01.05B. The Need to Listen to Conscience
The Need to Listen to Conscience
Once a small boy saw a little spotted tortoise and lifted his hand intending to smash it with a rock. Suddenly, something checked his thrust and spoke to him as clearly as a human voice, saying, “That is wrong!” Not knowing where the voice came from, he went to inquire of his mother. Having heard his story, she wiped tears from her eyes with her apron, and holding him in her arms said, “Some call it conscience. I prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you listen to it and obey, it will continue to speak clearer and clearer and always guide your steps aright; but if you turn a deaf ear and rebel against it, its voice will fade little by little and leave you in moral and spiritual darkness. The growth of your spiritual life depends upon your hearing and obeying this little voice.” To their great loss, many contemporary Christians ignore God’s voice in their conscience. They will listen to spiritual teaching and preaching every Lord’s Day, read devotional books daily, pay serious attention to brotherly advice and admonitions, but rarely give full ear to their conscience. Majority rule in the church, ethical instruction in Sunday School and dogmatic preaching in the pulpit have their place, but they cannot take the place of guidance by conscience which comes straight from the Throne of Grace. The Bible passage we read in the morning for devotions may not apply to today’s need. The sermon heard last Lord’s Day may not help us face this week’s trial. The voice of our regenerated conscience, God’s heavenly radio within, will always meet our needs precisely and guide our steps aright.
Whenever anyone permits conscience to season his speech and deeds, she makes his words true and just, and his actions noble and right. Under her influence, in 1415 John Huss gave a glorious witness to the City Council of Constance and to Sigesmund, King of the Germans, and later Holy Roman Emperor, “To my conscience I cannot be untrue! To the truth of the gospel, I cannot be a traitor! I would rather suffer a mill stone to be tied around my neck and thus to be thrown to the bottom of the sea, than to deny my own conscience and my Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.” When Huss was bound to the stake, with straw and wood heaped up around his body to the chin, and flammable rosin sprinkled upon them, “The offer of life was reissued if he would recant. He refused and said, ‘I shall die with joy today in the faith of the gospel which I have preached’ . . . as the flames arose he sang twice, Christ, Thou Son of the living God, have mercy upon me.”50 In giving his famous speech before the Diet of Worms in 1521, Martin Luther, when asked to renounce God’s truth, said, “Unless I am refuted and convicted by testimonies of the Scriptures or by clear arguments . . . I am conquered by the Holy Scriptures quoted by me, and my conscience is bound in the Word of God: I can not and will not recent anything, since it is unsafe and dangerous to do anything against the conscience.”51
How beautiful a clean Christian conscience is. We believers should maintain a good 59 conscience and live daily by it as did the apostle Paul who “looking intently at the council, said, ‘Brethren, I have lived my life with a perfectly good conscience before God up to this day” (Acts 23:1). By affirming allegiance to his conscience Paul maintained fidelity to his calling, and a few years later could say, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7).