Jiminy Cricket

"Let your conscience be your guide"

I read a thought provoking sermon this morning from 1994. God works like that; He places words and people in front of us to confirm what we're thinking, to answer our questions, or to invoke change in our lives. He knows our needs.  
In a nutshell, the sermon is about how awry we can go if we allow our "conscience to be our guide". After all, our conscience is dictated by our environment and circumstance so it's a poor indicator or compass of morality, virtue, and integrity. For those of you who remember Jiminy Cricket....well, looks like he led us astray. Consider these points from the sermon that really spoke to me...

I might remind you that there are things we invite into our own homes on television that fifty years ago you would have had to go to a porno house to see. But the conscience of the American mind has adjusted to that in just a very short period of time.

The concept that conscience is something God builds right into us does not have any support that I can find in the Bible, but yet we do have a conscience. That conscience came from somewhere, and that somewhere seems to be from the education we have had from the time we were born, that it came from the absorption of the culture within which we are conducting our lives.

We have people on earth who feel it is their duty to kill people of other religions because their god requires that of them, and they think they are earning themselves rewards. I am thinking of those who are a part of the Islamic faith, and putting together others who are not Islamic. The mind—the conscience—under the influence of human nature is very adaptable, so we have to be careful of it.

and the most important thing I took away from this was...

"I will tell you what that progression backwards is. If we first go against our conscience we will regard with horror what we considered to be sin, and we will abhor ourselves. We will want to crawl into a shell, one might say. But if we allow ourselves to do it again, the horror will begin to change to something that approaches to merely having regret, or to just being a little bit sorry. When we are in that stage we may even be still trying to hide it. What will happen is that we will gradually begin to rationalize why we allowed ourselves to do it until finally we are justifying. The next stage is that we will begin to accept ourselves with very little remorse. And then finally we will get to the place where we do not even care, and we are totally its slave."

Many Christians, I believe, get confused between their conscience and the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Two different things....one has a 50/50 shot of leading you down the right path and the other is never wrong. Ever. 

So our challenge today might be to ask God to show us truth. Ask Him to make sure there aren't things in your life that you have a clear conscience about that are actually masked sin.

What do you think? Did this speak to you?  Read the entire sermon HERE.

Be blessed!

Amy