1 Timothy 1:18-19 Faith for a Pure Conscience

A parent takes their sweet child, the child God gave them to love and care for and begins verbally and physically abusing them as an outlet for their rage and anger.

We see sins all the time. Serious sins. Crazy sins. Almost unimaginable sins.

Sins that make us wonder, How could someone do that? How does someone get to a place where they think that's ok?

The answer is they've stopped listening to their conscience. They’ve silenced that inner voice and started ignoring their feelings of guilt and shame that they once had over their sin, and they kept going anyway.

Sins that started out small and unnoticeable, became bigger than life and completely consumed them.

Examples like these show us why it is so important for all of us to listen to our own conscience because those unimaginable sins could be any one of us.

Sure you might think, “Well that could never be me. I could never do something like that!”

But are we really any different than them? Are we really that much less of a sinner than they are?

All of us have ignored our conscience at one point or another. Whose to say we couldn’t do it again?

Silencing or ignoring our conscience is dangerous. It can absolutely wreck your life with sins you would've never imagined committing.

No one falls into sin. They slide there. They make compromise after compromise ignoring their conscience all along the way.

This is why we need to make every effort to live our lives with a pure conscience.

Because..

A pure conscience is essential for a godly life.

1 Timothy 1:18-19 This charge I entrust to you, Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies previously made about you, that by them you may wage the good warfare, 19 holding faith and a good conscience.

In this passage Paul is speaking to his disciple Timothy. Timothy is a pastor that Paul has trained and left in Ephesus to build up the church while Paul went on to Macedonia.

And Paul loved Timothy so much that he called him his child in the faith.

And because Paul loved him he wanted Timothy to wage the good warfare. To fight the good fight of the faith. He wanted him to live a godly life, defend God’s Word and build up the church.

Then, in verse 19, Paul tells Timothy how to wage the good warfare. He says by holding faith and a good conscience.

By faith, what Paul means is the faith handed down by the apostles. Paul just summarized it right before this in verses 15-17.

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. 16 But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. 17 To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

The faith is that Jesus Christ died to save sinners and he rose again to reign as King of kings and Lord of lords.

So if Timothy is going to wage the good warfare, he needs to hold fast to the confession of our faith. He needs to hold fast to the gospel.

But he doesn’t just need to hold the confession of our faith. Timothy also needs to hold the life of our faith. He needs to hold a good conscience.

In other words, Timothy must hold the standard of our faith and also live a life of godliness that meets that standard.

And the only way to do that is by holding a good conscience. A clean conscience. A pure conscience. One that isn’t racked with guilt and hypocrisy, but is living in line with God’s Word.

If we want to live a godly life, wage the good warfare and hold fast to our faith, then we need to live with a pure conscience because look what Paul says the danger is if we don’t.

Verse 19 By rejecting this, some have made shipwreck of their faith, 20 among whom are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.

I want you to notice something that is essential for what we are going to be talking about today. Notice Paul says By rejecting this. Its singular. Not plural.

He doesn’t say by rejecting these. He says by rejecting this.

So what specifically are they rejecting? A good conscience that comes from holding fast to the faith.

Read it like this: By rejecting this, by rejecting a good conscience, Hymenaeus and Alexander have made a shipwreck of their faith.

Their faith had become such a mess, that Paul actually put them out of the church. That’s what he means by saying he handed them over to Satan.

It’s the same language from 1 Corinthians where Paul is talking about Church Discipline.

So Hymenaeus and Alexander had made such a shipwreck of their faith that Paul could no longer say they were actually Christians.

They had blasphemed, slandered, reviled, defamed, God’s Name through their unholy life.

And don’t miss the connection here. Paul is saying that an ungodly life is blasphemy.

When professing believers walk in disobedience, when they persistently live an unholy life, they are actually committing blasphemy against God.

Even though the confession of their faith says God is holy, and Jesus has the power to save sinners, their way of life betrays them. Their unholy life runs counter to that confession.

Disobedience and ungodliness says with our lives, God is not holy and God does not have the power to save. An unholy life is blasphemy.

So when a professing Christian rejects their conscience, silences their conscience, ignores their conscience and lives in continual, unrepentant sin, they make a shipwreck of their faith and there’s no reason to believe they were ever actually saved in the first place.

This is why it is important for Christians to hold a good conscience. Because holding a good conscience is the evidence that we are holding the true faith.

But Rejecting the conscience is dangerous. Paul calls it a shipwreck. Its complete destruction. Complete devastation.

Literally in Greek the word translated reject gives the picture of a violent and deliberate pushing away. It is a resolute and hardened rejection.

So when we reject our conscience its like we are violently tossing it aside saying I will not listen do you.

And here’s the idea. If you ignore your conscience, if you reject it over and over and over again, you will make a shipwreck of your faith.

You need to hold onto a good conscience.

And If the stakes are really this high, then we need to know how to do that.

How to not reject, suppress, or push away our conscience so that we might live a godly life and hold on to the faith.

But in order to we can answer that, we need to first answer...

I. What Is Your Conscience?

Most people think of their conscience as that small inner voice that tells you when you are about to do something wrong or makes you feel guilt and shame when you have done something wrong.

And that’s accurate enough, but when you actually look at God’s Word, our conscience is really so much more than just a small inner voice.

Our conscience is actually a gift from God that functions in our soul, the truest part of who we are, as a warning system for whether we are living in line with God’s Word or not.

And this conscience is part of the imago dei. Its part of the image of God. When God created mankind he said he made us in his image.

And part of that image is God’s moral character. So when God created mankind, he created us with the ability to know what is right and what is wrong. What is good and what is evil.

And the conscience is what God gave us to guides us in living a good life and avoid living an evil one.

Look at Romans 2:12-13.

Romans 2:12-13 For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. 13 For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.

What Paul is saying here is that every single person on earth is accountable before God to live a perfectly righteous life.

Jews who have and know God’s law will be judged by God’s law, and Gentile unbelievers who don’t have God’s law are still accountable to it because Paul says they will perish for their sin.

The general revelation God has given through nature is enough to tell people, even unbelievers, that they are accountable before a holy and righteous God.

Romans 1:18-20 says

Romans 1:18-20 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

All people, both Jew and Gentile, those who have God’s law and those who only have the general revelation of our conscience are accountable before God to worship him in righteousness and not live a life of sin.

That’s why, going back to Romans 2 it says those who sin without the law, that is the Gentiles, will still perish without the law. They will still suffer God’s wrath for all eternity in hell.

And those who sin under the law, that is Jews, will be judged by the law and suffer the justice of God as well.

Man has no excuse. Everyone that sins will suffer God’s wrath. That’s why Paul says For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified, justified meaning declared righteous and saved from God’s judgment.

Now Paul is not teaching here, a works based salvation. In a few chapters he makes it clear we are justified by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.

What Paul is doing is teaching that God’s law is the objective moral standard every single person that has ever lived will be held accountable to.

And God’s moral standard is perfect righteousness. Perfect obedience. James says if you have broken the law, even at one point, you have become guilty of all of it.

If you have ever sinned, even if it was just one time, you deserve to suffer God’s eternal wrath.

This is why the gospel is so amazing. All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

If God demands perfect righteousness we have no hope and we are condemned in our sin. Game over for all of us.

But God sent Jesus Christ. God sent the Son of God to live a sinless life. Where we disobeyed he perfectly obeyed in our place even to the point of death on a cross.

In his crucifixion Jesus took on himself the wrath God had against us for breaking his law so that through faith in his sacrificial death and bodily resurrection Christ becomes our substitute.

He gets our death and we get his life. Our life of sin is credited to him and he dies in our place and his life of perfect obedience is credited to us so that we are justified, declared righteous, and freed from the wrath of God to have eternal life.

All of us need a savior.

And all of us know we need a savior. All of us know we are guilty before a holy and righteous God because our conscience bears witness that we have broken his law.

Even unbelievers, even atheists that do not believe God even exists know they need a savior because why else would their conscience condemn them? Why else would they feel any guilt over anything they they’ve ever done?

Who’s judging them?

Paul tells us.

Romans 2:14-15 For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.

Notice Paul says by nature they do what the law requires. That is the imago dei. That is the image of God in us.

And while the image of God in us has been corrupted because of sin, by nature we still imperfectly know what is good and what is evil.

Everyone thinks murder is wrong. Rape is wrong. Stealing is wrong. Lying is wrong. You don’t need God’s law to tell you those things, why because God made you in his image.

So in this passage, you have God’s Law which is the objective moral standard for all mankind. And you also have the image of God that intuitively understands that standard.

This is where the conscience comes in. Paul says when men understand generally what is good and what is evil, they prove that God has created them in his image and they are accountable to him.

And so the conscience bears witness that we are accountable to the law of God that is written on our hearts.

In this way, the conscience acts as a guide.

It bears witness to us, to our inner most self, what is good and what is evil. What is in accordance with the image of God and what is not. And it urges us to choose the good.

Our conscience acts like a fire alarm. It warns us when there’s smoke so we don’t get burned by the fire of sin.

When temptation comes, the conscience bears witness and sounds the alarm saying don’t go there. Don’t follow that path. There’s only death down there.

So you need to understand the conscience is not God. Your conscience is not God speaking directly to you. Your conscience is a part of you, that bears witness to what God has already said in his law.

But sadly, Romans 1 says we suppress the truth. We ignore our conscience, and when we ignore our conscience that’s when we sin.

And that’s where we see the second function of our conscience. Our conscience doesn’t only act as a guide, it also acts as a judge.

Paul wrote and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.

That means your conscience stands as judge over you to accuse you when you’ve done something wrong or to excuse you when you haven’t sinned.

That’s why we say I have a clear conscience. I didn’t do anything wrong.

So the conscience, when working properly, makes us feel shame, guilt, fear, anxiety, and sometimes even depression to let us know we sinned against a holy God and we need to repent.

So what is your conscience?

Your conscience is an amazing gift from God that drives you to Christ.

For the lost, for the person that hasn’t put their faith in Christ, your conscience, your guilt, is God’s grace to you showing you your need for Jesus.

Nothing else can wash you clean and make you right with God. When Jesus returns he will judge every person that has ever lived.

Your guilt, shame, unholiness that you feel is your conscience is warning you that you will stand before God condemned in your sin.

But the good news of the gospel is you don’t have to. Come to Christ.

Place your faith in him. Commit your life to follow him and Jesus will tell you the same thing that he has told millions of Christians. Your sins are forgiven.

There is no guilt that Christ can’t or won’t forgive because Jesus lived a sinless life and he died in your place.

Hebrews 9:14 How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

That word purify means to make clean or cleanse completely. Do you want a clean conscience?Do you want to stand before God without fear of any judgement? Come to Christ!

God promises to forgive you and cover all of your sin. To never count any sin against you for all eternity because he counted that sin against Christ instead.

And for the Christian, God takes our conscience that has been broken and marred by our sin, and He renews our conscience.

Even though we had suppressed the truth like the rest of mankind, God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, makes it sensitive again.

No longer has God given us up to the debasement of our minds and the futility of our thinking letting us chase after our sins.

Now the Holy Spirit lives in us to press the Word of God, Jesus Christ, on our hearts so that we want to live an obedient life.

That is sanctification. Its the Holy Spirit sanctifying your conscience and empowering you to live according to it.

God uses your conscience to reveal sin in your life and convict you so that instead of having life and joy robbed from you through disobedience, you can put your sin to death by the power of the Spirit.

What an incredible gift! What amazing grace!

And if our conscience is such a gift, that means we need to listen to it. And that leads us to our second question...

II. Why is it Important to Listen to Your Conscience?

We started this sermon by looking at 1 Timothy 1 that said by rejecting this, by rejecting holding on to a good conscience, Hymenaeus and Alexander made a shipwreck of their faith.

By ignoring the warnings of their conscience and living unholy lives, they blasphemed God so much that it was actually impossible for anyone to say they were saved.

Ignoring your conscience will make a shipwreck of your faith.

Later on in 1 Timothy 4:1-2 Paul said...

1 Timothy 4:1-2 Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, 2 through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared.

Other translations like the NASB add the words seared as with a branding iron or as with a hot iron to give the full picture of what Paul is saying.

Basically, through sin, our consciences can become seared or burned.

Sin is like a hot iron that is pressed against our conscience burning it; leaving scar tissue in its place.

And every time we sin against our conscience, its like pressing that hot iron against it again and again and again.

We burn it over and and over until eventually, our conscience is nothing more than a thick scar that is totally insensitive to the sin that once caused it great pain and guilt.

A seared conscience is one that is inactive, silent, numb to our sin.

And a seared conscience leads to a shipwrecked faith.

It doesn’t happen all at once, but it happens over a long period of time.

Its the result of repeatedly compromising and giving into sin. The result of repeatedly ignoring your conscience, and rejecting it until you can no longer hear it at all.

Think of your conscience like this.

In your physical body, God has given you the ability to feel pain. Pain is a gift.

When you were a child and you reached out and touched the stove while mom and dad were cooking, what happened?

You got burned! And it hurt. You probably jerked your hand back and started crying out in pain begging for someone to make it better.

That’s your conscience functioning properly.

When you sin, a functioning conscience will make you feel pain. It will make you feel shame, regret, guilt, fear, anxiety, disgrace, or even depression.

Those feelings are a gift. Those feelings are God using your conscience to guard you from going further into a life of sin and disobedience. From a life robbed from the joy of walking with God.

Now those feelings are different than condemnation. God wants you to feel guilty for sin, so that you would turn from your sin and back to him.

But for the Christian, God does not want you to feel condemned. He does not want you to buy into Satan’s lies that God hates you or doesn’t love you.

Romans 8:1 There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus .

But guilt and shame, when they come from sin, are not meant to condemn you, they are meant to guard you and drive you to Christ for forgiveness.

That is the conscience working properly. That is the conscience sensitive to the hot iron of sin.

But have you ever been friends with a professional chef or watched someone who spends all their time in the kitchen cook?

What do they? They are constantly touching the food as its cooking. Using their fingers to help flip things over or test to see if something’s done.

Well how are they able to do that? I mean the food is piping hot! Its because the nerves in their fingers have been seared.

They have been burned so many times that they are numb and dead. They no longer feel pain from the heat that once made them jerk back their hand.

That is the seared conscience. It is one totally insensitive to the hot iron of sin because its been burned one too many times.

So here’s what happens. The more frequently someone sins against their conscience, the more insensitive they become to that sin until they can eventually do that sin without even wincing.

They feel no pain, no regret, no guilt.

And here’s why that’s so dangerous. If you’re able to silence your conscience in on area of your life, are you not just training yourself to silence it in another area of your life.

To say it another, the more you get used to sinning against your conscience in one area of your life, the easier it will be to sin in other areas of your life.

This is why I say no one falls into sin, they slide there. Let me give you an example.

A man does not just start cheating on his wife. It starts with lustful thoughts and fantasies. Sure they wound his conscience at first, but he’s not hurting anyone so the guilt eventually stops.

Then it moves to filling his mind with sexual images and pornography. He knows its wrong, but it still isn’t hurting anyone so he says quiet to his conscience and keeps going.

By this time his heart is so accustomed to fantasizing about other women that its nothing to exchange a little flirty banter with his attractive coworker.

Sure, the shame keeps him up at night at first and there’s fear that his wife will find some of their suggestive text messages, but nothing’s happened, what’s the big deal? It’s just a little fun.

Until eventually, his conscience is so seared towards his sin that before he knows it he’s in bed with another woman making a shipwreck of his faith.

That’s how sin works. Sin is not content to stay where it is. It is always wanting to corrupt you to the uttermost, and the only way it can get there is if you sear your conscience to its corruption.

This is why every sin in your life is a matter of life-and-death. Take any sin, no matter how small and take it all the way out to its logical end.

That’s where your sin wants to take you, and it will surely get you there, if you reject your conscience.

So here’s the big idea. Its important to listen to your conscience because every sin wounding your conscience ignores another step on the path to a shipwrecked faith.

The idea being listen to your conscience no matter how small of a whisper it might use, and don’t even start on the path of disobedience.

If you never burn your conscience, you’ll never have to worry about a seared conscience that is insensitive to the sin that will wreck your faith.

In other words, you need to make every effort to fight temptation and sin by the power of the Holy Spirit so that you can live with a pure conscience.

And that’s our third question...

III. How Do You Live with a Pure Conscience?

So If we don’t want to risk searing our conscience and becoming hard hearted towards sin in our life that will make us ineffective for glorifying God and furthering the great commission, then we need to make every effort to live all of our lives with a pure conscience.

With a conscience that is sensitive to sin and free from guilt.

Well how do we do that. I think there are three things.

1. You Must Train Your Conscience

Before the Fall, our conscience was a perfect instrument. It could be absolutely trusted to be a perfect indicator of God’s will and God’s law.

But because of sin, our consciences have been corrupted.

Romans 1 says that in our sin we became futile in our thinking and our foolish hearts were darkened.

God gave us over to the debasement of our minds to do what ought not to be done.

What all that means is that sin made our consciences get all out of wack.

Sometimes it doesn’t warn us when we are about to do something wrong, and sometimes it condemns us when we haven’t sin at all.

Our conscience isn’t perfect. But by God’s grace, it is being renewed. The Holy Spirit is sanctifying us.

He is remaking us into the image of Christ, the perfect image of God, by super charging our conscience through God’s Word to convict us of sin.

This is why ignoring your conscience grieves the Holy Spirit.

And this is why a mature Christian is someone whose conscience is accurately calibrated to God’s Word.

Going back to the idea of the smoke alarm, some people’s consciences will go off for burnt toast. They are overly sensitive.

They can make Christians feel like they’re sinning when God’s Word doesn’t say its a sin.

This is why some Christians don’t watch R rated movies or drink alcohol. Doing so would wound their conscience.

They believe that doing so would be a sin.

Other people’s consciences can be in a raging fire and not even make a beep. These are people who have a hard heart and seared conscience where they can sin without even wincing.

The answer for both is conforming our conscience to God’s Word.

In Romans 14 Paul mentions some issues of conscience that were causing conflict in the church.

Romans 14:2; 5; 15:1 One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables...One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike...We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves.

Here’s basically what was happening. Some Christians felt free eat meat offered to idols, while others thought it was a sin.

Some Christians kept the Sabbath, others treated every day the same.

And Paul puts these two groups of people into two categories. The strong in faith and the weak in faith.

The Strong in faith have more Christian freedom. Their conscience doesn’t go off for burnt toast.

While the weak in faith have such a sensitive conscience that they see some things as sinful when God hasn’t said they are so.

Now Paul doesn’t mean strong and weak as in better and lesser. He meant strong and weak as in theologically informed and theologically uninformed.

The strong conscience is one that more closely aligns with God’s Word, and knows more accurately what exactly is sin. For example they can drink alcohol or get a tattoo.

Now this is different than a seared conscience because a seared conscience is someone who has no regard for sin.

A strong conscience still cares about sin, they just knows what’ is sin and isn’t.

The weak conscience, on the other hand, is theologically uninformed and therefore overly sensitive. It sees more things as sin, while not being heretical.

Think of Christians who can’t drink alcohol or believe it is sinful to read Harry Potter.

Notice Paul doesn’t tell the weak in conscience that they have to become strong. Its not a sin to have a weak conscience.

In fact it is better to have an overly sensitive conscience than a dead one.

This is why the strong have an obligation to bear with the weak.

Those of us that are mature and have a theologically informed conscience renewed by the Spirit and God’s Word, should never put a stumbling block in front of another Christian and encourage them to sin against their conscience even if that activity is not itself a sin.

Why? Because in doing so, we are encouraging the weaker brother or sister to ignore their conscience. We are teaching them to do the very thing that will shipwreck their faith.

That’s why Paul says Romans 14:23 But whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats, because the eating is not from faith. For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.

Likewise, the weak in faith should not pass judgment on the strong. If God’s Word doesn’t say it's a sin, then it might be sinful for you, but that doesn’t make it sinful for everyone.

Both the strong conscience and the weak conscience need to look at each other and say I know they are doing their best to honor God. That’s why Paul says in verse 17-18,

Romans 14:17-18 For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. 18 Whoever thus serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men.

But here’s the thing. By using language like strong and weak Paul is urging us all to have a theologically informed conscience. One that is conformed to God’s Word.

Its the same thing he said in Romans 12:2.

Romans 12:2 Be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

So we need to train our conscience by renewing our mind through God’s Word so that we can discern what is God’s will.

So that our consciences are fully informed on what is good and acceptable and perfect. On what actions glorify God and what actions sin against him.

And this is a process. As we read God’s Word, study God’s Word, and know God’s Word, the Holy Spirit transforms our conscience day by day so that we can have a strong conscience that knows how to please the Lord.

So the first thing we want to do if we want to live with a pure conscience is train our conscience by conforming it to God’s Word.

2. You Must Follow Your Conscience

Acts 24:14-16 I worship the God of our fathers, believing everything laid down by the Law and written in the Prophets, 15 having a hope in God, which these men themselves accept, that there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust. 16 So I always take pains to have a clear conscience toward both God and man.

In this passage Paul is standing trial before the Governor, Felix because some Jews falsely accused him of starting riots in Roman cities and profaning the Jewish temple.

And so he says, I worship God. I worship God with all my life, and I know that God will resurrect the just and the unjust to face judgment.

All men will be help accountable to God.

So Paul says because I know that God will judge the living and the dead, I always take pains to have a clear conscience toward both God and man.

Taking pains is a word that means practice, commitment, making every effort.

So Paul says I make every effort to live with a clean conscience.

In other words, I try my best to follow my conscience and not give into sin.

Do you take pains to have a clear conscience in your life?

How loud does your conscience have to get before you’ll listen to it?

I think the idea here is what we touched on earlier. Taking pains to have a clear conscience means you need to make every effort to follow your conscience even when your conscience is just a whisper.

Your conscience was a gift to guide you in all of life. Why do you treat it like a last resort?

What would our holiness look like if we listened even to the slightest burn of our conscience? If at the moment we heard that voice say, “You don’t want to go here,” we turned and ran full speed the other direction?

What would you lose if you were that sensitive to your conscience? Even if it was a moment where you were having weak conscience, and what you were about to do was not even a sin, what would you be losing?

But on the other hand, what do you risk if you ignore that slightest burn? You might be burn your conscience as with a hot iron and lose some sensitivity to your sin.

You might be hardening yourself, paving the way to greater sin down the road.

Why not listen to your conscience, not matter how small, no matter how quiet?

Is it not better to listen than to reject our conscience and do something that does not proceed from faith?

Listen to your conscience. Every time. Failing to do so will harden your heart to your sin. Like Hebrews 3:12 said Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.

And Finally...

3. You Must Confess Defiling Your Conscience

1 John 1:9-10 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

Until heaven all of us will sin. All of us will ignore our conscience and suppress the truth and grieve the Holy Spirit.

The question is how will you respond when you do.

If we hide our sin, hang on to our sin, keep our sin, then we burn our conscience and risk searing it altogether not dealing with our sin like the sin that it is.

The temptation is to downplay your sin and do nothing about it not knowing your leaving yourself wide open to more and more temptation.

But if we confess our sins, what does God say? God is faithful and just to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

God can cleanse our conscience again and through confession make us sensitive to our sin again.

The word confess, in Scripture, means to say the same as God says.

So when we confess our sins, we are saying with God our sin is sin. It is evil, wicked vile and wretched. And our sin needs to be forgiven.

So confession, biblical confession, is really so much more than going to God and saying, “Aw shucks. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

Confession is actually saying with God our sin is evil. Our sin is wicked. Our sin is unholy and we are grieved that we sinned against our holy and loving God.

So when you confess your sins to God, its more than just admitting that you sinned. Its seeing your sin in view of God’s holiness and despising your sin for what it is.

This is why confessing your sin cleanses your conscience. It is transforming your mind and training your conscience to conform to God’s will.

Because where you once ignored your conscience to to given into some sin, by confessing it you come back to that sin and say, You know, what I did wasn wrong. I should’ve listened.

I convinced myself that my sin wasn’t all that bad, but now I’m agreeing with God that that sin should have no part in my life.

And the cycle starts again. Confessing your sin trains your conscience. And then you follow your conscience. And when you defile your conscience you confess again.

This is how you grow in sanctification. This is how you keep a pure conscience even when you still sin against the Lord.

Confession keeps you sensitive to sin, and God’s grace is the aloe on your soul that keeps you from being seared.

So if we want to live with a pure conscience, we need to train our conscience and conform it to God’s Word

We need to follow our conscience and not ignore even the slightest warning against sin

And we need to confess our sins so that we do not harden ourselves to the sin that so easily entangles us.

Conclusion

A pure conscience is essential for a godly life.

It is a gift of God that points us to our need for Christ to forgive all of our guilty sins, and then guide us in living a holy life.

It is the moral indicator that warns us when we are stepping outside of God’s will and disobeying him.

Failing to listen to it, can sear our conscience and make us hard hearted towards our sin.

Ignoring our conscience day by day, makes us less sensitive to our sin and risks making a shipwreck of our faith.

So follow your conscience! Why would you reject such a wonderful gift God has given you to help you live a holy life.

Let the Holy Spirit renew your conscience and conform it to God’s Word so that you can live a life that is pleasing to him.

And when you sin, renew your mind and confess your sins to Christ who is faithful and just to forgive your sins, and cleanse you from all unrighteousness.

Let’s Pray

Scripture Reading

Psalm 51:1-10

Have mercy on me, O God,

according to your steadfast love;

according to your abundant mercy

blot out my transgressions.

2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,

and cleanse me from my sin!

3 For I know my transgressions,

and my sin is ever before me.

4 Against you, you only, have I sinned

and done what is evil in your sight,

so that you may be justified in your words

and blameless in your judgment.

5 Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,

and in sin did my mother conceive me.

6 Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being,

and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart.

7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;

wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

8 Let me hear joy and gladness;

let the bones that you have broken rejoice.

9 Hide your face from my sins,

and blot out all my iniquities.

10 Create in me a clean heart, O God,

and renew a right spirit within me.

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