Hebrews 9:13-14
13 For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh,
14 how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?
We all need to have our conscience cleansed, and kept clean. What is the conscience, exactly?
Conscience – the mental faculty by which one distinguishes right from wrong; urges the individual to do what he recognizes to be right and to restrain him from doing what he recognizes as wrong.
Look what Paul warns Timothy about:
1 Timothy 1:18-19
18 This command I entrust to you, Timothy, my son, in accordance with the prophecies previously made concerning you, that by them you fight the good fight,
19 keeping faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and suffered shipwreck in regard to their faith.
We are to keep a good conscience. If you ignore your conscience or neglect it, your spiritual life will suffer shipwreck, and your conscience will become perverted:
1 Timothy 4:1-2
1 But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons,
2 by means of the hypocrisy of liars seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron,
They fall away from faith, and then doctrines of demons get seared into their conscience!
Here’s how it works:
You hear the word of God, learn what is right and wrong, and then you reject it, ignoring your conscience, and do what you want anyway! What’s the use of hearing and learning if you are not going to APPLY it?
We’re not necessarily talking about evil or overt sins, but simply not doing what you know you should be doing. Watch out for sins of omission – when you don’t operate in God’s plan for your life.
Look at this example of someone who committed a sin of omission, and whose conscience became hardened.
2 Samuel 11:1-5
1 Then it happened in
the spring, at the time when kings go out to battle, that David sent Joab and his servants with him and all
Kings went out to battle in the spring. WAIT – isn’t David a king?
He is now rejecting what he knows to be God’s will. He knows he should be with the army. But what’s the big deal? The army still destroyed the enemy!
When he starts ignoring the norms and standards in his
conscience, his conscience will become perverted. You all know the story from here, David sees
Bathsheba, forces himself on her, gets her pregnant, and gets her husband
drunk, then killed.
And it all started with David not doing one simple little
thing that he knew he should do!
When you ignore your conscience, and get out of the place God wants you, then you will get used to ignoring your conscience, and end up doing things you cannot imagine yourself doing!