The Common Grace of Conscience

Messy Church article 2: Reflecting on 2 Corinthians 1:12-22/ Romans 2/ Ephesians 4/ Rescue Skills by Deepak Reju and Jonathan D. Holmes

For several years, I lived on the campus of an undergrad institute that used a loud alarm bell system to prompt us to keep a uniform schedule. The bell clanged loudly in the hall outside my door at 6 a.m.- time to get up and ready. The next bell was 6:30 a.m., then 7:30 a.m., then 9 a.m. We had a clear choice at each alarm sound: be alerted, prepare, and obey or not and suffer the consequences.

I am withholding names to protect the not-so-innocent, but occasionally, some would pull out a roll of hockey tape after midnight and wrap the hammer in layers of tape. When 6 a.m. rolled around and you were supposed to have been jolted awake there would only be a dull thumping in the hallway. I can tell you that as a college kid, O, the glorious bliss of an extra half-hour sleep!

Do you know part of the human design is an internal alarm system? It is not the kind that tells you what time to wake up or shrills when you are supposed to be moving to the next scheduled event in your day, thankfully. However, if it functions correctly, it raises an alarm multiple times throughout your day. It is the gift of having a conscience.

What is the Conscience?

It is an internal awareness of right and wrong planted inside every person. It doesn’t matter if you consider yourself spiritual or not, religious or irreligious, Christian or atheist, or somewhere in between- you have a conscience. It alerts you to what is right or wrong, just or unjust, kind or unkind, many times daily. 

The Bible holds that our conscience is a grace or gift to us (Romans 2:12-15). It functions as an internal governor so that we have an alarm to warn or affirm when we are doing what is right or wrong.

“The conscience is a God-given capacity to distinguish between right and wrong. Because our God is a moral God, he gives those made in his image an ability, known as the conscience, to decipher morality”

– Deepak Reju and Jonathan D. Holmes, Rescue Skills

Further scriptures tell us that the standard of right and wrong, holy or unholy, that our conscience is turning us towards is ultimately God’s standard. In an honest study of God’s Word, we see that every man and woman, His image bearers, will one day be judged by this standard. (Romans 2:16)

Our conscience is one of the beautiful delights in our design. Instincts or desires do not merely drive us. We are more than a collection of urges. We are moral beings, morally culpable, and so are set apart from other created beings. It is why we desire to live in meaningful relationships with one another and not merely in schools or packs or murders like herding animals. It is also why relationship health matters to us. We feel the sting of wrongs, the hurt of broken behaviours, neglect or abuse – because God has given us a conscience that helps define our feelings.

What Makes Your Conscience a Reliable or Unreliable Witness?

 If we understand that our conscience is part of a design by a loving and holy Creator, then we also know it is malleable. It can be sharpened or muted. Over time, ignoring the trustworthy standards of God, our conscience becomes less and less reliable. 

It can be dulled, weakened, defiled, wounded and calloused (I Corinthians 8:7, 12; I Timothy 4:1, 2; Ephesians 4:17-19).

A significant contributing factor to a healthy or dysfunctional conscience is what you allow to saturate your mind. Therefore, it does matter the daily habits of our attentions – what you first soak your mind with, what you fantasize about, where you allow your mind to dwell, what you feed your mind on as a last directing thought before dosing off – all of this works to twist OR revive your conscience. 

“Feeding excuses to your conscience is like feeding sleeping pills to a watchdog”

– Andrew David Naselli and J.D. Crowley, Conscience

Ramifications of A Rightly Directed Conscience

“Yeah, so what?!” – Brad’s thoughts directed by his reluctant conscience.

Protecting our conscience through ordinary means of God’s grace is essential. If you allow your conscience to harden through wrong desires, habits and a constant feed on the unholy, you lose something incredibly precious.

You lose a tenderness towards a life lived out rightly before a God who loves you and has your best in mind. Instead, you move from a tender to a blurry or fuzzy sense of His love to a confused, doubting of His love until what once was delightful is now forgotten. Where you once found safety and security, you now look on in a hate-filled fear or a reductionist blame for all the wrongs in your life.   

The ramifications of a seared conscience are not only vertical, you and God, but also horizontal, you and other image bearers of God. Even here, your tenderness for the love, concern and compassion for others around you begin to be misshapen. Your friendships no longer reflect authentic love that hopes to see others through the eyes of Christ’s love. Honest relationships are to include a receiving of embrace and rebuke. Instead, our relationship reflects a shallower self-serving quality. They become more felt needs-based. Does this make me happy? Am I getting what I want from this person? How do they affirm me and my decisions and desires? Relationships become more disposable than life-shaping. 

Protecting and Reviving Your Conscience

“So we always take pains to have a clear conscience toward both God and man.”

– Acts 24:16

To end with encouragement, here is a simple summary from Deepak Reju and Jonathan D. Holmes, Rescue Skills, on how to protect and revive your conscience.

• Life comes back to a dead conscience when stugglers look outside of themselves. Invariably, this means looking to God our Creator for help. Also, this could mean reaching out to a trusted friend to confess and ask for accountability for unholy habits to be transformed.
• The dead conscience must come under the lordship of Christ. Our lives begin to reflect a humbling ourselves under the Word of God, learning to delight in the freedom that is within His best for us. 
• The dead conscience finds revival in confession, repentance, faith and obedience. Essentially, this is living out a right’ fear of God’- trusting He has the best possible designs and desires for our life. 
•  A reviving conscience has a praying-without-ceasing kind life. Living a confessed life of joyful obedience means admitting we are never alone! You are never left in the dark to do whatever you want! God is always with you. He sees and knows all of you. We should use this to always keep short accounts with Him. It means knowing that you are in such an immediate relationship with Him that at any time, you can ask, “Lord, breathe life into my dead conscience.” It is to consistently pray, “I beg you, Lord, to help me! Give me back a conscience that loves and delights in what you love and delight in!”

Thanks for reading,

BRS