How Can I Develop a Christian Conscience? (Crucial Questions)

by R.C. Sproul

Yet if there are no absolute, transcendent principles, how do we explain this mechanism that we call the conscience?

In the physical realm, the feeling of pain signals that there is something wrong with the body. Spiritually speaking, the pain of guilt, can signal to us that something is wrong with our souls.

When we sin, the conscience is troubled. It accuses us. The conscience is the tool that God the Holy Spirit uses to convict us, bring us to repentance, and to receive the healing of forgiveness that flows from the gospel.

We see in the New Testament that the conscience is not the final ethical authority for human conduct because the conscience is capable of change.

Perhaps you even became physically ill. But the power of sin can erode the conscience to the point where it becomes a faint voice in the deepest recesses of your soul. By this, our consciences become hardened and callous, condemning what is right and excusing what is wrong.

We become a culture in trouble when we begin to call evil good and good evil. To do that, we must distort the conscience, and, in essence, make man the final authority in life. All one has to do is to adjust his conscience to suit his ethic. Then we can live life with peace of mind, thinking that we are living in a state of righteousness.

We recognize that people can have highly sensitized consciences, not because they are being informed by the Word of God but because they have been informed by man-made rules and regulations.

the conscience can excuse when it ought to be accusing, and it also can accuse when it should be excusing.

For the Christian, the conscience is not the ultimate authority in life. We are called to have the mind of Christ, to know the good, and to have our minds and hearts trained by God’s truth so that when the moment of pressure comes, we will be able to stand with integrity.

Nevertheless, all of the grace that comes to us in the New Testament does not entirely eliminate the fact that we live under law.

In its simplest terms, a covenant is an agreement or contract between two or more persons. Every covenant contains within it certain benefits and promises, and every covenant includes legal requirements or laws.

There are laws in the New Testament just as there are laws in the Old Testament.

All men, everywhere, are participants in a covenant relationship with God even if they never join the Christian church or the Jewish commonwealth. The first covenant that God made with mankind was with Adam, who represented the entire human race. In that covenant, the covenant of creation, God entered into a contractual relationship with all human beings. By nature, every descendant of Adam belongs to the covenant of creation. This may not be a relationship of grace, but it is a relationship nonetheless. The laws that God gave in creation remain binding on all men. It doesn’t matter if they are religious, members of the household of Israel, or members of a local church.

We need to understand that creation ordinances transcend the limits of the particular laws that we find within the New Testament church. That means that the laws of creation go beyond the confines of the Christian church.

The church is called to be the prophetic voice of God in a given society and call attention to the fact that all men are under the authority of the creation mandates.

Remember, atheism doesn’t nullify the laws that God has given to man. The covenant of creation is inescapable. One cannot just repudiate it and step out of it. We can break the covenant, but we cannot annul the covenant of creation.

How many times have you heard it said that “you can’t legislate morality?” That’s been stated so often that it has become a cliché in our culture. It’s interesting to note that the very phrase itself has undergone a kind of strange metamorphosis. The original sense was that you can’t end sin by simply passing laws that prohibit it.

We know that people sin in spite of the fact that laws tell them not to.

But the statement that you can’t legislate morality has now come to mean that it’s wrong for the government to ever pass legislation of a moral nature.

If we can’t legislate morality, we can’t have laws against murder, against stealing, against false weights and measures, or against reckless behavior in public because these are all moral issues.

The question is not whether the state should legislate morality. The question is what morality should the state be legislating?

Historically, even within our own history, we see three levels of law. There is what we call the eternal law; there is natural law; and finally, there is what we call positive law.

A positive law is a particular law that appears on the books. “You may not sell falsely measured baskets of wheat in the marketplace.”

Natural law states that in nature there are certain principles that we should never violate.

Finally, there are particular, positive laws enacted in this world which are to reflect the natural law. This, in turn, reflects the eternal law, so that a law is considered good or just if it corresponds ultimately to God’s standards of righteousness.

In the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century, during the Enlightenment, a tremendous reaction against biblical revelation was voiced in Europe. Confidence in a revealed source of knowledge of eternal law came to be rejected. Society tried to establish itself in a revolutionary way, basing its legal structure on natural law apart from a consideration of the revealed law of God.

Now the standard for a law is not eternal truth, or eternal principle, or the character of God, but the wishes and desires of the most powerful or most vocal majority.

This is the time for Christians to call attention to the lex aeternita, the eternal law, and that eternal law of God is manifested in lex naturalis, the natural law that is built into creation. This protects society from the tyranny of the human majority and places us safely under God’s law.

Men make laws, but the laws they make are supposed to be subordinate to the law of God.

The English word “ethic” or “ethics” comes from the Greek word ethos. The word “morals” or “morality” comes from the word mores. The difference is that the ethos of a society or culture deals with its foundational philosophy, its concept of values, and its system of understanding how the world fits together. There is a philosophical value system that is the ethos of every culture in the world. On the other hand, mores has to do with the customs, habits, and normal forms of behavior that are found within a given culture.

Ethics are concerned with the imperative and morality is concerned with the indicative. What do we mean by that? It means that ethics is concerned with “ought-ness,” and morality is concerned with “is-ness.”

Ethics, or ethos, is normative and imperative. It deals with what someone ought to do. Morality describes what someone is actually doing.

If it is normal, we deem it to be good and right.

Ultimately, the science of ethics is concerned with what is right, and morality is concerned with what is accepted.

When the normal becomes the normative, when what is determines what ought to be, we may as Christians find ourselves swimming hard against the cultural current.

As Christians, the character of God supplies our ultimate ethos or ethic, the ultimate framework by which we discern what is right, good, and pleasing to Him.

It is not enough to know the good if we lack the moral courage to do what is right.

Everything that I do of an ethical character either pleases God or it does not. But God has not specified His black-and-white will for every conceivable circumstance. There are many ethical problems that we face every day that are not easy to pigeonhole.

Without knowing what the Word of God says, there will be too many gray areas before us. Yet the Bible doesn’t simply give us one or two principles, but many principles, so it takes work to understand and apply what it says about ethical issues. The more principles we learn, the better our understanding of ethics will become.