Join host Rick Hughes as he delves into the concept of the conscience — an integral part of our spiritual existence. This episode provides thought-provoking discussions on how the conscience functions and how it is essential in aligning our lives with God’s will. Explore the idea of creating norms and standards based on scripture, allowing them to guide your choices and actions.
Welcome to the Flatline with your host, Rick Hughes. For the next 30 minutes, you’ll be inspired, motivated, educated, but never manipulated. Now, your host, Rick Hughes.
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Good morning and welcome to the Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next 30 minutes, please stick around. It’s just a short time, about 27, 28 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, a whole lot of education with no manipulation. I say this every Sunday. We don’t con people. We are not trying to raise money. We’re not trying to sell you anything. We’re not asking you to join anything. This is completely unusual for most Christian organizations that try to solicit funds. We know that if God’s in it, God will pay for it, so we just do our job, keep our mouth shut, and the Lord has always faithfully supplied our needs, and I’m thankful for that. I’m thankful that he has given me an audience like you to listen, and I’m thankful for the encouraging words that you send to me. I love hearing from you. I love your letters. I love hearing when you tell me that you’re learning and growing and you’re applying these things into your life. And thank you for your prayer support and your encouragement in that way as well. You can always go to our website, rickhughesministries.org, rickhughesministries.org, not .com, .org, and you’ll find a list of all of our books online. all of our radio shows, everything we make available free of charge. I hope you’ll order them, especially our book on God’s grace and aging. One of our latest books deals with getting old and what God has provided for us. Because you, probably like me, are getting a little on up there. So thank goodness he’s made provisions for us in these days of our lives. You can always contact us at 800-831-0718. But I tell you, I’m not a counselor. I’m an evangelist. I’m not here to counsel you through your wedding problems or through your child problems. I’m here to give you the scripture. And occasionally people want to call and correct me and tell me how wrong I am and how screwed up I am. And if that’s you, don’t call. Don’t waste my time. If you don’t like what I’m teaching, then start your own radio show. How’s that? Then you can teach whatever you want to teach. But thanks for those of you that are faithful to listen, those of you that are faithful to pray. Thanks for your encouragement. I really appreciate it. Today we’re at lesson 994, moving on towards 1000. We’re going to talk about the conscience, the conscience. You know, the conscience, you have a conscience. And I want to give you some scriptures related to that and talk about it for just a few minutes. In 2 Corinthians 1.12, Paul wrote, for our rejoicing is this, this is what makes me happy, he said, the testimony of our conscience. You hear that? The testimony of our conscience. What is that testimony? What’s he talking about? He tells you now. that in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the world and more abundantly towards you. So he’s completely at ease and relaxed, doesn’t feel guilty about anything. He didn’t mislead anybody. His testimony of his conscience, his conscience is clean. In 1 Timothy 4.2, listen to this, this is scary. We’ll discuss it today. 1 Timothy 4.2, speaking lies and hypocrisy, having their conscience seared with a hot iron. How do you sear your conscience? And then another scary passage in Titus 1.15, unto the pure all things are pure, but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure, even their mind and their conscience is defiled. How do you defile your conscience? How do you sear your conscience? How do you have a clear conscience? The Bible teaches that you and I do have a conscious. Did you know that? The original Greek word used is sunnidesis, sunnidesis. And it’s a noun describing the invisible part of our soul. So we have a soul, and the soul has different faculties. And this is how we apprehend the will of God, which is designed to govern our lives. So I believe the soul is the home of our consciousness. our volition, our self-consciousness, and our mentality. Four things, our conscience, our volition, our self-consciousness, and our mentality. And it’s the intangible, immortal essence of a man that the conscience is, that comprises, the soul, excuse me, the soul is the intangible, immortal essence of a man that compromises who the real person is. and that’s giving that person rational, moral, and relational capabilities. So you have a soul, and your soul can think. You have mentality. You have volition. Your soul can choose. You have a choice to make. You can believe in Christ or reject Christ. Your soul has a conscience and a self-consciousness. And by that consciousness, I mean you can look at yourself in a mirror and you know that’s you. You’re aware of that. So mother and dad, when you have parents, they cannot create a soul. Parents don’t create a soul. They can only create biological life. And that will eventually die. Only God can create the soul, and that’s what’ll live forever. So as I said, your soul houses your mentality, your conscience, your self-consciousness, and it is the seat of your volition. So it’s clear from the scriptures as we study this that the arrogant individual is not what he thinks he is but rather he is the sum total of what he thinks in proverbs 23 7 for as he thinks in his heart so he is it’s in your conscience that you set standards as to what’s right and what’s wrong because we think with categories and we live by principles Whoever is limited by what he thinks has a tremendous loss of capacity for life because of such a narrow perspective of life if he doesn’t think very much, if he doesn’t have a clear understanding. If you need stimulation to be motivated into doing something rather than clearing your actions are based on what you think but rather based on what you feel. The solution is not, the stimulation sometimes can be alcohol, can be drugs, can be hobbies or people or whatever, but it usually requires you to not think, but just to let your emotions stimulate your mentality. So the conscience stores our norms and standards as we learn the scriptures. And then as we learn the scriptures, we build values in our consciousness and they keep us from destroying ourselves. We learn the difference between right and wrong. And we learn to recognize the urges that we have that cause us to do what is wrong. The question to ask is this, does your conscience honor God? Does your conscience honor God? It does if in fact your norms and standards and your priorities originate from the scripture. Did you hear that word norms and standards? That’s what’s in your conscience. Those are the things you operate by. Those are the things you live by. Notice the conscience of David giving him strength in the times of testing where the demands of King Nebuchadnezzar during his time as captive. Listen to what Daniel did. Daniel 1.8, but Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with a portion of the king’s delicacies, nor with the wine which he drank. Therefore he requested to the chief of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself. So he didn’t want to eat what the king Nebuchadnezzar said they should eat. And he purposed in his heart. That’s his conscience at work. His conscience wouldn’t let him do that. He had a strong consciousness. His personal norms and standards developed from having divine viewpoint gave him the ability to withstand the demands of the king regardless of what it might cost him. And that’s something to remember because honor is more important than anything else. An individual with no honor has no norms and no standards in their conscience and they will eventually compromise and crash. So what is the first norm you should seek to develop in a young child? Well, it’s very obvious, it’s respect for authority. Because without authority orientation, there’s no freedom in life and no prophecy in life. Your standards don’t make you spiritual or advance you to maturity. God’s standards do that. But you have to develop this respect for authority. And remember, nobody has a right to superimpose their standards on anyone else. Privacy means you are allowed to hold any opinion you want until you grow up spiritually. You have the privacy to take in the Word of God without anybody setting standards for you. You have to decide what the Word of God teaches and develop your own norms and standards in your life that you’re gonna function and live by. Because if you learn norms and standards and learn the word of God, in other words, if you learn the word of God, your standards, your norms will change eventually. At every stage of spiritual growth, you have a consolidated conscience and you regulate your own life on the basis of your own norms and standards. Any individual with biblical standards from metabolized doctrine is a strong Christian. A weak conscience lives by standards acquired from background which may or may not be good or which may or may not be distorted to the spiritual life. So the first question is how is your conscience? Is it strong? Is it weak? If it’s strong, you have norms and standards based on the scripture. If it’s weak, you have false norms and standards based on arrogance. In Acts 23.1, the Apostle Paul looked intently at the Sanhedrin and said, Brethren, I have conducted myself as a citizen with good conscience before God up to this day. With good conscience before God up to this day. In Acts 24, 16, in view of this, even I myself keep on practicing and maintaining even a blameless conscience, both before God and before men. So Paul recognized this. You can’t live with guilt in your life. You can’t live trying to hide things from people. And Paul said, my conscience is blameless. I haven’t hid anything from you. I haven’t done anything wrong. You’re attacking me. You’re trying to put me to death just because I preach the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. So Paul had what I’m going to call a balanced conscience, a balanced conscience. He had one set of norms and standards developed toward the authority of man, That’s the law. He understood that. And he had another set of norms and standards developed towards God. And both of these norms and standards are developed from Scripture. And you have to have the same thing. You have to have norms and standards related to the laws of the land. Then you have to have norms and standards related to your spiritual life. And sometimes they will conflict. Sometimes you have to make a decision how you’re going to live your life. Are you going to obey what the laws tell you you have to do according to the earth or the Satan or the God of this world? Or are you going to do what God tells you to do? You’ll probably run into that in the future somewhere down the road as organized Christianity continues to be attacked in this country. So if we go back to 2 Corinthians 1.12, we see that his conscience What he talked about was free of guilt for his attitude towards the believers in Corinth as well as the authorities of government. He didn’t have any guilt. 2 Corinthians 1.12 again, listen, for our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience. Can I ask you what is the testimony of your conscience? Are you living with hidden sin? Are you living with guilt in your life? Are you ashamed of what others don’t know about? He said, the testimony of our conscience is this, in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God. What a wonderful thing. We have had our conversation in the world and more abundantly to you. That’s two different sets of norms and standards. The norms and standards of the world, how to get along in the world, and the norms and standards of God. Now listen, it’s possible you can sear your conscience. Do you know that? You don’t want to do this. You can sear your conscience. In 1 Timothy 4.2, speaking lies and hypocrisy, having their conscience seared with a hot iron. That original Greek word for seared is the word kasouriazo. Kasouriazo. And we get an English word from that. That word is cauterize. And that means to burn the skin or the flesh of a wound with a heated instrument so it won’t bleed. If you’ve ever had any skin cancers cut off of you, sometimes after the surgery, they’ll cauterize the surgery where it’ll quit bleeding. The Greek word used according to Vine’s expository dictionary, the New Testament, means to burn with a branding iron. So illustrating how the conscience is branded from the effects of sin. You remember the old cowboy show, you know, where they’d take the cow and lasso the cow and pull him over to the fire and have the hot iron branding iron and they would lay him down and brand him and put the brand on his rump and he may make a loud moan and they let him up and for the rest of his life he has the brand of the T-bar P or whatever the brand might be. That’s what we’re talking about. That’s what it means to be seared, to be branded from the effects of your sin. For you and I, this means that we will carry about the scars of some sins we’ve committed perpetually in our conscience as memories because they never are forgotten. There’s an interesting thing about being saved. It does not remove the memory of certain sins that we’ve done. But salvation does mean this, that our Lord Jesus Christ died for those sins. We are forgiven for those sins, so we don’t have to carry the guilt for what we did any longer. paul wrote this metaphor using it to reveal the mindset of the times of the population individuals who are won over in their thinking by seducing spirits and doctrines of devils that’s what he wrote to he wrote this metaphor using it to reveal the mindset of the times, remember I read it to you earlier, to reveal the mindset of the times, the seducing spirits and the doctrines of devils. That’s in 1 Timothy 4.1. These types of individuals that he warned about are obviously hypocrites, and they don’t live by the standards of the word of God in their life. Okay? Now let’s move on a little bit. Let’s see what else we got to take a look at here. These types are obviously hypocrites. They don’t live by the standards that they preach due to the fact that they have scarred up conscience and they are no longer governed by any norms or any standards of any biblical proportions. That’s probably one reason why some modern day politicians can lie to you. and with a smile on their face. And they don’t feel guilt about it. They don’t feel guilt about their deception. They don’t feel anything wrong with lying to your face. And they probably, as soon as they’re off the stage and go behind the screen, they laugh about it. Oh, those people believed what I said. Ha, ha, ha. Don’t forget that Satan is the arch brainwasher. You hear me? Don’t forget that Satan is the arch brainwasher. He’s the ultimate mind manipulator. and he plays mind games trying to win you over so that your norms and standards will change. The scriptures tell you that you can also defile your conscience. Well, what in the world does that mean? How do you defile your conscience? Well, let’s look at Titus 1.15. Unto the pure all things are pure. But unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure, even their mind and their conscience is defiled. What does the word defiled mean? Years ago, when I was a competitive bass fisherman, I was fishing in a creek, and I was catching some really nice fish. I was flipping a jig around some down bushes and stumps and trees and logs, and I began to smell something. I thought, hmm, well, it stinks in here. As I went around the corner, there was a sign that said raw sewage entering into the creek. And I went, oh, Lord have mercy. So I had to get rid of all those fish and start washing my rods and reels in the clean water and try to get the stench out of them. The Greek word for defiled is exactly that, raw sewage. It’s the word meino. And it means to pollute or to contaminate or to soil. Meino is found in the sewer system or in the septic tank. So the individual with a defiled conscience, you can think about it, his conscience is equal to excrement or just plain filth. It’s no wonder they stink. This unbelieving mind can be totally defiled and not even realize what they’ve done to themselves. Did you know that? Listen to me as I read to you Romans 1, 18 through 28. And you can see how a defiled person thinks once their mind is polluted. In Romans 1, 18, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness because that which may be known of God is manifested in them, for God has shown it to them, for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so they are without excuse. Now, no one has excuse to say there’s no God. I don’t care who you are and what part of the world you live in, you can recognize there’s a God by looking at creation. But listen to this verse 21 in Romans 1. Although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God, nor were they thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. That’s the word scotizo, blacked out. That means no understanding, no comprehension of what’s going on. They’re scar tissue. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. And they changed the glory of God, the incorruptible God, into an image made like a corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. Because of this, verse 24 of Romans 1, God also gave them up to uncleanness in the lust of their own hearts to dishonor their bodies among themselves who exchanged the truth of God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who should be blessed forever. Amen. It’s for this reason that God gave them up to vile passions for even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise, also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one for another, men with men committing what is shameful and receiving in themselves the penalty of the error which was due. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, that’s the me I know, to do things which are not fitting.” When you get meino in your consciousness, when your conscience becomes a sewer, then you’re going to do things that are not fitting. God will allow you to get here. He’s not going to stop you. If you want to reject him, if you want to reject his word, if you want to reject everything about it, you can go right ahead and do that. God is a gentleman. He won’t pressure you, but he’s there. He loves you. He sent his son to die for you, to pay for your sin, to pay the penalty for your sin. There’s never a time in your life that you can’t pull out of what you’ve been involved in. If you’ve allowed your mind to do what? If you’ve allowed your mind to get into debased thinking, if your conscience has been polluted with me, I know, with the sewer, then these are the things you will do to yourself. You will get into these ungodly, filthy things that you think is okay now. You justify it as okay. You reject the Word of God. You reject everything God said, and you go about doing things your way. I’m going to do it my way. And when your life winds up miserable and rotten and polluted, don’t blame God. Don’t hold your hand up and say, God, why didn’t you tell me? God said, I did tell you. I sent my son to die for you. My son paid for your sin, but you didn’t listen. You were so arrogant, you thought you knew what was best for your own life. You can destroy your conscience. You can wind up living a life full of regret, full of fear because of the filth that you get into when you defile your conscience. And defiling your conscience leaves a brand in your soul. You’re branded. It’s like that cow with a brand on his rump where the hot iron branded him. Once your soul is branded and defiled by this sin, it’s never going to go away and you’re going to try to forget about it and try to change your way sometimes. But there’s only one way to change and I’ll tell you this honestly. The only way you can ever change your life is this word right here. If any man is in Christ, he’s a new creation. Old things are passed away and all things become new. By believing in the Lord Jesus Christ, you can be born again. You can have a brand new life. Imagine a chalkboard in school with writing all over the chalkboard and the teacher said, here’s a sponge, go up there and clean the chalkboard off. So you went up with a damp sponge and you began to wipe away all the chalk letters and chalk words and cleaned it until it’s a perfectly clean chalkboard. That’s what it’s like when you get saved. God cleanses you, wipes away all that sin. That doesn’t mean the memories go away. Of course, the memories are always like where you pull the nail out of a log but the hole is still there. But by understanding God’s plan and what Christ did for you, there’s no more guilt. You can change the way you think by learning new norms and standards, learning the divine standards from the word of God and quit being manipulated by Satan himself. Maybe you have been manipulated by Satan. Maybe you’re not interested in hearing what I’m telling you. That’s okay. You can have a nice life, go down the road, live your life however you want to live your life. But in the end, you will be held responsible because there is a great white throne of judgment, and you will stand before that throne, and you will answer God as to whether or not your name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. If you’ve never trusted Jesus Christ, your name is not in the Lamb’s Book of Life. You died the first death. You died, as it’s pointed, the man wants to die, and after that, the judgment. You died the first death, and you will die the second death when you’re cast into the lake of fire. This is called the second death. You don’t have to go there. You don’t have to experience that. You don’t have to live like that. You don’t have to have a conscience that’s seared up and defiled. You can have a clear conscience, as Paul said, the testimony of my conscience in simplicity and godly sincerity. So when you close your eyes tonight, what does your conscience tell you about yourself? When you close your eyes tonight, what is your conscience saying to you? You want to get right? You want to get rid of that stuff? Then go to God and confess your sin and receive Christ as your Savior. If you’ve never been saved, simply call out, Father, I believe that Jesus Christ died for me and I’m willing to accept him as my Savior. That’s a wonderful prayer. because the Bible says whosoever should call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. If you are a Christian and you’ve allowed yourself to get into this sort of stuff, go to God and confess your sin. And God said he would be faithful and just to forgive you and cleanse you from all unrighteousness. And begin to learn the scriptures, not just gnosis, but epinosis. the full knowledge, and replace your norms and standards with new divine norms and standards that will guide you, protect you, compliment you, and give you a wonderful life that God designed for you to start with. You may be in the process of self-destructing. I hope you’ll wake up and realize that. Maybe your conscience has been seared. Maybe your conscience is full of filth. It’s not too late. You can change. You can let the Word of God make a change in your soul. You can let the Holy Spirit come beside you by believing in the Lord Jesus Christ and accepting Him as your Savior. I appreciate you listening to me. Thank you for being part of the Flatline for all these years. We’ll be back next week, same time, same place. So until then, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to the Flatline.
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Thank you for listening to The Floodline with your host, Rick Hughes. If you’d like to contact Rick, please write to him at P.O. Box 100, Cropwell, Alabama, 35054, or online at www.rickhughesministries.org.
