affirm your gospel witness, you must (1) preach repentance from sins that are clearly sins in both the Bible and the consciences of the people in the target culture and (2) cultivate those virtues of the target culture’s conscience that are not traditionally a part of yours. These principles apply especially to the early stages of evangelism.
We, too, must seriously and prayerfully do the difficult work of streamlining our conscience under the direction of the Holy Spirit and his Word. This will mean creating new categories in our minds, new files, to which we will move the matters that we previously placed in the category of “Right and Wrong.” One file might say, “Family Rules,” another, “Wisdom Issues,” another, “Hygiene,” another, “Good Manners.”
Christian Liberty: The Freedom to Discipline Yourself to Be Flexible for the Gospel First Corinthians 9:19–23 presents two general categories of people: (1) people like Paul who become all things to all men for the sake of the gospel and (2) people for whom those like Paul flex. The question for those committed to gospel living is this: how do I go from being the ethnocentric person for whom Paul must flex to being the person like Paul who is doing this amazing flexing while flowing from culture to culture? It’s not easy. It requires years of carefully tending the garden of your conscience. Or
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Christian liberty is not about you and your freedom to do what you want to do. It’s all about the freedom to discipline yourself to be flexible for the sake of the gospel and for the sake of weaker believers.
You and your church are living, breathing results of Christ’s willingness to serve a culture not his own, to love people so different from himself. He tells you to do the same in Romans 14 and 15. Jesus preached (through Paul) what he practiced.
