Don’t Waste Your Conscience

Our conscience is a tremendous gift from God—one we must be careful not to ruin. Today, R.C. Sproul shows the importance of shaping our consciences according to the truth of God, not the ways of the world.

The single greatest restraint for evil that God has put in this world is conscience. The most wicked person, even people who are described as being without conscience, as being sociopaths or psychopaths, nevertheless have not been able to annihilate all together that voice of right and wrong that God has implanted in every human creature.

Remember that the law of God is not known merely from the 10 Commandments or from the pages of sacred Scripture. As the apostle Paul labors, “Death reigned from Adam to Moses.” That's because sin reigned from Adam to Moses, and Paul argues that where there’s no law, there can be no sin. No sin, no death. And so the point that the Apostle makes is that from day one, before the 10 commandments were ever delivered, God planted His law internally in the conscience of every human being.

Now, this is dangerous. We have to be careful that we don’t become seduced by Walt Disney and begin to think like Jimminy Cricket, that we should let our consciences be our guide. Because if we follow our consciences at every point, beloved, they will guide us into disaster. Why? Because even though God plants conscience in the mind of every creature, through our repeated transgressions, through our ongoing sin, we have the ability to put calluses on our conscience and we learn how to silence the voice of conscience and almost completely eradicate it.

That is, our consciences can be distorted. They can be twisted. If you let your conscience alone be your guide, you will probably live a life of unrestrained wickedness. But as far as you go in your wickedness and as much as you seek to quiet and stifle your conscience, you won’t be able to destroy it. The people that you know in this world who are hostile to the things of God, who have no qualms about the godless behavior in which they are involved every day, nevertheless do not always sleep easily at night when they put their head on the pillow. They know. 

And they know that they know that how they are living is not good.