To Encourage You

Philippians 3:19 “they glory in their shame”

One of the greatest gifts that God has given us is our conscience.  As pain is God’s gift to warn us of physical injury, the conscience is God’s gift to warn us of spiritual harm.  In 1 Timothy 1:18-19 Paul encourages his protégé Timothy to “wage the good warfare, holding faith and a good conscience. By rejecting this, some have made shipwreck of their faith.” By this he meant a conscience that works, that is sensitive to the voice of the Holy Spirit.  It is as we expose ourselves to the voice of the Spirit by way of the Word of God that our conscience becomes rightly informed, and so it responds correctly when we offend it by sin.  It is only as the conscience is convicted of sin that we have hope of turning from that sin in repentance and turning to the God who can forgive that sin and bless us with eternal life. 

But as Paul told Timothy, there is a great warfare going on to prevent this. The devil certainly has a role in this, but we can also fight against our own self.  So how does this happen? What are the devil’s and our own flesh’s destructive schemes? Well one such scheme is to sear our conscience by repeated exposure to sin (1 Timothy 4:2).  Sin affects us. It scars our soul. And just as a physical scar can deaden our nerves at the point of that scar, so the scars of a conscience that is repeatedly seared can have a deadening effect upon it.  In fact, it can become so damaged that rather than be ashamed of our sin, we can become like those spoken of in the verse above from Philippians 3 who take glory in it.  We can fly a flag to tell the world that we are involved in shameful sins. We can shout from the rooftops and march in the streets to tell everyone how proud we are of it.  But it’s all a deadly warfare against the conscience, a warfare that can destroy us in the end. 

And then there’s another approach to deal with a tweaked conscience – to blame others for our sin. It’s been happening since the beginning, when Adam blamed Eve for his disobedience to God, and Eve, in turn, blamed the serpent.  Of course, the serpent had a hand in it as he tempted Eve to disobey God, but in the end, it was Adam and Eve who were responsible, for rather than resist the devil, they gave in to him. 

And another self-destructive tendency regarding the conscience – that is to deny that the conscience is a good thing. It’s the strategy many psychologists use to deal with guilt-ridden clients.  They tell them that guilt is a bad thing.  They encourage them to ignore it, or to soothe and divert their minds from it with one strategy or another.  And while an overactive conscience can be problematic for some, to ignore it and play psychological games to deny it are far more destructive to our souls. 

So, what’s the remedy?   What’s the proper response to our sin and the pain within our conscience because of it?  First, we should acknowledge that a conscience that works is a good thing. It’s a gift of God to warn us to turn away from something that can bring great spiritual harm into our lives. But then, in response to it, we shouldn’t ignore it, blame someone else for it, or worst of all, take pride in our sin. Rather, we should confess and forsake our sin. Wonderfully, God has given us a great promise, that “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). 

You see, the Lord’s awesome desire for us is that we expose ourselves to the mirror of His Word, which, in turn, will expose our sin.  But as we confess it and turn to Him, we are “being transformed into (His very) image (and go) from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). The very glory of God: that’s what God would have for us – in wonderful contrast to the foolishness that would find glory in our shame.