Quotes about Conscience

Since the conscience holds people to their highest perceived standard, believers need to set that standard to the highest level by submitting to all of God’s Word. As they continually fill their minds with the truths of Scripture, believers clarify God’s perfect law. Their consciences will then call them to live according to that law.

The conscience is a built-in warning system that signals us when something we have done is wrong. The conscience is to our souls what pain sensors are to our bodies: it inflicts distress, in the form of guilt, whenever we violate what our hearts tell us is right.

Suppressing the conscience or deliberately violating it is deadly to our spiritual well-being. To disobey the conscience is itself a sin (Romans 14:14, 23; James 4:17), even if the conscience is ignorant or is misinformed. And to suppress the conscience is tantamount to searing it with a hot iron (1 Timothy 4:2), leaving it insensitive and thereby dangerously removing a vital defense against temptation (1 Corinthians 8:10).

Our sensitivity to personal guilt is a fundamental trait of our humanness that distinguishes us from animals. To try to suppress the conscience is in effect to diminish one’s own humanity.

As a Christian, you have the capacity to walk before God with a clear conscience:

1. Confess and forsake known sin. Examine your guilt feelings in light of Scripture. Deal with the sin God’s Word reveals (Pr. 28:13; 1 Jn. 1:9; Jas. 5:16; Psm. 32:5).

2. Ask forgiveness and be reconciled to anyone you have wronged (Mt. 5:23-24; 6:14-15).

3. Make restitution to those you’ve wronged (Num. 5:6-7; Lk. 19:8; Phile. 19).

4. Don’t procrastinate in clearing your wounded conscience. Some people put off dealing with their guilt, thinking their conscience will clear itself in time. It won’t. Procrastination allows the guilt feelings to fester. That in turn generates depression, anxiety, and other emotional problems (Ac. 24:16).

5. Educate your conscience. A weak, easily grieved conscience results from a lack of spiritual knowledge (1 Cor. 8:7).

If your conscience is too easily wounded, don’t violate it. To violate even a weak conscience is to train yourself to override conviction, and that will lead to overriding true conviction about real sin. Moreover, violating the conscience is a sin in itself (Romans 14:23), bringing legitimate guilt for a real offense against God. So, respond to your conscience, even if it’s weak, and then continue to inform your conscience with God’s Word so it can begin to function with reliable data.

Drugs, therapy, entertainment – they’re all used to silence a guilty conscience. But for the Christian, the conscience is the key to freedom.

The conscience is generally seen by the modern world as a defect that robs people of their self-esteem. Far from being a defect or a disorder, however, your ability to sense your own guilt is a tremendous gift from God. He designed the conscience into the very framework of the human soul. It is the automatic warning system that cries, “Pull up!  Pull up!” before you crash and burn.

The conscience entreats you to do what you believe is right and restrains you from doing what you believe is wrong. But don’t equate the conscience with the voice of God or the law of God. It is a human faculty that judges your actions and thoughts by the light of the highest standard you perceive. When you violate your conscience, it condemns you, triggering feelings of shame, anguish, regret, consternation, anxiety, disgrace, and even fear. Conversely, when you follow your conscience, it commends you, bringing joy, serenity, self-respect, well-being, and gladness.

Both the mind and the conscience can become so defiled that they cease making distinctions between what is pure and what is impure (cf. Titus 1:15).

The conscience…is not infallible. Nor is it a source of revelation about right and wrong. Its role is not to teach you moral and ethical ideals, but to hold you accountable to the highest standards of right and wrong you know.

Both tradition and truth inform the conscience, so the standards it holds you to are not necessarily biblical ones (1 Corinthians 8:6-9). The conscience can be needlessly condemning in areas where there is no biblical issue. In fact, it can try to hold you to the very thing the Lord is trying to release you from (Romans 14:14, 20-23)!

Your conscience reacts to the convictions of your mind and therefore can be encouraged and sharpened in accordance with God’s Word. The wise Christian wants to master biblical truth so that the conscience is completely informed and judges right because it is responding to God’s Word. A regular diet of Scripture will strengthen a weak conscience or restrain an overactive one. Conversely, error, human wisdom, and wrong moral influences filling the mind will corrupt or cripple the conscience.

Your conscience is like the nerve endings in your fingertips. Its sensitivity to external stimuli can be damaged by the buildup of calluses or even wounded so badly as to be virtually impervious to any feeling. Paul also wrote of the dangers of a calloused conscience (1 Corinthians 8:10), a wounded conscience (v. 12), and a seared conscience (1 Timothy 4:2).

Take time each day to inform your conscience by reading God’s Word. Never train yourself to ignore your conscience, but respond quickly to its warnings. And then cleanse your conscience through consistent confession as you seek forgiveness from those you’ve sinned against – whether God or others. Those things will strengthen your conscience so that you can enjoy the freedom and blessings of a clear conscience before God.

Everybody who is created comes into the world with a sense of right and wrong. That is the law written in the hearts. In addition to that, God has put the conscience and the conscience is a warning device that sounds off when we violate that law, or affirms us when we obey it. The conscience is not that law; it is merely the warning device.

Conscience is to the soul what pain is to the body. We would like to avoid pain as much as possible, but at the same time we recognize that pain is a gift from God. If you didn’t have pain, you would destroy yourself. Pain is critical to physical preservation. And so the conscience is critical to spiritual preservation.

Our society under the prince of the power of the air has two objectives. Objective number one is destroy the moral law so that the conscience is misinformed. Train people against what is innately the law that is in their hearts when they’re born, give them a new morality, not the morality of the Bible, not God’s law. We want people not to think biblically. We want them freed from that so we’ll construct another morality that will pour that into their lives through every means possible. That’s destructive. And then the second thing that society wants to do orchestrated by the enemy of your souls is to tell you that your conscience is a liar. That what’s wrong with you isn’t sin, it’s a lack of…self-esteem. It isn’t that you’re bad; it’s that you’re good and you need to think better of yourself… The guilty conscience isn’t healthy, it shouldn’t be tolerated, switch it off.

The conscience is at the core of what it means to be human, as opposed to being an animal. What distinguishes human beings and animals is self-consciousness; that is the ability of the soul to reflect upon itself. Humans are the only creatures in the material world who can think about their thoughts, who can contemplate why they think the way they think, who can understand their motives, who can make moral self-evaluations. And that is a God-given gift, the innate ability to sense what is right and wrong,

It’s essential to understand…that the conscience doesn’t act independently. It can only act upon a belief system. It is not a belief system. The conscience is not the law of God. It is not the voice of God. It is not moral law. It is simply a mechanism.

Your conscience works off your belief system. [So] the more you know about the Word of God, the more you’re consistently in the Word of God, learning the Word of God, hearing the Word of God, meditating on the Word of God, the more informed your conscience is truly informed.

[The conscience] either indicts you, accuses you, or it exonerates you and defends you.

James 1 says, “Lust when it conceives brings forth sin”… If you don’t win the battle on the inside, it will show up on the outside. A pure conscience is more to be sought than a good reputation.

What happens when a person becomes a believer is that conscience is purified by the Holy Spirit; and, as a Christian, I believe conscience is giving pure information. I believe that the Holy Spirit, in conjunction with your conscience, is going to send pure impulses. That’s why a Christian who sins is going to suffer far more intense guilt than a non-believer who’s got a seared conscience… The Holy Spirit will operate in and through your conscience and make moral judgments on your action.

Your conscience as a Christian is that tool in connection with the Holy Spirit which makes moral value judgments on your actions. Respond to it, because your conscience will not only make the judgment, it’s not only the judge, your conscience is also the executioner. If you don’t listen to your conscience, you’ll suffer from your conscience. Your conscience will continue to accuse you, and you’ll have a guilty conscience and a guilty complex.

So how does a person shut down conscience? Two ways: misinform it. Conscience is not a law; conscience is a mechanism. You can shut down pain, right? You can shut down pain; just take drugs. Mask pain. If you mask pain, you mask the reality that you’re doing some damage. You can mask conscience by misinforming it. How do you do that? You take the true law of God, which is written in Scripture and written in the human heart, and you basically eliminate it, denounce it, diminish it, remove it, and replace it with another law; and if you do this generationally you’ll eventually raise generations of people whose conscience is now informed by lies. The other thing you can do to shut down the conscience is just think you shouldn’t feel guilty. Let psychology take you off-the-hook: “You shouldn’t feel bad about yourself. You’re wonderful. You’re the best. You can be anything you want to be. You’re heroic. You’re a good person. You ought to be able to do whatever you want. You live any way you want. Don’t let anybody make you feel guilty for anything.” Just keep driving all efforts against the normal work of the conscience and misinform the conscience and you’ve turned the beast loose. This society in which we live today has been doing that damage for decades, for decades.

Never train yourself to violate your conscience. If your conscience is troubled by what you are thinking about doing, don’t do it. If you are not sure about it, don’t do it. It is hard to overstate the value of a clear conscience, and it is definitely worth keeping your conscience clear so that your relationship with God will not be hindered (cf. Psm. 66:18).