Our culture is not our conscience; just as our government is not our God.
Remember this OLD saying? “Let your conscience be your guide.”
Can you trust your conscience? Where does my conscience come from? What is the conscience for? Why do you secretly feel guilty when you do or say something? Our conscience is a guard for us.
Can you trust your heart? I hear people say, “Trust your heart. What is your heart saying?” God teaches us that “the heart is deceptively evil,” and that we don’t know just how evil our hearts are. So, I would assume then that the heart and the conscience are not the same.
When you came to believe in Jesus Christ, did you pray something like this? “Jesus, forgive me and come into my heart.” Why the heart? Because God says that we “sinners” need a “new” heart, and one like His Son’s.
I would say that the conscience has to do with the mind and knowing what God wants us to know for our good future with Him; while the heart has to do with our natural sin-nature, with our own worldly and fleshly desires – that wars against God’s Spirit that begins to live in us.
The soul has been referred to as the mind and heart, that of knowing and desiring, which are eternal like our spirit. Everything about us, except our physical body, will live forever but must be “born-again.”
What does the Bible say about our conscience?
A word that often replaces the word ‘conscience’ in the Bible is “integrity.” (Genesis 20:6) Our conscience testifies inwardly to us about our conduct. (2 Corinthians 1:12)
Our conscience convicts us of wrong-doing, or of disobeying God’s call on our life or any of His laws for all of life. (Hebrews 10:22)
1 Corinthians 10:23-33 teaches us that one person’s conscience can be free to do things that another person’s conscience doesn’t allow them that same freedom. Why? Well, for many reasons. Maybe for health issues. Or, because of your little children, or younger ones in the Lord, always watching what you do that they are not yet able to do with self-control, modesty and concern for others. But what the important thing is here, that although we have rights and freedoms from God, no one should seek their own good, but the good of others.
Your conscience does not find you guilty when doing or eating something that someone else’s conscience won’t allow them to do or eat. Why? It depends on what you know so far that God has told you, because our conscience comes from Him.
What is so very sad, and evil, is how the devil is able to convince people that good is evil and evil is good, so that they no longer feel the inner guilt of a sensitive conscience. Here is where we end up with a dead conscience or hardened one, useless. But, when we come to Jesus and ask Him to forgive us and live in us by His Holy Spirit and Word of Life – our conscience is restored, and our heart made new. (Hebrews 10:22)
Our conscience can be attacked by worldly teachings that oppose God’s truth and will for our lives. (Hebrews 13:7-8) If we ignore our good conscience over and over – even our faith in Jesus Christ will suffer harm, as Jesus taught in many of His parables. We are told to “hold on to faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and thereby shipwrecked their faith.” 1 Timothy 1:18-19
Why do people NOT feel guilty to, let’s say, kill people who believe differently, or to kill a baby in the womb, or to prevent someone from talking openly about Jesus Christ, or to take property or possessions that don’t belong to you, or to directly get in someone’s way to anger them, or to make up a lie about someone, or lie about something you did or didn’t do, or to expect payment for work you didn’t do, or to go after someone else’s spouse, or to have sexual relations with the same sex, or with a child or an animal? Why?
“Now the Holy Spirit expressly states that in later times some will abandon the faith to follow deceitful spirits and the teaching of demons, influenced by the hypocrisy of liars, whose consciences are seared as with a hot iron.” 1 Timothy 4:1-2
Feelings and gut-felt intuition are NOT to be followed. When we keep ignoring our good conscience – our conscience becomes dull and then all together dead and ineffective for what God gave it to us for. That is why people do the most detestable and grossest inhumane things to other people without feeling remorseful, even believing they are right in doing such things.
The ‘culture’ of a society can lose its good conscience as well when that society of people no longer have a God-fearing conscience. We see the result of a society’s seared conscience in the Bible’s records, one being why God flooded the earth keeping only Noah and his family alive to start over. We see this with God’s destruction of all the people in Sodom and Gomorrah except for Lot and his family who would not conform to homosexuality nor obey their demands. “The thoughts of men were evil all the time.”
God will forgive anyone, in Christ Jesus alone! God will return and restore to Himself what the devil stole and tried to use for destruction and self-glory. By God’s Spirit, God pours His love into the heart of the one who repents before the Savior Jesus Christ, who died in our place to remove our guilty stain of sin and rebellion to God.
The mighty love of God can transform our whole being and make us ready for eternity with Him! There is NO love like the love of God!