Fallen and Restored Part 3
Guest Post written by Daniel Guzman
For Part One, please click here
For Part Two, please click here.
Our Godly Conscience and How We Grow It
We have already seen the reality of the conscience in all humans, the horrible reality of a guilty conscience, and how it can affect us. Now we’re going to see the beautiful reality of a godly conscience.
With the fall, every area of our life as humans has been affected by sin in such a way that we’re all inclined to evil; there are no innocent human beings. That means that our reason, our emotions, our desires, etc., are inclined to evil, not that they are as evil as they can be all the time, but we’re not by nature good since the fall. Human nature has gone astray; we’re now selfish people who look for our own good and our own benefit above anyone else. That also means that every good gift given to us by God has also been stained by sin, including our consciences.
As we saw in the last post, it is a horrible thing to experience a guilty conscience; it is something that affects us to the core of our being, both psychologically and physically. We can try to escape, but we will never be able to. Unfortunately, our consciences in our fallen state are not always awoken; sometimes we sin, we do evil deeds, and the judge doesn’t condemn us at all. Sometimes we sin so much in the same area that the strong voice of the conscience is asleep until it is awoken again, and the judge within us torments us.
This means that the conscience is not an infallible judge and a perfect guide regarding our morality and how we should live to please and glorify God always in everything we do. Stained by sin, the conscience by itself cannot be the absolute judge by which we live our lives; many times, we are not judged by the conscience when we lie, or when we have idols, or when we don’t rest, and if we don’t feel judged by our conscience, that doesn’t mean that we’re not sinning.
Some men, like the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, have tried to live a life based on the law written on their hearts and being free from the judge within them giving them a guilty verdict. He tried to build an entire moral system around his conscience and awareness of the moral law. Yet he lived his life violating the first table of the law (i.e., the first four commandments) every day, he lived a selfish life, he didn’t love his neighbour, and lived all for his self-interest. If you asked him, he lived a perfect moral life with a clean conscience, but at the same time, he sinned and never repented and turned to Christ. The law within him didn’t guide him to the Lawgiver and didn’t guide him to the Saviour of his soul; he perished in confidence of having lived a perfect moral life, by the standard of a corrupted conscience.
The good news is that Jesus came to restore everything that the fall corrupted. Through His perfect work, Jesus is making a new creation, starting with a new humanity, made in Christ’s image for the glory of God. Through His work applied to believers by faith, our reason, our emotions, our desires are being made new, made godly, made holy. This is a whole process that will be completed when we return to the presence of God after we end our lives here to start them in the new heavens and new earth. This means that our conscience is also being restored form a corrupted conscience that sometimes accuses us and sometimes is asleep and ignores our sin, into a godly conscience that grows in the conviction of the Law written in it and is used by God to grow is in repentance and dependence on Him for the constant forgiveness of our sins and the victory over our sins little by little until we’re sin-free in eternity.
So, if we’re in Christ, our conscience is also growing to become what it was created to be, a godly guide so we can live a life pleasing to God. Now, how do we grow in our godly conscience so it can guide us to live as living sacrifices for God (Romans 12:1) and to do his good, perfect, and pleasing will (Romans 12:2)?
The answer is simple, yet we tend to overlook it. We need God’s grace because without His grace, we cannot grow to be more like Christ. We’re never alone, Christ promised us that He will send the Comforter so we could live a life that reflects the righteousness given to us by faith. He promised He would be always with us until the end of the age, and He’s with us through His Spirit, giving us grace day by day to grow and be Christlike.
That is part of our sanctification; our conscience has been redeemed! Now we have a godly conscience, and we need to grow it more and more. How do we do that in practice? The Spirit works through the Word, both preached and meditated, to renew our minds, to be more aware of our sin, and in that way to awaken our conscience. That means the more we grow in knowledge of who God is, His character and what he made us to do and to be, the more we will realize all the things that we do and think that are against His holy character. We need to know well what God requires of us in each of the 10 commandments, greatly summarized in the 2 great commandments. We need to know what pleases God, a broken and contrite heart, for example, and we see that in the Word as well. The more we hear the Word preached and the more we read and meditate it in private, the more the Spirit will work in our lives to give us renewing grace that transforms our mind to think more like Christ and to have a godlier conscience.
The more godly our conscience is and the more aware we are of our sin, the more we will go to God in prayer because we need His forgiveness. He is faithful to forgive us if we confess our sins; we just need to come to Him. Part of growing more and more in our conscience and being more aware of our sin, we are also more aware of our need for forgiveness, our need for Christ, who has on the cross accomplished the remission of all of our sins. We just need to come to Him and confess to receive and be assured we’re forgiven. His forgiving grace and his sustaining grace are given to us directly from the fountain of every grace when we go to His presence in prayer.
And finally, as we grow more and more in our godly conscience, we are more aware of our sin and go to Him for His grace that forgives us and restores us. Through this process, the Spirit also sanctifies us. Not only are we more aware of our sin and hate it more and more through a godly conscience, and that brings us to seek His forgiveness and grace, it also transforms us so we sin less and less every single day. We won’t achieve perfection in this life, that’s not our goal, but the more grace we receive, the more we are transformed and the more transformed we are, the more like Christ we are! Through a godly conscience, shaped by the Word and used by the Spirit, we also have more and more victory over Sin! We participate in the great Victory of Christ!
As the beautiful hymn states: No guilt in life, no fear in death, this is the power of Christ in me! Let us then praise God because He has paid for our sin, and the judge within us is a guide to grow us in holiness, not to condemn us to death.