Martin Luther, when called to stand trial at the Diet of Worms 500 years ago, gave his defense of “justification by faith,” saying, “Here I stand. I can do no other. I’m bound by my conscience. My conscience is bound by the Word of God.”
The human conscience works upon the data it's fed through thoughts, beliefs, allegiances, etc.
“Through our attitudes and interpretations of situations, we ‘describe’ the problem to be worked upon,” explains a famous self-help doctor. “If we feed ourselves information that we ourselves are unworthy, inferior, undeserving and incapable, for example, this data is processed and acted upon as any other data in giving us the ‘answer’ in the form of objective experience . . . Our conscience makes use of stored information or ‘memory’ in responding to current situations.”
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“The conscience works on the inside as part of your soul," says Jordan. "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.
"The functioning in your inner man is of utmost importance but the difficulty with your conscience is it can be easily manipulated. Paul talks about a ‘defiled conscience.’ That is, you have a system of norms and standards but it runs on bad information.
“It encourages you to move to that which is right and away from what’s wrong. It convicts you of the wrong.
"The functioning in your inner man is of utmost importance but the difficulty with your conscience is it can be easily manipulated. Paul talks about a ‘defiled conscience.’ That is, you have a system of norms and standards but it runs on 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.’
"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.’
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“Proverbs 4:23 advises, ‘Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.’ All capacity for life—everything you have the capacity to do in your life—is initiated in your heart. That’s what God says. Jesus said in Mark 7:21 that ‘out of the heart proceed evil thoughts.’ It isn’t where you are, it’s who you are that’s the problem.
“Now, that’s a fundamental thing you have to understand about your nature. When you see the things you’ve produced in your life, understand where they came from. Your emotions are designed to be responders and respond to what your heart initiates.
“Basically, you have three aspects to you: the mentality of your soul, the physical actions you’re going to take, and the emotions. The way you were originally created by God to function was for your mind and your will to decide upon a course of action, and then for your emotions to respond to what’s in your mind, producing the action. That’s the natural way to function.
“Sin corrupted all that at the fall of Adam and Eve, but with the ‘new man’ Believer, instead of thinking, then feeling and taking action out of your feelings, God says, ‘Now take the way you think, and take the actions, by faith.’
“It’s not based on your feelings because your old sin nature corrupts the feelings and distorts the feeling, and if you’re going to take action out of your feelings, well, you know your feelings are too dumb to trust, don’t you?
“The way emotions work is they are always followers. They have no intelligence, no intellect. They can’t discern fact from fancy. They can’t tell the difference between the past, the present and the future. They have no ability to do that. All that’s done in your MIND. Your emotions respond to what’s in your mind.
“You can sit here this morning and think about something bad possibly happening in the future and become just as anxious about it right now as if it already happened. It’s an unreal thought.
“You don’t have to live in this think-feel-act circle. Romans 12:2 says to ‘be transformed by the renewing of your mind.’ You need to look at life through God’s eyes. God says your mind’s like a computer. It can be programmed one way or another.
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“The real culprit in life is not the particular circumstances or trials we face; it’s the attitude we take toward them. If you can understand how God created you, and how He made you to work and function, you’ve got a real leg up on things.
“While your spirit gives you God-consciousness, the soul gives you the capacity to be conscious of yourself. Your soul is the seat of your personality—of you as an individual. It is the part of you, by the way, that you never share with anyone else. The soul is the seat of who you are. The Greek term ego actually means ‘I am.’ The essence of who I am; that’s the soul.
“Now, your body gives you the capacity to communicate with the world about you. It’s the vehicle in which your spirit and soul reside and carry it around.
“In your spirit is your mind. It’s what gives us that capacity of knowing. Human spirits give us the ability to communicate with one another. That’s what the Bible calls your mind. In the mentality of your spirit, you have mental capacity; a memory center, vocabulary, frame of reference you get from all the things you know.
That same level in the soul is called your ‘heart.’ ‘In the heart’—that’s a function of your soul. The mentality of your soul is your heart. Proverbs 23:7 says, ‘As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.’
“When it comes up over to your heart, it’s no longer a way of thinking; it’s a way of believing. Romans 10 says, ‘With the heart man believes to righteousness.’ It’s when you recognize the difference between knowing something and believing it.
“You say to a kid, ‘You know better than that!’ It’s the difference between having the knowledge of a thing and having reached out by faith—by an act of your will—and having brought that into becoming a part of you and who you are.
“I know many things about a lot of different things that I don’t make the basis upon which I live. I know a lot about theology, much of which I don’t believe. I’m not going to make it a part of myself. It’s in my mind; it’s in my understanding. I grasp it, and I understand what’s being said, but I don’t base my life on it.
“You hear people say that heaven and hell can be 18 inches apart—you can have a head knowledge but not a heart knowledge. What they’re talking about is a difference between something in your spirit and something in your soul.
“The idea is I bring it out of the realm of what I know and I say, ‘This is what I’m going to believe; this is going to become the foundation upon which I take my life action,’ and then it becomes a part of my soul; part of the essence of my being.
“It’s the will that takes that information from in my head and puts it in my heart. And so it’s vitally important to understand the will is the decision you make to take what you know and make it a part—make it the foundation—upon which you’re going to live.
“Within the soul is the will (a volition responsible to make its own decisions and choices), and it’s the seat of your emotions. Jesus said in the garden, ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death.’
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“With an unsaved person, their spirit is dead toward God; alienated, functionally cut off. Ephesians 4:17 says they ‘walk as other Gentiles in the vanity of their minds.’
“Now, a dead spirit functions in relation to other people—Satan and his policies and programs—it just doesn’t function in relationship to God. The unsaved person doesn’t receive God’s things; he receives the philosophies of the world. His ideas come from human viewpoint, human training.
“Everything he has to draw upon to put over into his soul comes from bad sources. His authority—his source of enlightenment—comes from the philosophies of this world; the lust of the flesh, the eye, the pride of life. That’s where he gets his input. That’s where his soul draws into itself from.
“Romans 1:19-22 says consequently there’s a blackout of his soul. Why? Because instead of light and truth coming in through the spirit, what comes in is darkness. The Bible says the ‘entrance of thy Word gives light,’ but if the Word doesn’t come in, what’s left? Have you noticed light requires something, but darkness doesn’t? To get rid of darkness you’ve got to turn on the light.
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“The body is depraved; it’s called 'the body of sin' in Romans 6. It’s the seat of your old sin nature. It’s the place where sin gets its control. Just like God is going to work out through your spirit, sin works from your body in. It’s the part of you that’s still kin to Adam that way.
“With an unsaved person their ‘heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it.’ (Jeremiah 17:9) The self-consciousness that the soul had—sin turns it into self-importance and distorts it. Your will becomes a slave to your passions; the emotions. And your emotions are in revolt. So rather than functioning the way God intended you to function, it’s all messed up because of the entrance of sin.
“Now, you go to the Cross and trust Christ as your Saviour and God does some radical things to you. First thing He does is He regenerates you. Your dead spirit that was cut off from God is now given the life of God.
“ ‘The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life,’ and now I have God’s life. No longer am I dead to God, ‘now I’m alive unto God.’ Now God’s truth can now be assimilated into my understanding through the Spirit.
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“Eternal life doesn’t mean you wait ’til you die and go to heaven to get it. Eternal life is your present possession the moment you trust Christ. On a daily basis we have HIS life as our life! Paul says, ‘For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.’
“Paul says, ‘I’m crucified nevertheless I live.’ ‘For me to live is Christ.’ He says, ‘When Christ WHO IS our life.’ Do you see how that means right now?! Eternal life is a present possession!”
“You remember the verse in II Corinthians 4: ‘If our gospel is hid, it’s hid to them who are lost’? That light is shined into us and now we have light in our soul. We have the capacity to receive, assimilate and apply in our life sound doctrine because we can see. The light’s now on. And so our soul, our will, our emotion have all been placed into the light.
“Now our body has been ‘crucified with Christ’; it’s rendered dead. That is, it is not to be the source of our operating. Death in the Bible is when your soul leaves your body.
“If God’s going to leave us here to serve Him, He’s got to leave us in a body, but He’s fixed that body—your relationship spiritually to that body—where it doesn’t have to run your life anymore. You are free from its dominion.
“Obviously you can still choose to be influenced by your flesh, but when you do it’s because you’ve made that choice. God set you free where you don’t have to make that choice.”
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“When Paul talks about a ‘good conscience,’ he’s talking about a conscience that’s 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 word to the details of life.
“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, a function of the 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.’ ”
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“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.”
“You know what being positive toward sound doctrine does? You want to get some victory in your life? The first thing you need to do is get some verses in your mind that you can use to deal with what you’re facing. And if you don’t know anything yet about what you’re facing, just get in some verses and deal with not knowing what you’re facing. Just get in some verses about who you are in Christ.
“Give yourself some information your faith can latch a hold on and that you can put in your soul and, when you do, that information brings life.
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“Paul’s saying don’t walk around like a bunch of lost people, negative toward sound doctrine to the point they develop a cataract on their eye so the light can’t come in. They get that callous. They’re past feeling, past being touched by an understanding of sound doctrine of who they are in Christ. They give themselves over—completely and totally betray themselves.
“In II Timothy, Paul says ‘they oppose themselves.’ They live their life opposite of who they really are. There’s a frantic search for happiness on their own. They have all of it in Christ but they’re out there still looking for it. Their past having the truth of God’s Word reach up and impact them.
“That Lie program gets inside and begins to take hold of the heart. You begin to take your frame of reference, your worldview, the attitudes you have toward your situations and the details of your life, and you have this edifice of human viewpoint, and the wisdom of the world controls your thinking, controls your heart.
“When you have a computer, and you’ve got all this information on your hard drive, every now and then you have to ‘defrag it.’ Your hard drive gets so fragmented it slows down and won’t work. If you want to speed it up, defrag it. Get it all together. Well, your Christian life can happen that way.
“Paul says ‘learn Him.’ Learn who God has made you in Him and stand in that and say, ‘That’s what’s true about me. That’s who I really am, not all this other stuff.’ II Corinthians talks about ‘perfecting holiness.’ II Timothy 3 talks about how the Word of God ‘makes you perfect, throughly furnished unto every good work.’
Paul talks about renewing your mind, re-educating your mind. You take the old information out and put new information (truth) in. Then you develop a new frame of reference.
“The buzz word today is a ‘new worldview.’ You get a new perspective on life, a divine perspective. And now when you’re looking at the details of your life, you begin to learn to look at it through a new way of evaluating. Just like growing roses, you water, trim and fertilize the rose bush before you ever see a rose. It’s a process—a growing process. How do you know? You read the instructions.
“God has structured you in your spiritual makeup in such a way that light is designed to come from His Word through your spirit into your soul by your faith. You will by a positive choice believe that truth. It says you are to be ‘filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom, all understanding.’ Not just have a form of godliness, but have the power of that life living in you and as you grow in that maturity.
“When Paul uses the word ‘perfect’ in Philippians 3:15, he’s not talking about, ‘Don’t ever commit a sin.’ He’s talking about those of us who are mature. Those of us who have an occupation with the mind of Christ and the things of God. Those of us who have reached a level of spiritual maturity, applying God’s Word to the details of life.
“You know what happens as a result? You never quit growing. You need to be fat on the inside. Have a big fat soul. As you grow in the fruits of righteousness, you master the details of life. In being able to handle the details of life as Christ would, there’s the peace and the joy and the real true happiness. It’s being filled with the love of Christ.
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Paul writes in Titus 1:9, ‘Holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers.’
“These elders he’s addressing are going to be in the front line of defense against the Lie program. He’s saying, ‘In order to hold fast to God’s Word as you’ve been taught, where you’re able to exhort and convince the gainsayers, or people who talk against something, you need to have a clear conscience.’
“Boldness in the ministry, or ‘holding fast the faithful word,’ comes out of a conscience that is clear. Proverbs 28 says, ‘The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.’ That’s a conscience issue.”
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