Your Conscience
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 994 aired on September 8, 2024
Good morning and welcome to The FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes. Please stick around.
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that? Then you can teach whatever you want to teach. Thanks for those of you that are faithful to
listen, those of you who are faithful to pray. Thanks for your encouragement. I really appreciate
it. Today we are at lesson 994, moving on toward 1,000. We are going to talk about the
conscience.You have a conscience and I’m going to give you some Scripture related to this and
talk about it. In 2 Corinthians 1:12 Paul wrote,
“For our proud confidence is this
[this is what
makes me happy]:
the testimony of our conscience, that in holiness and godly sincerity, not in
fleshly wisdom but in the grace of God, we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially
toward you.”
Paul is completely at ease and relaxed. He doesn’t feel guilty about anything. He
didn’t mislead anybody. His testimony is his conscience is clean. Listen to 1 Timothy 4:2, this is
scary,
“By means of the hypocrisy of liars seared in their own conscience as with a branding
iron.”
How do you sear your conscience? Then another scary passage is Titus 1:15,
“To the pure,
all things are pure; but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their
mind and their conscience are defiled.”
How do you defile your conscience? How do you sear
your conscience? How do you have a clear conscience? The Bible teaches that we have a
conscience. The original Greek word used is
suneidesis.
It is a noun describing the invisible part
of our soul. We have a soul and the soul has different faculties. This is how we comprehend the
will of God which is designed to govern our lives. I believe the soul is the home of four things:
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our conscience, our volition, our self-consciousness and our mentality. The conscience is the
intangible, immortal essence of man that comprises what the real person is which is having
rational, moral and relational capabilities. You have a soul and your soul can think, you have
mentality. You have volition, you can choose. You make decisions. You can believe in Christ or
reject Christ. Your soul has a conscience and self-consciousness. By this self-consciousness you
can look at yourself in the mirror and you know that it’s you. You’re aware of this. Mother and
dad cannot create a soul. They can only create biological life and it will eventually die. Only God
can create the soul and it’s what lives forever. As I said, your soul houses your mentality, your
conscience, your self-consciousness and it is the seat of your volition. It’s clear from Scripture as
we study this that the 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 within himself, so he is.”
It is 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 a narrow perspective of life if he doesn’t think very much limits clear understanding.
If you need stimulation to be motivated into doing something rather than clearly thinking, your
actions are not based on what you think but rather based on what you feel. This stimulation can
be alcohol, drugs, hobbies, people or whatever and usually you are not thinking but just letting
your emotions stimulate your mentality. The conscience stores our norms and standards we learn
from Scripture. As we learn Scripture we build values in our conscience and they keep us from
destroying ourselves. We learn the difference between right and wrong and we learn to recognize
the urges that cause us to do what is wrong. The question to ask is this. Does your conscience
honor God? It does, if in fact your norms, standards and priorities originate from Scripture. Did
you hear the words norms and standards? These are what are in your conscience. These are the
things you operate by. They are the things you live by. Notice the conscience of Daniel giving
him strength in the times of testing with the demands of King Nebuchadnezzar during his time as
captive. Listen to what he did in Daniel 1:8,
“But Daniel made up his mind that he would not
defile himself with the king’s choice food or with the wine which he drank; so he sought
permission from the commander of the officials that he might not defile himself.”
He didn’t want
to eat what King Nebuchadnezzar said they should eat and he
“made up his mind”
or purposed
in his heart. This is his conscience at work. His conscience wouldn’t let him do this. He had a
strong conscience. 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.
This is something to remember – 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. What is the first norm you should seek to develop in a young child? It’s respect for
authority because without authority orientation, there is no freedom in life and no privacy in life.
Your standards don’t make you spiritual or advance you to maturity. God’s standard’s do this but
you have to develop this respect for authority. Remember, nobody has a right to superimpose
their standards on anyone else. Privacy means you are allowed to hold any opinion you want
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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 norms
and standards in your life that you’re going to function and live by. If you learn the Word of God,
your standards and norms will change. At every stage of spiritual growth your conscience
develops and you regulate your life on the basis of these norms and standards. Any individual
with Biblical standards from metabolized doctrine is a strong Christian. A person with a weak
conscience lives by standards acquired from his background which may or may not be good or
which may or may not be oriented to the spiritual life. How is your conscience? Is it strong? Is it
weak? If it is strong, you have norms and standards based on Scripture. If it’s weak, you have
false norms and standards often based on arrogance. In Acts 23:1,
“Paul, looking intently at the
Council said, ‘Brethren, I have lived my life with a perfectly good conscience before God up to
this day.’”
In Acts 24:16,
“In view of this, I also do my best to maintain always a blameless
conscience both before God and before men.”
Paul recognized this. You can’t live with guilt in
your life. You can’t live trying to hide things from people. Paul said, “My conscious 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.” Paul had
what I’m going to call a balanced conscience. He had norms and standards developed toward the
authority of man, the law. He understood this. He had another set of norms and standards
developed toward God. Combined these norms and standards were 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 and you have to have norms and standards related to your spiritual life. Sometimes they will
conflict. Sometimes you have to make a decision on how you’re going to live your life. Are you
going to obey what the laws say you have to do according to Satan and his world? Or are you
going to do what God tells you to do? You’ll probably run into this in the future as organized
Christianity continues to be attacked in this country. If we go back to 2 Corinthians 1:12, we see
that his conscience was free of guilt for his attitude toward the believers in Corinth as well as the
authorities of government. He didn’t have any guilt. Listen to 2 Corinthians 1:12 again,
“For our
proud confidence
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? Paul said,
”The testimony of our conscience, that
in holiness and godly sincerity, not in fleshly wisdom but in the grace of God, we have conducted
ourselves in the world, and especially toward you.”
These are 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. It’s possible you can sear your conscience. Did you know that? You don’t want
to sear your conscience. Again in 1 Timothy 4:2,
“By means of the hypocrisy of liars seared in
their own conscience as with a branding iron.”
The original Greek word for sear is
kausteriazo.
We get the English word cauterize from this. It 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 will cauterize it so it will quit bleeding. The Greek word used
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according to
Vine’s Expository Dictionary of the New Testament,
means to burn with a branding
iron, illustrating how the conscience is branded from the effects of sin. Do you remember the old
cowboy shows where they would lasso a cow and pull it over to the fire where they had a hot
branding iron? They would lay him down and put the brand on his rump. He made a loud moan
and they would let him up and for the rest of his life he has the brand of the T-Bar-P or whatever
the ranch might be. This is what we are talking about. This is what it means to be seared, to be
branded from the effects of your sin. This means we will carry the scars of some sins we have
committed perpetually in our conscience as memories because they never are forgotten. Here’s
an interesting thing about being saved. It does not remove the memory of certain sins that we’ve
done. Salvation does mean that our Lord Jesus Christ died for those sins. We are forgiven for
those sins so we don’t have to carry guilt any longer for what we did. Paul wrote this metaphor
using it to reveal the mindset of the times of the population of individuals who were won over in
their thinking by seducing spirits and doctrines of devils.
“But the Spirit explicitly says that in
later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits
[seducing
spirits]
and doctrines of demons
[doctrines of devils]
”
(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. They don’t live by the standards that they preach due to the fact
that they have scarred up consciences and they are no longer governed by any norms or any
standards of any Biblical proportion. This is probably one reason why some politicians can lie to
you 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 that anything is wrong with lying to your face. As soon as they’re off
the stage and go behind the screen, they probably laugh about it, “Those people believe what I
said, ha ha ha.” Don’t forget that Satan is the master 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. Scripture tells you that you can also defile your conscience. What in the world does
this mean? How do you defile your conscience? Let’s look at Titus 1:15,
“To the pure, all things
are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and
their conscience are defiled.”
What does this 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 downed bushes, stumps, trees and logs and I began to smell
something. I thought, “Boy, it stinks in here.” As I went around the corner there was a sign that
said, “Raw sewage” entering into the creek. I got rid of all the fish and started washing my rods
and reels in the clean water trying to get the stench out of them. The Greek word for defiled is
exactly that, raw sewage. It’s the word
miaino
and it means to pollute or to contaminate or to soil.
Miaino
is found in the sewer system or in the septic tank. The individual with a defiled
conscience has a conscience that is filled with excrement or just plain filth. It’s no wonder they
stink. This unbelieving mind can be totally defiled and the person doesn’t even realize what
they’ve done to themselves. Did you know this? Listen to me as I read Romans 1:18-28 and you
can see how a defiled person thinks once their mind is polluted.
“For the wrath of God is
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revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth
in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God
made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal
power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made,
so that they are without excuse.
[No one has an excuse to say there is no God. I don’t care who
you are or what part of the world you live in, you can recognize there is a God by looking at
creation]
. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but
they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
[This is the word
skotizo,
blacked out. It means no understanding or no comprehension of what’s going on. There
is scar tissue]
. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the
incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed
animals and crawling creatures. Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to
impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of
God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed
forever. Amen. For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women
exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also, the men
abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another,
men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of
their error. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over
to a depraved mind
[this is the
miano
]
, to do those things which are not proper.”
When you get
miano
in your consciousness, when you conscience becomes a sewer, then you are 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 it. 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 the penalty for your sin. There is never a time in your
life that you can’t pull out of what you’ve involved in. If you’ve allowed your mind to get into
debased thinking, if your conscience has been polluted with
miano
, with the sewer, then these are
the things you will do to yourself. You will get into these ungodly, filthy things that you think are
okay. You justify it as okay and reject the Word of God. You reject everything God says and you
go about doing things your way. “I’m going to do it my way.” When your life winds up
miserable, rotten and polluted, don’t blame God. Don’t hold your hand up and say, “God, why
didn’t you tell me?” God says, “I did tell you. I sent My Son to die for you. My Son paid for
your sins 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 and
full of fear because of the filth that you get into when you defile your conscience. 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 sin, it’s never
going to go away. You’re going to try to forget about it or sometimes try to change your ways but
there is only one way to change. The only way you can ever change your life is this verse right
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here,
“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold,
new things have come”
(2 Corinthians 5:17). 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
it and the teacher says, “Here’s a sponge. Go up there and clean the chalkboard off.” So you go
up with a damp sponge and you begin to wipe away all the chalk letters and chalk words. You
clean it until it’s a perfectly clean chalkboard. This is what it’s like when you get saved. God
cleanses you and wipes away all that sin. This doesn’t mean the memories go away. Of course
memories are like where you pulled a nail out of the log but the hole is still there but by
understanding God’s plan of 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. Quit being manipulated by Satan. Maybe you’re not interested in hearing what I’m
telling you. That’s okay, you can have a nice life going down the road, living 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. You will stand before this 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 die the first death. Then as Hebrews
9:27 says,
“And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment.”
After the first death, you will die the second death when you are 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 this. You
don’t have to live like this. You don’t have to have a conscience that seared up and defiled. You
can have a clear conscience as Paul says,
“The testimony of our conscience, that in holiness and
godly sincerity.”
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? Do you
want to get right? Do you want to get rid of that stuff? Then go to God 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.” This is a wonderful prayer because Romans
10:13 says,
“For whoever will call on the name of the Lord will 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
says He will be faithful and just to forgive you and cleanse you from all unrighteousness (1 John
1:9). Begin to learn Scripture, not just
gnosis
but
epignosis,
the full knowledge, and replace your
norms or standards with new divine norms and standards that will guide you, protect you,
complement you, and give you the 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 this. Maybe your
conscience has been seared. Maybe your conscience is full of filth. It’s not too late. You can
change. Allow the Word of God to change your soul. Let the Holy Spirit come inside you by
believing in the Lord Jesus Christ and accepting Him as your Savior. Thank you for being part of
The FLOT Line for all these years. We’ll be back next week, same time, same place. Until then,
this is your host Rick Hughes saying thank you for listening to The FLOT Line