The Conscience

The Conscience

“This being so, I myself always strive to have a conscience without offense toward God and men.” Acts 24:16.

We sometimes meet with people who tell us that they are not under the law, but under grace, and therefore they are not condemned, do what they will.

Now the question is, does the Gospel contemplate such a state? Does it propose to depose or abjure conscience, or to purify and restore it to sovereign control?

1. What is the conscience?

Conscience is that faculty of the soul which pronounces on the character of our actions (Rom. 2:15). All men have a conscience; whether enlightened, or unenlightened, active or dormant, it is there: it cannot be destroyed.

2. What is the role which the conscience fulfills?

This office is to determine or pronounce upon the moral quality of our actions--to say whether this or that is good or bad. Conscience is an independent witness standing as it were between God and man; it is in man, but for God, and it cannot be bribed or silenced. Someone has called it “God’s Spirit in man’s soul,” and certainly it is the most wonderful part of man. All other of our faculties can be subdued by our will; but this cannot; it stands independent, taking sides against ourselves whenever we transgress its fiat: something in us bearing witness against us when we offend its integrity.

Now it is a question of vital importance to our spiritual life whether the Gospel is intended to deliver us from this reigning power of the conscience or whether it is intended to purify and enlighten the conscience, and to endow us with power to live in obedience to its voice. Let us examine a few passages on this point. First, let us see what is done with conscience in regeneration. Heb. 9:14: “How much more shall the blood of Christ, who, through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” See also Heb. 10:22. Second, let us see the office which conscience sustains in regenerate men. 1 Tim. 1:19: “Having faith and a good conscience, which some having rejected, concerning the faith have suffered shipwreck.”

“I tell the truth in Christ. I am not lying, my conscience testifying with me in the Holy Spirit.” Romans 1:9. See also 1 Timothy 3:9 and Acts 23:1, 1 Timothy 4:2 and Titus 1:15. Paul had no idea of a wild, lawless faith, which ignored the tribunal of conscience and talked of liberty, while leaving its possessor the bond-slave of his own lusts. Hence Paul tells us that he exercised himself to always have a conscience void of offence.

3. What is implied by having a clear conscience void of offence

This implies—first, a “purged” conscience, made clean; conscience must be made clean before it can be kept clean. Secondly, systematic obedience to the dictates of conscience. To be kept void of offence it must be obeyed with promptness; to parley is to defile it. How many a soul has dated its ruin to temporising with a suggestion, which conscience asserted ought to have been put down at once!

Thirdly, to keep a conscience void of offense requires unremitting effort, exertion, “exercise,” determination; a bringing up, so to speak, of all the other powers and faculties of the being; “herein do I exercise myself,” the whole man, soul, mind, body.

Here there is a need for “exercise” indeed; this signifies no child’s play, no mere effervescing emotion, expending itself to sentimental songs or idle speculations. Here is “the fight of faith,” the faith of the saints, which can dare, and do, and suffer anything rather than defile its garments. Only those who thus fight have the Apostle’s kind of faith. Satan knows this, and he waylays such souls with every temptation possible to them.

4. Those who would keep a clear conscience, void of offense, must subject their whole soul to the will.

As conscience is the reigning power of the soul, the will is the executive, and in order to keep a pure conscience the will must act out its teaching. When inclination lures, when the flesh incites to that which conscience condemns, the will must say no! and be firm as adamant, counting all things but dung and dross. This is just the point where human nature has failed from the beginning. Our first parents fell here. Their consciences were on the right side, but their wills yielded to the persuasions of the enemy.

Joseph’s conscience thundered the right path, and his will acted it out. Pilate’s conscience also thundered the right course, but his will failed to carry it out. In one we behold a hero, in the other a traitor!

5. To keep a pure conscience requires great vigilance, lest by surprise or inattention we defile it.

“And what I say to you, I say to all: Watch.” Our enemy is always watching to put an occasion of stumbling in our way. He knows the power of surprise. He lays many a snare to take us unawares; many a nicely laid plot; many carefully adjusted circumstances to catch us by guile. Oh, what a need for vigilance! If by subtlety we ever get overcome, what must we do? Lie down in guilt and despair—allow conscience to remain polluted and incensed? No! Up and confess, and forsake, and wash again.

6. To keep a pure conscience requires patience

Patience will wait till God, by time and providence, justifies our course. Paul said it was a small matter with him to be judged of man’s judgment. Why? Because his conscience acquitted—justified, and God witnessed that he was right. 

7. A pure conscience is its own reward.

Just as a clean conscience is its own reward, an offended conscience is its own punishment. Conscience frequently offended soon becomes “seared”—mark, not destroyed; quick and raw enough underneath, ready to be probed and fretted by the worm that does not die, and scorched by the fire that never goes out but seared on the surface, of no use for present service; numbed, dark, useless. If you are in such a state my friend, make haste to the the cross, confessing and forsaking your sins, and get your “conscience purged again from dead works to serve the living God.”

For “without holiness no man shall see the Lord!”