Totally convinced

“What you see going on in Egypt right now is just a total purging of the country of Christians,” said Jordan last night in his study on the conscience. “Whether they’re real Christians or just professing Christians, anything that names the name of Christ is just being destroyed by the Muslims.

“You know you and I have brothers and sisters through the years who’ve really suffered like that? That’s hardly been a time on the planet in any one’s lifetime where people weren’t literally going to the stake, as it were.

“I’ve read recently in the ‘Voice of the Martyrs’ about a young family in Bangladesh where the Muslims came into their little town and then required the dad to recant the name of Christ. He wouldn’t, they beat him real bad and then they turned on his wife. Then they turned on his little girl and, standing in front of her dad, who was all beaten to a pulp (he could only see out of one eye), they cut off the left arm of his little girl because he wouldn’t renounce Christ. Then they cut off the girl’s right leg and let her bleed to death in front of him all because . . . now I don’t know about you, if I’d have been going through that, I probably would have come to the place where I said, ‘Okay, give up, I’ll sign wherever you want me to sign.’

“Religious people do those kinds of things to people with a good conscience. They can be thoroughly, totally convinced you’re of the devil. Paul did it to the Pentecostal saints. Going by your conscience isn’t enough—it’s what controls your conscience.

“Martin Luther, when he stood before the trial at the Diet of Worms, he gave his defense of justification by faith, and he said, ‘Here I stand. I can do no other. I’m bound by my conscience. My conscience is bound by the Word of God.’

“When Paul talks about a ‘good conscience,’ he’s really talking about a conscience that’s working properly. It’s doing its job. He’s not saying the information in it was good because obviously when Paul says, ‘I did everything with a good conscience avoid of offense toward God,’ he obviously realized later on that he was wrong!

“A good conscience is talking about a conscience that is functioning properly. Acts 24:16 says, ‘And herein do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void of offence toward God, and toward men.’

“You see that issue of ‘exercising myself’? A good conscience requires effort in a disciplined fashion over a period of time to apply the truth of God’s work to the details of your life. Your conscience evaluates what you do!

“I love that verse in II Corinthians 4, Paul says, ‘But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God.’

“You’re looking at someone’s heart. To put the truth in their heart and then let their conscience, which is a function of their heart, accuse or excuse on the basis of the sound doctrine.

“I Timothy 4:15 is a verse talking about activating your conscience: ‘Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them; that thy profiting may appear to all.’ You want the profit of your edification to APPEAR. Meditate! Have a pure heart!

“Your conscience is where you take the doctrine you’ve stored up in you and it’s how your soul says, ‘Working there but not working here.’ You take the instructions. You evaluate the things that go on in your life based upon what’s in your heart.

“And then he says ‘faith unfeigned.’ That means it’s authentic; it’s not feigned; not false. It’s not pretend faith; it’s real stuff. It’s faith that works by love. It’s saying, ‘I’m just going to trust what God says no matter what.’ ”

*****

No other Bible writer discusses a person’s conscience more than Paul. He says in Romans 2:14-15: “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves:
[15] Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)”

“Your conscience (which means ‘with knowledge) is your inner evaluator; it’s a function of your soul, says Jordan. “You conscience either accuses when you do something wrong or it approves something you’ve done right. It’s that self-justification function of your soul that will either accuse your or excuse in regards to your conduct matching the system of norms and standards adopted into your inner man.

“The conscience works on the inside as part of your soul. It’s universal; everybody has one. It’s proactive; you don’t have to ask it to function. It’s mainly retrospective; it’s usually looking back at, ‘That’s what you did.’

“It encourages you to move to that which is right and away from what’s wrong. It convicts you of the wrong; it encourages you to the right. So that functioning in your inner man is important but the difficulty with your conscience is it can be manipulated. Paul talks about a ‘defiled conscience.’ That is, you have a system of norms and standards but it’s bad information.

“Paul talks about a weak conscience. A conscience’s that is weak means it doesn’t have much information to go on. It needs to be fortified. Not only can it be misinformed, defiled, weak and evil (Paul refers to ‘an evil conscience’) but it can also be muted because it can be seared. It can be so consistently violated, where the wrong is affirmed as the right, that it does what Ephesians 4 talks about: ‘Who being past feeling have given themselves over to lasciviousness to work all uncleanness with greediness.’

“Now how that happens is what Paul calls ‘the fiery darts of the adversary.’ You have the ‘shield of faith’ to quench the fiery darts, but when you get burned it leaves scar tissue. Scar tissue has no feeing; you’re ‘past feeling,’ as Paul says.

“Acts 23-24. Paul defines a good conscience as a conscience that is void of offense toward God or men: ‘I’m living consistent with what I understand God wants me to do.’

“The problem with that is look at Acts 26:9: ‘I verily thought with myself, that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth.’ That’s what religion will do; it will blind you that much."