1. "True moral and spiritual freedom comes not from rejecting or deconstructing your conscience, but only from getting and keeping a clear conscience."

2. "Your conscience is a God-given resistance army within you that fights against you when you fight against him."

3. "Conscience can make a right thing wrong. It can't make a wrong thing right."

4. "Your conscience doesn't just testify that you've committed this or that sin. Ultimately, it testifies that you are a sinner. That's something far deeper and scarier about yourself."

5. "You can't cleanse your own conscience. Only the blood of Christ can. No positive thinking or religious reformation can clear away the marks that sin has left on your conscience."

6. "There is no heavenly balance sheet where your good works can outweigh your bad. If your conscience is convicting you, don't try to bury it under a heap of good works like you might try to silence an alarm clock by stuffing it under a pillow."

7. "Religious reasoning can be a pretext for sin. Beware of making theological arguments that justify your own disobedience."

8. "Feeding excuses to your conscience is like feeding sleeping pills to a watchdog."

9. "By choosing to spend significant time with someone, you are virtually deciding in advance to participate in the kind of things that person does. Don't fool yourself; there are some relationships it's simply better not to pursue."

10. "Your conscience is like a clear lake. If you sit with it long enough and you let the waves of busyness and distraction calm down, you can stare right through your conscience clear to the bottom of your soul. And one reason so few of us do that is that we know we're not going to like what we see."

Observation Questions

1. In Romans 2:15-16, what two actions does Paul say the conscience performs on the day when God judges the secrets of men?

2. According to 1 Corinthians 4:3-4, what does Paul say about being judged by others, and what does he mean when he says he is "not aware of anything against myself"?

3. In Hebrews 9:13-14, what contrast does the author draw between the blood of goats and bulls and the blood of Christ regarding the conscience?

4. According to 1 John 1:8-10, what two claims does John say are false, and what does he promise God will do if we confess our sins?

5. In 1 Corinthians 8:9-12, what does Paul warn the "strong" believers about, and what does he say happens when they wound the conscience of a weaker brother?

6. What does David pray for in Psalm 139:23-24, and what two things does he ask God to reveal about him?

Interpretation Questions

1. Why does the sermon describe conscience as functioning like a "check engine light" rather than a "light bulb"? What does this analogy teach us about the nature and limitations of conscience?

2. According to the sermon's exposition of Romans 2:15-16, why is conscience described as seeming to testify "independently" of us and even "against" us, even though it is part of us? What does this reveal about conscience's purpose?

3. The sermon emphasizes that disobeying your conscience is sinful even when your conscience forbids something God actually permits. Based on 1 Corinthians 8 and the sermon's teaching, why is this the case?

4. How does Hebrews 9:13-14 and 10:19-22 explain why Old Testament sacrifices were insufficient to cleanse the conscience, and what makes Christ's sacrifice uniquely effective?

5. The sermon states that "conscience can make a right thing wrong, but it can't make a wrong thing right." What does this principle mean, and how does it shape how Christians should relate to their conscience?

Application Questions

1. The sermon warns against using distractions like social media or entertainment to avoid dealing with a convicting conscience. What specific habits or patterns in your life might you be using to ignore or delay responding to conviction? What would it look like to "do business with God right away" instead?

2. When have you been tempted to disobey your conscience in order to fit into a group or gain someone's approval? What "inner ring" are you most tempted to seek acceptance from, and how might that temptation lead you to compromise what you believe is right?

3. The sermon encourages asking your conscience two diagnostic questions: "What's in that should be out?" and "What's out that should be in?" Take time this week to honestly answer both questions—where might your conscience be too strict based on upbringing or culture, and where might you be excusing something God actually forbids?

4. Paul says he "always takes pains to keep a clear conscience toward both God and man" (Acts 24:16). What practical steps could you take this week to be more intentional about maintaining a clear conscience in your relationships with others—whether family members, coworkers, or fellow church members?

5. The sermon emphasizes that transparent relationships within the local church help us maintain obedience and a clear conscience. Is there a specific struggle or temptation you have been hiding that you need to share with a trusted brother or sister? What is one step you could take toward greater transparency this week?

Additional Bible Reading

1. Hebrews 10:19-25 — This passage expands on how Christ's sacrifice cleanses our conscience and grants us boldness to draw near to God, while also connecting a clear conscience to faithful participation in the church community.

2. 1 Timothy 1:18-20 — Paul charges Timothy to hold faith and a good conscience, warning that some who rejected conscience have shipwrecked their faith, illustrating the serious consequences of ignoring conscience.

3. Acts 24:10-21 — Paul's defense before Felix provides the context for his statement about taking pains to keep a clear conscience, showing how a clear conscience gives boldness when facing accusation.

4. 1 Peter 3:13-22 — Peter teaches that a good conscience toward God gives believers confidence in suffering and connects this to the cleansing power of Christ's resurrection.

5. Romans 14:1-23 — This passage, which the sermon is primarily based on, addresses how Christians with differing convictions should relate to one another without causing each other to violate conscience, setting up the discussion of conscience and the local church.

Sermon Main Topics

I. Common Misconceptions About Conscience

II. What Is Your Conscience?

III. What Does Your Conscience Do?

IV. What's Wrong With Your Conscience?

V. How Can You Get a Clean Conscience?

VI. How Can You Keep a Clean Conscience?

VII. What Shouldn't You Do to Your Conscience?

VIII. What Should You Do to Your Conscience?

IX. The Freedom of a Clear Conscience

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Detailed Sermon Outline

What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word conscience? Is it Jiminy Cricket, chirping to Pinocchio, always let your conscience be your guide? Or maybe you think of conscience as a kind of no fun school teacher, all rules and punishment, always nagging you, just trying to keep you from having fun with your friends.

Or maybe you think that the so-called conscience is an outdated relic of a bygone era. Maybe you think that what some people call conscience is just the sum total of moral rules that other generations have come up with and tried to impose on you. Maybe you think those rules are there for no good reason. Maybe it's your view that any moral norms or beliefs that cause anxiety or shame are suspect and should be resisted. Maybe you think those rules and norms are just there to cover for some other agenda, that they have no basis in reality, and conscience is just a sham security system that stands between you and real freedom.

Maybe your view of freedom is that you have to liberate yourself from any rules and norms that you did not come up with yourself.

In this morning's sermon, I want to help us all see that true moral and spiritual freedom comes not from rejecting or deconstructing your conscience. But only from getting and keeping a clear conscience.

Getting and keeping a clear conscience frees you from condemnation, it frees you from guilt, it frees you from shame, and it frees you from bondage. To other people's opinions and other people's rules.

As Mark mentioned, this sermon is the first of a two-part series on the conscience, this week and next. And again, as Mark mentioned, normally our Sunday morning sermons here are expositional, working through books of the Bible, but this week and next we're going to be looking at the conscience, pulling together what Scripture says from many different passages. Today we're focusing on the conscience and the individual Christian. Next Sunday, Lord willing, the conscience and the local church.

As much as I can, I'm going to make the sermon an exposition of Romans 14:1-15:7. So it's a good sermon to be a good passage to be meditating on throughout the week. The elders wanted us to have a short series on conscience because understanding the conscience and treating it rightly are both essential to the Christian life. And learning how to relate to others' consciences, especially when they differ from yours, is crucial to the unity and the health of every local church. You'll see in your bulletin that I have conveniently provided the messages outlined for you.

That's on page 13, as well as a nifty graphic on the page before. So let's work together through biblical answers to seven questions about the conscience. Number one, what is your conscience?

Here's a simple definition: Conscience is your inner sense of right and wrong that judges everything you have done or consider doing. I'll say that again: Conscience is your inner sense of right and wrong that judges everything you have done or consider doing. Or consider doing. In Romans chapter 2 verse 14, Paul begins to discuss Gentiles, that is, non-Jews, who don't have the Jewish law, but they nevertheless keep it because God has put it inside them. Then in verses 15 and 16, Paul continues, They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.

These verses teach us that conscience is an inward faculty. It's an aspect of your understanding of yourself. And conscience is an inward faculty that passes judgment on yourself. It speaks to you about you. It doesn't speak to others and strictly speaking, it does not speak about others.

Your conscience is a judge within and the sole subject of judgment is yourself.

In Romans 2:15, Paul says that, On the last day when God judges all people, the consciences of at least some people will alternately accuse and excuse them.

So the conscience only has two verdicts to render: right or wrong, innocent or guilty. Your conscience either testifies with you that you've done right or it testifies against you that you've done wrong. Your conscience is an inner moral dashboard. Think of it like the check engine light in your car. If that light is working properly, then no light on means no problem with the engine.

And if there is a problem, the light will come on. Either no problem, no light, or problem and therefore light, and when that light comes on, your wallet starts to feel about $2,000 lighter.

For those of you who drive regularly, when that check engine light comes on, Is your first response, oh no, I better take it to the shop right away? Or, nah, it's probably nothing. It'll be fine.

How you treat your car's conscience might tell you a little bit about how you treat your own, just as a little test or exercise for you. Number two, what does your conscience do? Conscience looks in two directions. It looks backwards at what you have done and it looks forward at what you're thinking about doing. In its work of looking backward at what you have done, there are two pairs of actions that conscience performs.

When your conscience agrees with what you've done and declares that it was right, your conscience excuses and comforts. Excuse not in the sense of making excuses, but in a technical legal sense of declaring that you've done no wrong. And that excusing offers comfort. Other people might accuse you of wrong, but a conscience convinced you're right is a powerful comforter. The Puritan William Perkins declared in his treatise on the conscience, a good conscience is a man's best friend.

When all men entreat him hardly, It will speak fair and comfort him. It is a continual feast and a paradise upon earth.

We see conscience's work of excusing and comforting in Paul's testimony about himself in 1 Corinthians 4:3-4. He says, But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge For I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. When Paul says he's not aware of anything against himself, that's just the verbal form of the word for conscience.

Now Paul recognizes that his conscience is a fallible guide. We'll come to that. But it's important to see that Paul's clear conscience is a powerful protection. Against accusation and slander. One reason Paul cares little what other people think about him is that he has a clear conscience.

And the other reason, and it's a big one, is that God will judge and God will reveal on the last day what's really been the case. But one of those comforts now is his own clear conscience. As Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 1:12, For our boast is this, the testimony of our conscience, that we behaved in the world with simplicity and godly sincerity, earthly sincerity, not by earthly wisdom, but by the grace of God and supremely so toward you.

Still looking backward at things you have done, conscience also accuses and convicts. It excuses and comforts. It also accuses and convicts. Conscience tells you that you've done wrong. Conscience tells you what you've done wrong.

And conscience causes you inner pain over the wrong that you've done. We've seen that already in Romans 2:15. It's also an aspect of what Paul means by godly grief in 2 Corinthians 7:9-10. He says, As it is, I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting, for you felt a godly grief so that you suffered no loss through us. For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.

One of the strangest and most important aspects of conscience is this: Though it is an aspect of you and is within you, it seems to testify independently of you and so often against you. Here's how J.I. Packer put this crucial point: It is a universal experience that conscience is largely autonomous in its operation. Though sometimes we can suppress or stifle it, it normally speaks independently of our will and sometimes indeed contrary to our will. And when it speaks, it is in a strange way distinct from us.

It stands over us, addressing us with an absoluteness of authority which we did not give it and which we cannot take from it.

In Scripture, the accusing and convicting work of conscience is often described in vivid, even graphic terms. So in 1 Samuel 24:5, David's heart struck him.

For cutting off a corner of Saul's robe. Or right after Peter's sermon at Pentecost in Acts 2:37, it tells us that the crowd was cut to the heart. Conscience jabs at you and stabs. Conscience eats away and gnaws. Your conscience is there to warn, it's there to rebuke, It's there to convict.

When you turn against your conscience, your conscience turns against you. Your conscience is a God-given resistance army within you that fights against you when you fight against him. So that's all looking backwards. Looking forward, when you consider whether to do something, your conscience either gives you a green light or a red light.

The operating system your conscience runs on is everything you think is right and wrong. And your conscience evaluates every potential action in light of that whole system. Then it returns an advance verdict, either permitted or prohibited. And in some cases, your conscience will tell you that something is not merely permitted but required, like when that tax bill comes due.

Whether it looks backward or forward, conscience always operates by connecting a broader rule to a specific act or state. Your conscience tells you that lying is wrong. So, if I tell my boss I was in the office at 6:00 p.m. yesterday when I had actually already left, that would be a lie and I shouldn't do it. In all of this, conscience functions like a complete court of law within you. Conscience serves as a court reporter, keeping a record of everything you've done.

Conscience bears witness, either for or against you, sometimes accusing you. Conscience also serves as judge, rendering a verdict either for you or against you, guilty or innocent. And if that's a guilty verdict, conscience even acts to inflict the judicial punishment.

Your conscience causes you pain, it bothers you, it wears on you, it weighs on you, it presses against you with a force that's hard to escape from.

Look over the nifty little graphic I've given on the left page, page 12, for a minute. Just one point to make from it for now. We'll use it more next week but I know that it might take a little while to acclimate to having a graphic like this. So you can use it and discuss it throughout the week. Here's the main point to make for now: Conscience delivers a binary judgment.

It only has two speeds: right or wrong, permitted or not, green light or red light. Your conscience is either bound telling you you must do something or must not do something, or it is not bound. You are free to do something or not do something. So the bound part would be those two opposite ends where there's something that's prohibited or something that's required. In either case, you're bound You got to do it or you got to not do it.

But then that huge kind of white space in between is where something is neither required nor prohibited. You're free to act or not to act. You know, when what's prohibited, think of the Ten Commandments. You shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not commit adultery. Or what's required, we think of some of the Ten Commandments, like honor your father and mother, that's required.

Or the great commandment, love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And then when we're in that clear middle section, again, it's what is neither prohibited nor commanded. We'll talk about those little hash mark sections this week. That's not so much about conscience but just about kind of gray areas in our own experience or understanding. But when you're playing in that vast middle section of neither prohibited nor required, your conscience has sort of told you that's the case.

But your conscience can't tell you what to do beyond that. It can't tell you whether to act or not. If you're convinced that an action is permitted, you're just not sure what to do, well, conscience is no more help to you. Conscience can't tell you who to marry, it can't tell you whether to take that job, it can't tell you what you should try to spend your whole life doing. That's where you need wisdom, but that would be for a whole other sermon series.

Number three, What's wrong with your conscience? What's wrong with your conscience?

Think again about the conscience as that check engine light. There are two ways that light could be bad. First, it could be functioning improperly. It could be improperly calibrated. In that case, the light might turn on when there's nothing wrong with the engine.

Hence those times when we dismiss it. Or there could be no light on when there really is something wrong with the engine. Your conscience is a God-given capacity but no one's conscience perfectly lines up with the will of God. Everyone's conscience is inaccurate at some points. That's part of the result of the fall and how sin affects our minds and hearts.

All of our consciences will sometimes forbid what God permits or permit what God forbids. That means it's possible to be convinced you've done something wrong when you really haven't. It's also possible to be convinced you've done nothing wrong when you really have. So when your conscience is inaccurate, you need to calibrate it. You need to conform your conscience's standards to God's standards and you do that by saturating your mind with God's word.

Your conscience is an instrument. It's like a scale. It can be in line or out of line with reality. If a scale reads 20 pounds when no one is standing on it, it has to be reset, recalibrated so that it starts at zero. John MacArthur has a helpful analogy for this point.

He writes, the conscience functions like a skylight, not a light bulb. It lets light into the soul It does not produce its own. Its effectiveness is determined by the amount of pure light we expose it to and by how clear we keep it.

But there's another way that your conscience can be bad. That would be when your conscience feels guilty, condemned, unclean, and the light's working properly. It's turning on because there really is a problem. That bad news it's telling you about yourself is true. That's bad news but it's news you need to hear.

Your conscience is working properly but you are not.

Nothing you try can either silence your conscience or change its verdict. It just keeps pinging you, ringing between the ears, guilty, guilty, guilty. If you're not a believer in Jesus, here is where this message gets extremely important for you. When have you last heard that voice within saying, guilty? And how did you respond to that voice?

There are a whole lot of different ways you could respond to that negative verdict of conscience. There's so many ways you could try to quiet it or ignore it. You could argue with your conscience. You could try to convince yourself that what you did was right. You could try to discredit your conscience.

You could say, those moral standards are just projected on me by my parents or my culture.

That voice is nothing more than other people trying to shame and control me. On this defense, the problem isn't you, it's what other people would say about you. It's not you, it's them. Or you could try to clean your conscience yourself. You could try to say, you,'ll do better next time.

You'll try to somehow earn some moral extra credit that will make up for the bad grade you're giving yourself right now. Maybe you've tried one or more of those strategies.

Have any of them worked? I hope not. For your own lasting good. When the check engine light is working properly, the only solution is to fix the engine. That's something none of us can do for ourselves.

None of us can solve the problems within that our consciences rightly point us to. Because your conscience doesn't just testify that you've committed this or that sin. Ultimately, it testifies that you are a sinner. That's something far deeper and scarier about yourself. When your conscience is working rightly, it tells you there's something fundamentally wrong within you.

Israel's King David committed adultery and then had murder committed to cover it up. And after he became convinced of his sin. He wrote one of the great confessional poems of all time, Psalm 51. Listen to how David responds to his own conscience. Listen to where David locates the problem.

Psalm 51:1-4. Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sins.

For I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment. Can you relate to David? Have you ever looked into your conscience deep down within and seen stains that you can't clean off.

Number four, how can you get a clean conscience?

Scripture teaches that God made all of us to know him, to love him and to serve him. And because we are his creatures, we are all accountable to him for all that we do. We owe him everything and we will one day owe an account of ourselves.

To him. None of us lives to himself alone. None of us belongs fundamentally to ourselves. We are the property of the God who created us. We are gods, we owe him everything, and we'll answer to him for the lives that he gives us.

Where does conscience fit into that? Conscience is the reminder of that account that you will give It's a little mini reckoning, a mini accounting within yourself all the time. That's a preview of the final accounting to come. And ever since Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, we've all rebelled against God. We've all turned away from God and turned against God.

We've all sinned against him and sinned against our own consciences. So now the default state for a conscience that's working properly is to continually testify guilty.

And that guilty verdict inside is an accurate preview of the final guilty verdict that God himself will render on the last day on all those who are outside of Christ. God himself will declare that guilty verdict and God himself will inflict the fitting penalty, which is eternal punishment. That's what your conscience is warning you about. Trying to alert you to and wake you up to as scary as your own conscience can be. It's just the faintest foreshadowing of the final judgment to come.

Don't buy the lie that the only reason you'd feel bad about something you've done is shame. And the only cause for shame is other people's false projection of their own moral standards. Very often, your conscience is speaking a hard truth to you that few other people would dare to tell you. Your conscience is trying to drive the truth through a shield of deceitful defenses that you've built up over time. So how can you get a clean conscience?

How can that verdict shift? How can the blinking light turn off? It's only by trusting in the death and resurrection of Christ to save you.

Only by trusting in the blood of Christ that alone can cleanse you from every sin. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, which our pastor Mark preached through all of last year, the author reminds his Jewish Christian readers that the Old Testament sacrifices could only purify externally, not internally. He says again and again, they couldn't cleanse the conscience. They couldn't clear away the internal record of sin. Because they couldn't pay the whole penalty for sin.

Here's Hebrews 9:13-14: For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. Or again, Hebrews 10:19-22, Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water. In his death on the cross, Jesus paid the full penalty for all the sins of all those who had ever turned from sin and trusted in him. And then he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven and presented himself to the Father there, opening up the way for all of us who trust in him to come into God's presence with boldness and assurance forever. That's what God did through Christ, through the whole sweep of Christ's saving mission for us.

You can't cleanse your own conscience.

Only the blood of Christ can. No positive thinking or religious reformation can clear away the marks that sin has left on your conscience. You can only get those cleansed by trusting in Jesus to save you. Not by trying to work your way to God, but by relying on the work that Jesus has done for you. As we sang earlier, I hear the words of love.

I gaze upon the blood. I see the mighty sacrifice and I have peace with God. If that's intriguing to you but you don't know quite what it means or how to follow up, if you're not a believer in Jesus, talk to the friend who brought you. Talk to anybody sitting next to you. Talk to any of the pastors and staff members at the doors.

There's nothing more we'd want to talk with you about than how you can get a clean conscience through the blood of Christ. That's how to get a clean conscience. Point five, how can you keep a clean conscience?

How can you keep a clean conscience?

Objectively speaking, everyone who trusts in Christ has their sins forgiven. If you believe in Jesus, you have peace with God. But subjectively speaking, in terms of our own experience, you don't always experience a clean conscience in your day-to-day life. Sometimes your conscience feels like a room that just got cleaned, spent hours tidying it up, then five minutes later it's a mess again. There are two main reasons why a Christian might not experience a clean conscience.

You might like assurance or you might like obedience. And sometimes, the reasons you like assurance is that you lack obedience. Let's talk about assurance first. There are many reasons why genuine Christians struggle with assurance. Meaning, you are saved, but it's hard to know you're saved.

You are right with God, but it doesn't feel like it. I think one of the most common reasons Christians struggle with assurance is that you're more aware of your sins than you are of the sufficiency of Christ's sacrifice. Your sins feel more real to you than Christ's blood does. One of the reasons for that struggle, that gap, is another gap. Namely, the gap between what you know of God's will and how well you obey God's will.

Often when somebody becomes a Christian, it's as if their conscience has suddenly woken up from a long nap. All of a sudden there's all sorts of new conviction. I didn't even realize that was a sin. Ooh, I guess it is. How have I done this my whole life and not been bothered by it?

It's as if your conscience is shouting out at you all the time. And even as you grow as a Christian, the more you study God's word, the more you become aware not only of his will but of the ways you fall short of his will. So often, your knowledge of God's will is growing faster than your Obedience. Now here's the thing, your obedience really is growing but your knowledge of God's will is growing faster. So the gap is getting bigger and your conscience is, in a way, bothering you more.

It feels like you're not becoming more holy but you really are. That kind of change and transformation takes work, it takes new habits being formed, it takes discipline. Knowledge can come quicker and easier than actually putting the knowledge into practice. So in one sense, it's normal for Christians to be troubled by their conscience, Christians who are genuinely saved. This means that you have to exercise faith.

You have to practice faith. You have to put your faith to work in confessing sins and appropriating Christ's saving blood. Andy Naselli and JD Crowley in their excellent book on conscience put it like this: Only an ever increasing trust in Christ's work on the cross can fill this ever widening gap and keep us from despair. Here's how John put it in 1 John 1:8-10. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. Twice in these three verses, John tells us that all Christians still sin. If you say you have no sin, you're a liar. It's those who claim to have no sin who are false believers. And John tells you what to do with your sin.

Confess it, name it before God, bring it into his presence and disown it. Ask him for forgiveness. God has staked his very character on his promise to forgive. The verse does not say, God is merciful and loving to forgive our sins, though that would be true. Instead it says, He is faithful and just to forgive our sins.

For God to forgive the sins of those who trust in Christ is a matter of truthfulness to his word and promise. And it's a matter of justice, uprightness, moral integrity. Christ has paid for those sins, so if God is making you pay for them again, he's a liar, he's a moral fraud. That's the stakes. At work in forgiveness, God is faithful and just to forgive.

He has promised to, he has demonstrated how he can. He's put the law on the side of the Christian. The law is not against you, it's for you. The same law that convicts you is the law by which God says, I will forgive because that law is satisfied. Those punishments are fulfilled in the death of my Son.

So one reason you need to regularly confess your sins to God is to experience Christ's cleansing work in your conscience. The road to assurance runs through the repeated exercise of faith, in confessing sin.

But you also might lack a clear conscience because you lack obedience. And here, I'm not thinking so much about those with sensitive consciences that are bothering them all the time, but those whose consciences aren't sensitive enough. Here, I'm thinking about those times when you know something is wrong but you do it anyway. Every time you do that, you desensitize your conscience. It's like if you accidentally burned your hand on the stove while you're cooking and then instead of icing it, you stuck it back on the burner.

That's what you do every time you sin against conscience. As we read earlier in the service, as Logan read to us, the Apostle Paul says in Acts 24:16, so I always take pains means to keep a clear conscience toward both God and man. Keeping a clear conscience takes work. It takes meticulous care not to sin against God, not to sin against others, not to sin against your own conscience, and when you do, to then confess it.

Paul worked hard to be able to say as he said again and again that he kept a clear conscience. When you know something is wrong but do it anyway, you take a sledgehammer to your conscience and to your assurance of faith. So how can you grow in maintaining a good conscience, keeping a clear conscience through obedience? This is one reason why church membership is important. Commit to a local church and commit to transparent relationships within the church.

When you're struggling or tempted, ask for help. If you don't know whether something is a sin or not, ask for counsel. The more you try to live the Christian life alone, The more easily you'll cave into temptation, the more easily you'll believe the lies you're tempted to feed your own conscience. The more you hide your struggles, the easier it'll be for you to overcome your conscience's objections. Brothers and sisters, one of the goals of public church discipline is to appeal to and to awaken a believer's conscience when they've been hitting the snooze button on it.

As Caleb Morell put it to me this week, Church discipline is a defibrillator to shock the conscience back into life. So how can you keep a clear conscience, confess sin, exercise faith in Christ, and resolve to consistently obey Christ within the body of Christ?

Number six, What shouldn't you do to your conscience?

Here I have five warnings. This point will be a little bit longer. Though I have said much already, I still have much to say.

First, first warning: Never Disobey your conscience's prohibitions. Never disobey your conscience's prohibitions. Don't override your conscience. Never do something your conscience forbids. In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul is addressing the question of whether Christians can eat meat that was sacrificed to idols.

On the one hand, idols are really nothing, so meat is not in any way objectively tainted. If you have true knowledge that the idols are nothing, you can have true knowledge that the meat meat is not infected by that idol worship. Christians really are free to eat it. But on the other hand, some Christians, especially recent converts from pagan polytheism, still feel like that meat is tainted by being offered to an idol. They used to offer worship to idols in that way.

It still feels wrong to them. Their conscience tells them it would be wrong to eat it. So, Paul thinks their conscience is overly restrictive, overly sensitive. But even though their conscience is prohibiting them from something that God doesn't prohibit, here's the absolutely crucial point. Paul tells those believers they must not disobey their conscience.

And he instructs other believers to be careful to act in a way that does not provoke those more sensitive believers to disobey their own conscience. That's all set up or kind of explanation of what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 8:8-13. And if you want another passage to study throughout the week coming up, 1 Corinthians 8:10, so chapters 8:9-10, it's very parallel to Romans 14 and 15 in many ways. Great chapters to be meditating on as well. Here's 1 Corinthians 8:8-13.

Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat and no better off if we do.

But take care that this right of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if anyone sees you who have knowledge eating in an idol's temple, will he not be encouraged if his conscience is weak to eat food offered to idols? And so by your knowledge this weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died. Thus, sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak. You sin against Christ.

Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble. Whenever your conscience gives you a red light, you must stop. And even when it gives you a green light, it's not always safe. As our pastor Marcus put it, Conscience can make a right thing wrong. It can't make a wrong thing right.

So why is it wrong to disobey your conscience even though you know your conscience is fallible? It's because to disobey conscience is to deliberately do something that you think is wrong. It's deliberately to do something that you think is against God's will. Even if it isn't actually disobeying God, you think it is and you're still doing it. Here's how the theologian Cornelius Plantinga put it.

By flouting the deliverances of his own conscience, a person breaks trust with God. For by doing what he thinks is wrong, a person does what he thinks will grieve God. And the willingness to grieve God by one's acts is itself grievous. This is one reason why the Bible says some people's consciences are cauterized or seared. Like Paul says in 1 Timothy 4:2, he describes the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared.

When you sear something, you desensitize it, like burning away the nerve endings in your fingers. When you disobey your own conscience, you train it, you teach it to be less active and effective in your life. If you disobey your conscience, you're in danger of disabling your conscience.

Don't quiet your conscience with excuses. Don't argue with your conscience to try to rationalize sin. As Andy Naselli and JD Crowley have written, Feeding excuses to your conscience is like feeding sleeping pills to a watchdog. We see the result of King Saul doing this in 1 Samuel 15. If you remember that sermon from a couple of months ago, God gave Saul, through Samuel, very specific instructions to carry out a military attack on the Amalekite headquarters and to preserve no soldier, to keep nobody alive, and to keep no spoil.

Very specific instructions. And Saul did not follow God's instructions, but he convinced himself that he did. And he tried to convince the prophet Samuel too. 1 Samuel 15:13-15, and Samuel came to Saul, and Saul said to him, 'Blessed be you to the Lord. I have performed the commandment of the Lord.' and Samuel said, 'What then is this bleating of the sheep in my ears and the lowing of the oxen that I hear?' Saul said, 'They've brought them from the Amalekites, for the people spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen to sacrifice to the Lord your God, and the rest we have devoted to destruction.' Religious reasoning can be a pretext for sin.

Beware of making theological arguments that justify your own disobedience.

A third warning, don't try to placate your conscience through religious efforts. There is no heavenly balance sheet where your good works can outweigh your bad. If your conscience is convicting you, don't try to bury it under a heap of good works. Like you might try to silence an alarm clock by stuffing it under a pillow. You can't skip straight from guilty conscience to good works as if good works will solve the guilty conscience problem.

Good works will never take away the stain on your conscience, only the blood of Christ will. The solution to a guilty conscience is not to hit the snooze button, it's not to bury it under a pile of religious practices, but only to carry it to Christ. Only Christ can fix the problem that your conscience is rightly condemning you about, as Thomas Watson put it. It is a mercy when we are disquieted about sin. It is better for a man to be troubled at the setting of a bone than to be lame and in pain all his life.

Blessed is that trouble. Which brings the soul to Christ. It is one of the worst sights to see a bad conscience quiet.

A fourth warning, what you shouldn't do to your conscience. Don't outsource your conscience. Don't let any human standard or authority replace your conscience.

One way you could do this unintentionally is through treating discipling in the church as more a matter of copying behaviors than developing discernment. When you're rightly trying to pattern your life on the life of a more mature believer who you look up to, there's a danger of simply copying someone's practice rather than educating your conscience with the conviction that's motivating their practice. In so many areas of life, there are legitimate ways for the same conviction to be lived out in different practices. There's a difference between principles and methods. Discipling is not about mindlessly copying methods.

Instead, it's about learning why mature believers do what they do. So if you're trying to grow in a specific area, maybe how you spend your time, what media you do or don't consume, how you educate your children, where you draw lines and hanging out with non-Christian friends, don't just ask a mature believer what do you do? Instead, ask them what convictions have guided how you make that decision?

Forming your conscience so that you're continually growing in ethical and theological discernment is part of the process of maturing as a Christian.

You can't outsource it. So here's an application for parents. In parenting, there's a spectrum over time in how you relate to your kids. When your kids are younger, it's legitimate and necessary for your kids to obey you simply because you say so. That's enough of a reason for many kinds of obedience at many times.

Them learning to submit to you is training. It's part of how they learn to submit to God. But as the years go by, You should be proactively working to help your kids understand and embrace more of the reasons why you're instructing them to do certain things and not do others. Now, children, and I mean kids of all ages, should you do something just because your parents say to do it? Yes.

If you have any questions about the reasons or whether this is really a legitimate instruction, I would advise you to obey first and then ask questions afterward. Obey and then learn what your parents have in mind by instructing you to do that. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. For all of us, not just kids, another way you might outsource your conscience is by doing something simply because other people are or because someone else asks you to or because in order to fit in and get someone's approval you really want or in order to please your boss, you understand that a certain behavior is simply expected. C.S.

Lewis calls this temptation the pull of the inner ring. He wrote a profound essay on this called the Inner Ring. It's in his book, the Weight of Glory. Lewis talks about how if there's a group you want to belong to, any group, a time may come when you have to choose between their approval and your conscience. As Lewis puts it, of all passions, the passion for the inner ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

Teens in the congregation, what inner ring do you want to belong to? Often, people who pride themselves on not trying to fit into the obvious inner ring are just as eager to fit into some other, smaller, cooler, alternative inner ring. Whatever inner ring you're aiming to be included in, what's the behavioral price of admission? What do you have to do to belong? And how does that expectation sit with your conscience?

To say everyone does it or well, she's doing it is to outsource your conscience. It's to put a human being in a place where only your conscience belongs. Teens and college students consider, by choosing to spend significant time with someone, you are virtually deciding in advance to participate in the kind of things that person does. Don't fool yourself, there are some relationships it's simply better not to pursue.

Another way you might outsource your conscience is to submit it absolutely to any human authority, laws, or norms. God has established legitimate authorities that we should obey, like within the family or schools or employers or civil government. In matters under each authority's jurisdiction, they can legitimately require you or forbid you to do certain things. But that has two limits. No earthly authority may command what God forbids or forbid what God commands.

If they do either, you must disobey them. We see this twice in the book of Acts related to evangelism and people not wanting the apostles to preach Jesus. Acts 4:19-20, Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard. Or again, in Acts 5:29, To justify their defiant evangelism, Peter and the apostles say, We must obey God rather than man. Again, this conscientious disobedience only comes into play when God's commandments and human commandments contradict.

But it's an important category to keep open. As our own statement of faith says in Article 18 of Civil Government, We believe that civil government is of divine appointment for the interest and good order of human society, and that magistrates are to be prayed for, conscientiously honored and obeyed except Only in things opposed to the will of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the only Lord of the conscience and the prince of the kings of the earth.

Still in point six, a fifth and final warning.

Don't disable or distract your conscience. How could you try to disable your conscience through drinking or drugs to get your conscience quiet in order that you can commit some sin and enjoy it? You try to quiet your conscience so that you can enjoy some sin it would otherwise condemn. Not only is drunkenness a sin, but it's doubly a sin if you get drunk in order to pave the way to other sins. Never try to strategically silence your conscience.

But it's not only dangerous to disable your conscience, it's also dangerous to distract your conscience. These days, our phones and computers offer up endlessly renewable streams of distraction. Say you commit a sin and your conscience is bothering you. That's a moment to be seized in order to confess sin. But instead, if your conscience is bothering you and you go scroll through social media or binge Netflix or dive into a video game, you're hardening yourself against your conscience.

You're overriding your conscience every bit as much as those other strategies simply by ignoring it, by trying to just wait until the light stops blinking. Don't build up the muscle of ignoring your conscience. Instead, do business with God right away by confessing your sins in prayer. Finally then, question seven: what should you do to your conscience? Here I've got three brief, practical instructions in addition to what we've already talked about.

Three instructions: obey it, question it, calibrate it. Obey it, question it, calibrate it. First, very briefly, obey your conscience. If your conscience flashes a red light, stop. If you wonder whether that red light should really be there, then, like I encourage children, ask questions after you've obeyed.

It's like with a fire alarm. You only want to go tinkering with the settings after you have made completely sure that there really is no fire.

Second, question your conscience. Question your conscience specifically ask two questions of your conscience. What's out that should be in? What's in that should be out? That should be out.

The first question, sorry, I think I did that in the wrong order. First question, what's in that should be out? Meaning, are there any moral rules that you have that might not be absolute moral rules in God's book? Are there any places where your conscience might be requiring something of you that God does not strictly require? Factors here that can contribute to what rules you take for granted include your parents, your broader family, your cultural background, your religious upbringing, and even your personality and preferences.

Second question, what's out that should be in? Where might you be saying, that's not a sin, when God says, actually, yes it is? Here you need to know your own besetting sins. In what ways are you tempted to be too soft on yourself? And excuse yourself.

Where are you tempted to let yourself off the hook? You also need to know your culture's besetting sins. In different ways, every culture will collectively malform the consciences of those who live in it. Not everything that's legal is moral, but the fact that something is legal makes it seem moral.

A third instruction for what to do with your conscience is calibrate it. Again, to calibrate an instrument is to bring it into conformity with a standard. It's like tuning a guitar string, each string to vibrate at exactly the pitch it's supposed to. So how can you tune up your conscience? I've got three encouragements.

First, saturate your mind with God's Word. Meditate on it, memorize it, read through its length and breadth, and as you immerse yourself in Scripture, expect it to challenge some of what you take for granted as right and wrong. Expect Scripture to update your moral operating system.

A second encouragement of how to calibrate your conscience: Learn from other Christians, especially Christians who are different from you. Learn from Christians with different cultural backgrounds. Learn from Christians who are from other places. Learn from Christians who are from other times by studying church history. None of these are infallible, but all those kinds of Christians are witnesses to God's Word through their good faith effort to obey it.

Third, pray. Ask God to adjust your conscience. Ask God to show you where you've been wrongly excusing sin or where you've been needlessly condemning yourself. Ask God to show you where you've fallen short of your own standards and where your standards need fixing. As David prays in Psalm 139:23-24, Search me, O God, and know my heart!

And know my heart, test me and know my anxious thoughts, see if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.

The 17th century Puritan Richard Sibbes said that conscience is either the greatest friend or the greatest enemy in the world. Your conscience is like a clear lake. If you sit with it long enough and you let the waves of busyness and distraction calm down, you can stare right through your conscience clear to the bottom of your soul. And one reason so few of us do that, and we do it so seldom, is that we know we're not going to like what we see.

But your conscience doesn't have to be your enemy. It can be your best friend. A clear conscience is a soft pillow and a strong shield. How can you get that clear conscience? Only by trusting in Christ, only by confessing that nothing you can do will save yourself and he's done everything necessary to save you.

And if you do trust in Christ then you can have assurance, confidence, boldness to live your life in plain view of all, regardless of what anyone says or thinks about you.

And most important, a clear conscience gives you boldness in approaching God, boldness in calling on God as your Father, boldness in going to Him for whatever you need, boldness in knowing He'll answer your prayers. That is real freedom. I praise the Christ of God. I rest on love divine, and with unfaltering lips and heart. I call this Savior mine.

Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, we pray that yout would grant us to trust in Jesus, to confess our sins to youo, and so to experience the cleansing power of His sacrifice.

We pray that you would grant us to take pains to keep a clear conscience. We pray for anyone whose conscience is bothering them even now and they don't know what to do about it, that you would bring them to saving faith in Jesus. We pray in his name. Amen.