Conscience: What It Is, How to Train It, and Loving Those Who Differ

by D.A. Carson

A church that thinks it has gotten beyond last generation’s debates over music and wine will find that this generation’s debates over recycling and child discipline are just as divisive. A believer who has prided himself on being generous on disputable matters will suddenly find himself judging a fellow believer who doesn’t buy fair-trade coffee.

What exactly is the conscience? •What should you do when your conscience condemns you? •How should you calibrate or adjust your conscience? •How should you relate to fellow Christians when your consciences disagree? •How should you relate to people in other cultures when your consciences disagree?

To be human is to have a conscience. Animals don’t have a 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.

The conscience is a gift for your good and joy, and it is something that God—not your mother or father or anyone else—gave

Blessed is the one who has no reason to pass judgment on himself for what he approves” (Rom. 14:22b). Like everyone else, you long to be “blessed” or happy.

Conscience is all about right or wrong, black or white. It doesn’t do gray scale very well.

Conscience is personal. It is your conscience.2 It is intended for you and not for someone else.

If everyone had the same conscience standards, we wouldn’t need passages like Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8, which teach people with differing consciences how to get along in their church.

Anne needs to realize that buying non-fair-trade coffee (rule B) turns out not to be a sin before God, and Bill needs to understand that rules H, I, J, K, L, M, N, and O—including going to the theater and playing video games—are not inherent sins in God’s sight. However, Anne better be thinking a whole lot more about rule G since God cares about it. And notice that Bill is wrong to omit rule A from his conscience. And they’re both off about P, which doesn’t show up on either of their radars. But God thinks it should!

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

(Of course, as long as Bill considers H, I, J, K, etc. to be truly wrong actions for him, he’ll need to obey his conscience in those areas, even if Scripture is silent. Say, for example, that rule H is “Don’t use unfiltered Internet.” As long as Bill believes God morally requires this rule for him, he must follow it.

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.

We make conscience insensitive by developing a habit of ignoring its voice of warning so that the voice gets weaker and weaker and finally disappears. Paul calls this “searing” the conscience: “Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron” (1 Tim. 4:2

This may explain why a generation ago in some parts of America, very strict churches were extremely careful about many minor issues that they perceived were right and wrong, but the same churches also trained their deacons to guard the church doors and keep out blacks. Talk about “neglect[ing] the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness” (Matt. 23:23)! Talk about choking on camels!

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.

Your conscience is not the lord of itself—that’s idolatry. You are not the lord of your conscience. Your parents are not the lord of your conscience (though you do well to obey them when under their care). Your pastors are not the lord of your conscience (though they care for your soul, and you would be foolish to disregard their counsel). Fellow believers are not the lord of your conscience. God is the only Lord of conscience.

Whenever “obey conscience!” collides with “obey God!,” “obey God!” must come out on top—every time.

In the New Testament conscience translates syneidēsis, a word that occurs thirty times in the Greek New Testament.

2. Acts 24:16. “So I always take pains to have a clear conscience toward both God and man.” Paul always tries hard to make sure his actions correspond with what he believes are God’s moral standards.

4. Romans 9:1. “I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit.” Paul’s moral consciousness confirms through the Holy Spirit that he is not lying.

7. 1 Corinthians 8:10. “For if anyone sees you who have knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, will he not be encouraged, if his conscience is weak, to eat food offered to idols?” In the Greek text, “conscience” is the grammatical subject of the verb “encouraged” (or “strengthened” or “emboldened”). Here’s a more formal translation: “For if someone sees you, the one who has knowledge, eating in an idol’s temple, will not his conscience, being weak, be encouraged to eat food offered to idols?” (compare the KJV, NKJV, NASB, NET, and HCSB versions). Here’s the idea: If anyone sees you, who have an informed moral consciousness on this issue (i.e., you know that there are no real gods but one), eating in an idol’s temple, won’t that person’s misinformed moral consciousness be emboldened to sin against his own conscience by eating food sacrificed to idols?

8. 1 Corinthians 8:12. “Thus, sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ.” When you embolden your brothers and sisters to disregard their moral consciousness (even if it’s misinformed), you are sinning against them by causing them to feel intense guilt since their misinformed (and thus oversensitive) moral consciousness condemns them. In that way, you also sin against Christ.

Your moral consciousness should not condemn you for eating such

This is in my opinion and effective ruling on a matter of conscience that Paul is making. We are off and we are not given extreme specifics on issues such as this I think here we are getting a very specific ruling.

18. 1 Timothy 1:19. “. . . holding faith and a good conscience. By rejecting this, some have made shipwreck of their faith.” Timothy must never let go of his trust in God and must always live according to his moral consciousness. Some have failed to do this and have destroyed their lives. John Calvin concludes, “A bad conscience is, therefore, the mother of all heresies.”2 There is a connection between a bad conscience and apostasy; objections to Christianity are fundamentally moral, not intellectual (cf. John 3:19

22. Titus 1:15. “To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled.” Because of their sins, their minds don’t think rightly, and their moral consciousness doesn’t function correctly.

26. Hebrews 10:22. “. . . let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” We should draw close to God with a sincere heart and with the complete confidence that faith brings because Jesus has sprinkled our hearts to cleanse us from a guilty moral consciousness.

29. 1 Peter 3:16. “. . . having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.” Christians should live in such a way that their moral consciousness approves of their actions.

A weak conscience is not the same as a seared conscience. A seared conscience becomes inactive, silent, rarely accusing, insensitive to sin. But the weakened conscience usually is hypersensitive and overactive about issues that are not sins. Ironically, a weak conscience is more likely to accuse than a strong conscience. Scripture calls this a weak conscience because it is too easily wounded. People with weak consciences tend to fret about things that should provoke no guilt in a mature Christian who knows God’s truth.

The conscience is your consciousness of what you believe is right and wrong

“A clear conscience is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of innocence.

2. Conscience can change. Your conscience is your consciousness of what you believe is right and wrong at any given point in time, and it can change for a complex of reasons, good and bad.

3. Conscience functions as a guide, monitor, witness, and judge. Your conscience guides you to help you conform to moral standards, monitors how you conform to them, testifies to how you conform to them, and judges you for how you conform to them, thus making you feel guilt and pain (see table 1).10

What should you do when your conscience condemns you? (ch. 3) •How should you calibrate your conscience to match God’s will? (ch. 4) •How should you relate to fellow Christians when your consciences disagree? (ch. 5) •How should you relate to people in other cultures when your consciences disagree? (ch. 6)

Your guilty conscience is a barrier between you and God.

“Your sins are forgiven,” Jesus pronounced (Matt. 9:2). “How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God” (Heb. 9:14).

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.

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.

But notice something surprising about the wording of 1 John 1:9. You expect John to say, “If we confess our sins, God is kind and merciful.” Instead he says, “faithful and just.” If you’ve just confessed to a crime, the last thing you want to hear is that the judge assigned to your case is the most just and righteous judge in the city. No, you want to hear that he is the most merciful judge. But John deliberately chooses two words that are completely counterintuitive.

But we can draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings “because we have had our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed in pure water” (Heb. 10:22 NET). God’s Word repeatedly promises that Jesus can cleanse your conscience so that you can draw near to

Only the cross can fill that ever-widening gap between your consciousness of what you ought to be and your actual obedience. As you mature in your faith, you grow increasingly in love with Christ and his gospel;

Martin Luther believed that maintaining a good conscience was worth going to prison for and even dying for.

“Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.

You should maintain a good conscience even if it means you’ll suffer prison or death. It’s that important.

You don’t want to travel the pathway from a weak conscience to one that is wounded and defiled and emboldened to sin, then to an evil conscience, and finally to one seared as with a hot

“The way to keep the conscience tender,” writes Jonathan Edwards, “is to the utmost to resist sin.

For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” The principle is this: Don’t sin against your conscience.

God didn’t give you a conscience so that you would disregard it or distrust it. Romans 14:22b–23 teaches that a person who lives according to their conscience is “blessed.” So the general principle, especially for Christians who have the Holy Spirit and the holy Scripture, is that you should listen to and obey your conscience.

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.

it’s also clear from Romans 14 that the strong in faith do not necessarily please God any more than the weak in faith. Both can glorify God, and both can sin against God.