If you have not read the previous parts, please click to see them below.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4
–
In Christ, there is always hope! Unhealthy consciences can be recalibrated, and healthy consciences can be cultivated.
The insensitive conscience can be cleansed. The “blood of Christ” can “purge your conscience” (Heb. 9:14; 1 John 1:7, 9). We can “draw near…having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience” (Heb. 10:22).
This cleansing occurs initially at salvation. It is especially obvious when an adult gets saved. I remember a man who formerly had been a gangster and ate ice cream while he watched his cronies torture their victims. But after he was saved and had grown in the Lord, he got sick to his stomach when an inmate he was witnessing to used a knife that had been smuggled in to his prison cell to slit his own throat. The former gangster had been sensitized.
This can also occur in revival. When people get honest, they access the cleansing power of the blood of Jesus (1 John 1:7, 9). When they do, their consciences are sensitized. During times of revival, the IRS used to have a “Conscience Fund” for unpaid taxes sent in.
The oversensitive conscience can be freed. Not freed to do wrong, but freed from beyond the Bible rigidity (2 Cor. 8). This freedom also frees people to no longer feel obligated to force a “my way or the highway” pressure on those who differ in matters that are variable and not black and white.
The properly sensitive conscience can be guarded. Paul said, “Pray for us: for we trust we have a good conscience, in all things willing to live honestly” (Heb. 13:18). A good conscience is willing to live honestly under the lordship of Christ. This right sensitivity keeps the conscience healthy.
John Van Gelderen
Post Author
