The Apostle Paul gave me a good reminder this morning.
“My conscience is clear, but that doesn’t prove I’m right. It is the Lord himself who will examine me and decide.” (I Corinthians 4:4)
Sometimes we listen to the voice of warning that speaks to our consciences — the voice of the Holy Spirit — and we stop before crossing from temptation into sin.
Sometimes, sadly, we ignore that voice after concluding that the warning doesn’t apply to us because of some exclusion we’ve concocted.
Hello, sin.
But our guilty conscience seems dead asleep.
We don’t feel guilty.
Yet we are.
King David found out the hard way that a conscience can become blinded by selfishness and do no good to protect the soul from racing off a cliff into sin.
Thank God that God didn’t give up on David and sent the prophet Nathan to help restore the catatonic conscience of the king.
The fact is that we can’t trust our eternal status to how we’re feeling in our consciences.
We’ve instead got to trust the Spirit to convict us of our sins as we measure our lives against the teachings and example of Jesus Christ.
We’ve got to stay in the Word and in prayer so that we retain sensitivity to God’s voice.
Yes, we’ll always be able to find others whose sins appear worse than ours, people whom we believe are more deserving of punishment by God rather than ourselves.
But we’ll never live up to the perfect example of Christ and that’s why we’ll always need God’s grace.
Let’s let our consciences be our guide without letting them become our god.
We are to listen to our consciences but only as we are certain that they are listening to the Lord.
As always, I love you
Martin
