By Peter Kaye |

...and chance the consequences."  Who'd have thought a fictional pirate king in a comic opera (Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance) would give such scripturally based advice! Perhaps "trust" would have been a better word - but otherwise, these are words God would approve.

In the book, Peter's conscience hits him hard after lying to Janet and his behaviour at the barn dance (Chapter 5 page 74) and Janet (Chapter 6 page 102) links conscience with the Holy Spirit saying  "... it's like your conscience, someone on your shoulder, saying "You know you shouldn't." And I think she was right - your conscience isn't a static thing, it can be influenced in the right way by God, through his spirit. And in the wrong way, by the world.

Here's a good post on DesiringGod.org.  Is Your Conscience Captive to God?.

These are the points that hit me:

  • Our consciences are a significant aspect of God's revelation to us
    • "Unless I am convinced by sacred Scripture, or by evident reason, I cannot recant, for my conscience is held captive by the word of God, and to act against conscience is neither right nor safe.” Martin Luther.
    • John Calvin spoke of the “divine sense” that God puts into every person, and part of that divine sense is the conscience.
    • Thomas Aquinas said the conscience is the God-given inner voice that either accuses or excuses us in terms of what we do.
  • God's revelation to us comes in the following ways:
    • From the Bible.
    • A gift to every human being, Bible reader or not. Believer or not.
    • Through creation - what we see all around us. Believers and non-believers alike.
    • By planting a conscience within each of us
  • Our consciences aren't fixed. The author (R C Sproul) writes:
    • "Almost all people adjust their consciences between childhood and adulthood, and the adjustment is almost always downward. That is, we learn how to turn the volume of our conscience down so that our ethics align with how we want to live and not how God tells us we should live."
  • "The more we repeat our sins, the greater the guilt we incur, but the less sensitive we become to the pangs of guilt in our consciences." I know this is true for me. And it's a bit scary. Like someone secretly moving the marker ending the safe working temperature of a boiler, ever higher.
  • Even Christians adjust our consciences to fit the world we live in. (William Wilberforce says a lot about this in his book Real Christianity.

Read the full post by R.C.Sproul here.

 

 

Writers Thoughts