Tuesday: A Clear Conscience
There are many precious things that we can possess. Health, love, friends, a great family – these all are blessings. But perhaps one of the most important of all is a clear conscience.
Image © Review and Herald Publishing Assn. Goodsalt.com
Read Hebrews 10:19-22 and 1 Timothy 4:1-2. What does it mean to have an “evil conscience” and a “conscience seared with a hot iron”?
Our conscience functions as an internal monitor of our outward lives. A conscience needs to attach itself to a high and perfect standard: God’s law. God wrote His law on the heart of Adam, but sin almost obliterated it – not just in him but in his descendants. Only fragments of the law remained. “[Gentiles] show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness” (Rom. 2:15, NIV). Jesus succeeds where Adam failed because God’s law was “within [His] heart” (Ps. 40:8, NKJV).
What does Paul say is our only solution to a bad conscience? See Heb. 9:14.
“The cobwebbed closet of conscience is to be entered. The windows of the soul are to be closed earthward and thrown wide open heavenward that the bright beams of the Sun of righteousness may have free access. . . . The mind is to be kept clear and pure that it may distinguish between good and evil.” – Ellen G. White, Mind, Character, and Personality, vol. 1, pp. 327, 328. When God’s law has been inscribed on the heart of the believer (Heb. 8:10), and the believer by faith seeks to follow that law, a clear conscience is the likely result.
| If you have ever struggled under the strain of a guilty conscience, you know how terrible it can be, how it can be a continuous presence, never giving you relief. How can focusing on Jesus, and His death on the cross for you and your sin, help free you from the curse of a guilty conscience? |
Yes, I need a free conscience! We all need it! By allowing our mind to be open to goodness! Continuous self-awareness comes with practice! But only God can clean what is dirty… Because it is impossible for us humans not to have defects! Only through Christ’s true love our mind and heart can become a shiny clear cristal!
WOW….
Psalm 12
12 Lord! Help! Godly men are fast disappearing. Where in all the world can dependable men be found? 2 Everyone deceives and flatters and lies. There is no sincerity left.
3-4 But the Lord will not deal gently with people who act like that; he will destroy those proud liars who say, “We will lie to our heart’s content. Our lips are our own; who can stop us?”
Words may bless or hurt. Something for us to keep in mind.
I think that true Adventists need to have a clear conscience. But we need to ask God with all our hearts and he will surely give it. I remembered this memory verse and it is one of my favourite Psalms 51:10 “Create in me a clean heart, O God” is something we have to ask every time. Our conscience will be clear if we do have a clean heart.
The conflicts start in our heart, the yes and no thing. Should I do it or stop it. Then ask yourself is God going to be praised or disgraced? If you win that battle by realizing one of these and its outcome you are blessed and you will have a clear conscious. Clear conscious is more than money and what one possesses
The same way that King David’s conscience was kept free from a guilty conscience: psalm 40:11, and 12, says it all as to how his conscience was kept free from guilt because of the previous five messianic verses there, 6-10, all that Jesus did and would do in taking humanity and becoming the ultimate sacrifice for sin for all.
A Clear Conscience is only achieved by one means. Romans 5:1,2,-Faith in our Redeemer God, Romans 5:21. Because we struggle continually, we lose the battle occasionally, but with the help of our Savior Jesus, we do not lose the war.