Dear all at IPC,

What is it that makes the difference between hearing God’s words, even listening to God’s words, and then responding to him in the way that we should?

What is it that makes the difference between the days when we are actually arrested, grabbed by the word of God and have to change because of it, and the days when we treat God’s word like background noise that we can safely ignore?

According to the bible, it is our conscience that makes the difference. It is our conscience which pokes and prods us into active listening to give an active response. It is our conscience that the Spirit uses to lovingly say to us, ‘hey, he is talking to you. This is for you and you need to do something about this: now’. We all know that difference. The days when we’ve been spectators of preaching, or critiquers of it, and then the days when we walk out of church knowing we have been addressed by God. The problem is that our conscience doesn’t actually work that well. Unfortunately, our consciences have been badly damaged in our arrival in to this world and the way in which we have treated our own consciences hasn’t helped either.

What that means is that our conscience functions slightly sporadically. Some days it works accurately, and the next it does not.

It is the apostle Paul who pays most attention to this, in part because he has thought longest and hardest about why his fellow Israelites had such a lousy record of listening and responding to God for generations. And Paul speaks of three separate issues that can affect our consciences, and the epistle to the Hebrews adds a fourth.

Even though we have a conscience, we can have a seared conscience.  1 Timothy 4:2 –  ‘through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared’, Paul says by not responding to the word of God, we damage our ability to listen and respond. Which is a frightening thing. 

When it comes to our consciences, it is a case of use it or lose it. When it comes to listening to God, if we fail to do it, it gets harder to do. The less we listen, the less we will listen. Our consciences malfunction. We won’t hear God critiquing our legalism, our smugness.

We don’t really use the word ‘seared’ apart from in cooking. I can go on YouTube and see people searing steaks – burning, scorching the surface of meat with sudden, intense heat. On the outside the meat is sealed, but the flavour is on the inside.  Biblically speaking, it’s a little different – the damage is done on the outside and seals anything getting through to the inside. To have a seared conscience means that nothing gets through.

Sometimes we can have a defiled conscience. Paul says to Titus, ‘to the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure. But both their minds and their consciences are defiled.They press to know God but they deny him by their works’ (Titus 1:15) The apostle is saying here that our own sinful behaviour has an effect on us. You don’t need me to tell you that if you sin today it will be much easier to sin tomorrow. Sin clears a path for itself. When we sin, we defile our conscience, and we make it easier for us to silence our now defiled conscience when it is trying to tell us to listen and trying to tell us how to live.

It is the truth that we tell our children, that sinning now makes it much easier to sin later: lying makes it easier to lie; stealing makes it easier to steal. Sin grows. Sin never stays within what we imagine the safe confines are that we have created for it. It will always break out. Our conscience no longer convicts: it’s silenced and unclean and allows us to sin in greater ways.

In 1 Corinthians 8 Paul also writes about a weak conscience. Speaking about new converts, not all possess this knowledge. ‘But some, through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled.’ Paul is saying theologically they are all over the shop, and the result is there are those in Corinth who feel they can’t eat food offered to idols because they think it will imperil their salvation.

Sometimes sin has messed us up so badly that our consciences aren’t a good guide to anything. You can’t rely on it. Hebrews goes as far to say in chapter 10:22 that our hearts are sprinkled clean from ‘an evil conscience’. The problem with our conscience is that it is not just it’s detection system which has been blunted, but now it can actually be in the business of licensing and authorising sin. People will sometimes say they have a peace about doing the most sinful of things. They’ve got no problem in doing what God clearly speaks against. Their conscience has been silenced, deadened, and it now affirms them in their wrong.

Can you see this is what we are up against? The faculty that tells us we need to listen and act has been compromised, not even reliably compromised. I think when we understand this, it makes a huge amount of difference. It means that every time we hear God speak, we will cry for his help, knowing that by the Spirit working on our fragile and unreliable conscience, he will help us to listen and to swallow what he says, no matter how unpalatable. But we cannot do that on our own.. 

There have been times in my life when I’ve drunk in every word I’ve heard preached. But there are other times when it has been like water off a duck’s back. Our consciences can harden, day by day being seduced into not listening. It may be that as we read this, we realise that our consciences have been damaged by long hidden, even long forgotten, sinful behaviour. We may have been confronted with the fact that our consciences and minds, although a gift of God, are completely out of joint.

So what are we to do? We are to throw ourselves on God and ask him to help us here, as he speaks of salvation and judgement. God is still speaking graciously. Remember, God has gone to enormous lengths to speak to us in ways that are designed to get through to even the most damaged conscience.

And so today if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart. “He speaks, and listening to his voice, new life the dead receive”.

Your Minister and friend,

Paul