Fidelity To Truth Requires a Conscience

“Holding faith, and a good conscience; which some having put away concerning faith have made shipwreck;” (1Ti 1:19 AV)

 

Holding true to the doctrine of the Bible and a good conscience goes hand in hand.  Putting it another way, voluntarily making oneself accountable to the beliefs of others causes us to double-check that which we are about to instruct to make sure it is right.  We are first accountable to God.  But there has been a movement that shies away from accountability to others.  If we teach something that is not orthodox or for which we can show little support, we tend to get a chip on the old shoulder and claim extra illumination which no one else in the history of the world was ever privy to.  Things like the identity of the two witnesses of the book of Revelation, the author of the book of James, or the existence of a literal hell come to mind.  Three are even more blatant examples of this.  Like denying the deity of Christ, the trinity, or even the veracity and absolute perfectness of God’s written word.  Academia has made authorities of us all and there seems to be no accountability for what we preach.  We are not talking about peer reviews as in one’s examination for a doctoral thesis.  All the candidate has to do is find enough examiners who will agree with him and he is approved.  Now, what we want to consider is a sensitive conscience towards the consequences of the truth we are about to teach on the sheep in the pew.  Do we make ourselves accountable to them?  Does our conscience bother us if we do not study hard enough or purports something the Bible doesn’t support or clearly proves otherwise?

The serious Bible student will discover, over time, some of the things he has come to believe may have to be adjusted or corrected.  The LORD felt it necessary for me to stretch a three-year degree out to thirteen years.  Frustration was part of my experience.  I so wanted to get busy for the LORD.  However, what that allowed me to do was to examine what I was taught and what I came to believe for the presence of error that had seeped in.  In fact, the honest Bible student will make this practice a habit of life.  He will continuously examine what he thinks in the light of God’s word and fix what the Spirit illumines as error.  One such idea I had was recently challenged twenty-five years after I learned, or thought I learned, what the Bible said about it.  Something I wrote in my doctrinal statement, which many men of God have reviewed, was challenged by a church member.  I had to go back and look at it more in-depth.  What was interesting is my view didn’t completely change, but it did modify slightly.  I could have allowed my ego to get the better of me and tell this dear saint to deal with it.  But I didn’t.  I examined all points of view on this topic and presented it to the church.  We did so in a way that gave more strength to one position over the other and showed weaknesses of all positions.  The point is, I made myself accountable to the conscience of another and did honest and hard study so my conscience could sleep at night.

We find this habit of violating our conscience especially true when we do not stick with the context of a passage.  This is a major sin among preachers today.  Not that a passage might support your argument if found in another context.  But if the verse clearly means something else in the context in which you find it, this is not holding the faith in a clear conscience.  Not to beat a dead horse, but Calvinism is extremely guilty of this.  The simple context; who is it being written to, and individual or group of people; the clear context of the entire book first; prepositional phrases following statements of predestination or foreknowledge; are ignored for a broader argument of TULIP.  Calvinists are not the only ones.  We are all tempted to use the word of God as a weapon from time to time and use a passage without consideration of what the person in the pew might do with it.  We could mislead and encourage the sheep towards disobedience.  Or words yet, we could harm the faith which the Spirit is trying to increase.  When we preach or teach, do we look into the faces of those whom we are feeding and ask ourselves if we are honest in what we are about to say?  Have we done our due diligence to be sure what we are about to say lines up perfectly with the word of God?  Are we honest enough to say we do not know something when, in fact, we do not know?  Are we honest enough to tell the difference between apologetics and manipulation?  Faith and conscience cannot be separated.  Fidelity to the truth and the ability to defend it relies on our conscience.