Better Than Your Conscience

“Let your conscience be your guide.” I’ve heard this statement many, many times over the years, particularly from Christians. It’s not necessarily bad advice – if one’s conscience is well-informed by God’s truth and tender to the conviction of the Holy Spirit. Scripture, though, tells us one’s conscience may be weak, over-sensitive to things that are of no real moral or spiritual weight (1 Corinthians 8:7-13), or “seared as with a hot iron” and made insensitive to things that should provoke it mightily. When believers urge each other to make moral choices on the basis of their conscience it is not, then, always necessarily the best advice.

Many believers have a fearful, law-centered, hyper-careful attitude in being disciples of Jesus – especially when they are new to the faith. They haven’t yet settled into the love, grace and faithfulness of their Creator and Heavenly Father. The smoke of hell is still on their clothes, so to speak, and until its odor diminishes, they remain strongly motivated in their walk with God by the fear of hell. As a result, they are excessively concerned with the do’s and don’ts of Christian living, sensitive especially to anything that touches on the sins that most plagued their lives.

In time, as these believers set down roots in the great truths of God’s mercy, grace and love for them, as they come to trust deeply in the faithfulness of their Heavenly Father and the perfect, atoning work of Christ, their consciences become balanced, stable, shaped by, and reflecting the wisdom of, God’s truth. (1 John 4:16-19; 1 Corinthians 1:30-31; Romans 5:20, etc.) In such a circumstance, the conscience of the Christian believer is a useful ally in discerning good from evil.

Terribly, other believers migrate into a condition where their conscience becomes so damaged by willful sin that it no longer functions at all. Obviously, advising such a believer to follow their conscience is a very bad idea. These are the sort of Christians who are perennially carnal, “babes in Christ,” contentious, fleshly, sensual, friends of the World, even caught up in gross sexual immorality. (1 Corinthians 3:1-3, 1 Corinthians 5; 1 Corinthians 6; James 4:4; James 3:14-16, etc.) Ironically, these are the believers most eager to follow their conscience because it reacts to nothing, however immoral. If their conscience is the Final Arbiter of right and wrong, well, anything goes, then. Hooray!

In the end, it is better to be led by the conviction of the Spirit and the truth of God’s word. These things never change, they never flex for the ever-shifting carnal currents of culture, or bend for the fleshly desires of the individual, they never accommodate the myriad devilish counterfeits of divine truth, leading so many into sin and death. Let these be your guide.

Romans 8:14
14 For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.

1 Corinthians 2:9-13
9 but just as it is written, "THINGS WHICH EYE HAS NOT SEEN AND EAR HAS NOT HEARD, AND which HAVE NOT ENTERED THE HEART OF MAN, ALL THAT GOD HAS PREPARED FOR THOSE WHO LOVE HIM."
10 For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God.
11 For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God.
12 Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God,
13 which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.

2 Timothy 3:13-17
13 But evil men and impostors will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.
14 You, however, continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of, knowing from whom you have learned them,
15 and that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.
16 All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness;
17 so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.