Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

(Read Acts 23:1-5)

There’s an old European proverb that says “There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience.”

So, how soft was your pillow last night?

Do you have a clear conscience?

Could you wake up this morning and look in the bathroom mirror and be at peace with the decisions that you made this past week?

As we observed last week, the conscience that God has placed in each one of us is able to either excuse our behavior or accuse us for our behavior—even though it comes from your own thoughts, your conscience acts like an independent third party, doesn’t it?

And here’s another thing about your conscience—it is your conscience.

It belongs to you personally, and your conscience can’t dictate someone else’s life (and their conscience can’t dictate your life, either!)

Think, for example, of the two men we talked about at the beginning of last week’s sermon, Alvin York and Desmond Doss.

Both men came to very different conclusions about the morality of taking human life in war, but both men followed their consciences.

So which one was right?

One valid way to answer that question is that both of them made the right decision because both of them followed their conscience.

Both of them did what they believed was right.

And I think that this serves as a good definition of the conscience—one that I aim to support and illustrate through the Scriptures as we move through this study.

We can define the conscience as

CONSCIENCE: Your PERSONAL CONSCIOUSNESS of what is RIGHT and WRONG

This definition is adapted from a very helpful book called Conscience: What it is, how to train it, and loving those who differ by Andrew Naselli and J. D. Crowley, and I commend it to you as we go through this study.

One of the things that we will see as we move through this series—and something that is illustrated by the difference between Sgt.

York and Cpl.

Doss is that an act of “good conscience” can differ between two people.

One man had a clear conscience in killing the enemy in war, and the other had a clear conscience in refusing to take a human life.

Now, we have said before (and we will see in future installments) that it is always wrong to violate your conscience—if your conscience tells you it is a sin to take human life in war (or go to a restaurant on Sunday or eat trans-fats or drive without a seatbelt), then you are sinning if you do those things—you are deliberately doing what you believe God forbids.

And that is sin (even, as we will see, if the action itself is not inherently sinful!)

Now, at this point you might be thinking, “Well, if conscience can make something a sin that isn’t really a sin, then what stops us from complete relativism in our morality?”

Or to put it another way, this sounds like the world’s version of “living according to ‘your truth’”—that you can have your sense of right and wrong, and I can have my sense of right and wrong, and you can’t tell me what is right for me and I can’t tell you what is right for you… We certainly don’t want any part of that kind of foolishness, do we?

So how do we keep from sliding down that slope into relativism?

Because there are people out there who have a “clear conscience” that frankly shouldn’t.

And there are people out there struggling with weak, wounded consciences over issues that they don’t need to struggle over.

Some people can commit the most heinous acts of blasphemy and hatred and cruelty and sleep like a baby on their downy soft pillow of a good conscience, and others who are tormented by an oversensitive conscience that rails against them and accuses them over things that are not sinful at all.

And so here is what I want to do this morning—I want us to look at the Scriptures and see how the conscience is described, with an aim to showing you that

The closer that you WALK with CHRIST, the CLEARER your conscience will be

In the passage that I just read a few moments ago, the Apostle Paul is standing trial before the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem—the high council of seventy ruling elders of the Jewish people.

(Paul used to be a member of the Sanhedrin before he came to saving faith in Jesus Christ).

In Acts 21, Paul had been at the center of an upheaval in Jerusalem over false charges that he had desecrated the Temple.

He was taken into custody by the Romans, who eventually set him before the Sanhedrin so they could examine him and explain “the real reason why he was being accused” (Acts 22:30).

So as Paul is standing there before the council that he used to belong to, his first words to them were, “Brothers, I have lived my life before God in all good conscience up to this day.”

In other words, Paul said, “My conscience is clear concerning everything I have ever done in my life up to now!”

And in verse 2 we see the response that his statement brought:

Acts 23:2 (ESV)

2 And the high priest Ananias commanded those who stood by him to strike him on the mouth.

Clearly Ananias believed that Paul should not have a clear conscience about his deeds!

And yet Paul said that he had—both in the past and in the present—a “good conscience before God”.

So the first thing I we can know is that it is possible to have a “clear conscience”—it is possible that

I.

The Conscience can be CLEAN

Paul says that his conscience did not condemn him for his past—that he had no trouble looking at himself in the mirror every morning.

As we read through the New Testament we see several places where we are told that it is possible to have a clean conscience

For GOOD reasons (1 Timothy 1:5)

Paul writes to his disciple Timothy that as he is planting churches in Macedonia that

1 Timothy 1:5 (ESV)

5 The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.

If you have a pure heart and a sincere faith, you will also have a good conscience.

A good conscience is a wonderful gift from God—the more that your heart and your faith are aligned with God’s character and His will, the clearer and cleaner your conscience will be.

We read something similar in Hebrews 13, where the author writes

Hebrews 13:18 (ESV)

18 Pray for us, for we are sure that we have a clear conscience, desiring to act honorably in all things.

Here again we see that the conscience drives us to “Act honorably”.

Honorable acts are a good reason to have a clear conscience.

In 1 Peter 3:16, Peter says that your good conscience enables you to act with integrity and honor when you are slandered and reviled for the sake of Christ:

1 Peter 3:16 (ESV)

16 having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.

Again—see here that a good conscience is only “good” as far as it reflects the goodness and character of God—sincere faith, acting honorably, good behavior in Christ.

Instead of a murky “your truth / my truth” kind of relativism, the Scriptures show that a “good conscience”, a “clear conscience” comes from a sincere faith and good behavior in the goodness and holiness that comes through faith in Jesus Christ.

The closer that you walk with Christ, the clearer your conscience will be.

Now, it is vitally important to note that there are a lot of people out there who have a “good conscience”—they can sleep like a baby at night and look themselves in the mirror without blinking—while being guilty of terrible acts of cruelty, deception, wickedness or even violence.

They have what they think is a good conscience, but they are far from walking with God

You can have a “clear conscience” for good reasons, and you can have a “clear conscience”

For BAD reasons (Acts 23:1)

And we don’t need to look any further than Paul’s own admission in Acts 23 for an example, do we?

Consider again—he told the Sanhedrin that he had lived his life before God “in all good conscience!”

If you know Paul’s “backstory”, then you know what kind of person he was, right?

Let me read you a few verses from Acts (and Paul’s own letters) that describe what kind of man he used to be:

Acts 8:3 (ESV)

3 But Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.

The word “ravaging” means “laying waste”—a “scorched earth” policy against believers, throwing them into hostage pits without mercy

Acts 9:1 (ESV)

1 But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest

Murderous threats against believers were Paul’s every breath—his every waking moment was filled with hatred and a desire to see them die.

Paul himself describes his life before he met Christ in Galatians 1, where he says

Galatians 1:13 (ESV)

13 For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it.

And in 1 Timothy 1 he writes

1 Timothy 1:13 (ESV)

13 ...formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent...

And all the while, Paul said, he did all of these things in good conscience!

He says in Philippians 3:6 that all of that hatred and murderous threats and violence and blasphemy was “zeal” for God!

Philippians 3:6 (ESV)

6 as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

Paul had a “good conscience”—but he shouldn’t have!

Here’s what we learn about the conscience from these things: A conscience that is not faithful to God cannot be trusted—at the time that Paul had done all these things he was rejecting Jesus Christ.

He rejected the truth that Jesus is the Son of God, and so his conscience told him that Jesus was a blasphemer—and the Law said that blasphemers (and those who follow them) should be executed:

Leviticus 24:16 (ESV)

16 Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death.

All the congregation shall stone him.

The sojourner as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death.

So if a good conscience is good to the extent that it loves and obeys God through faith in Christ, then a conscience that rejects Christ will necessarily not be a “good” conscience—no matter if it feels like it is “right”.

In fact, the Scriptures speak a great deal about ways that

II.

The Conscience can be WARPED