A Good Conscience
No. 2
Loved ones, we’re
studying the spiritual life in these Sunday evening services; the
spiritual life. And I thought we should spend just another -- even
though it’s the fourth teaching -- we should spend another evening
on just the importance of a good conscience, because it is so basic
to a victorious walk. And I thought that many of you, perhaps, might
not be settled in your own mind on the basis of the study that God
has shown us in his word. And so I’ll just take a moment to show
you the outline again.
And, you remember,
you find the key verse in 1 Thessalonians 5:23. And many of us --
this is old stuff to us -- but I know that many of you, it has been
real light to you just to see this for the first time. So let’s
just be patient with each other as we deal with the scriptural
outline of our inner personal lives, or what scriptural psychology
seems to teach us. 1 Thessalonians 5:23, “May the God of peace
himself sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be
kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
And that has helped
man of us loved ones, as we’ve used that model for understanding
the way God deals with us. You see the three words, “Your spirit
and your soul and your body.” And it has made a lot of sense to
those of us who have been brought up in psychology to see that we had
our physical body by which we communicated with the world, and inside
that we had our soul, or the psychological part of us that
communicates with ourselves. And then inside that again, our spirit
which is the part of us that communicates with God.
And we have often
likened it to the kind of situation you got in the Old Testament
temple, you remember, with the public court and then the holy place,
and then the holy of holies. [Shows graphic of the personality
showing 3 concentric rectangles with the 'spirit' -- 'holy of holies'
-- being the innermost, then the 'soul' -- the 'holy place' -- around
the spirit and the largest outside rectangle -- 'public area' --
being the body.] And as you follow the Bible through, of course, you
find that 'the spirit' consists of the conscience, and the intuition,
and the communion, or the ability to perform those functions with
God. And as you follow through, 'the soul' in Old and New Testament,
you find that it includes the mind, and the emotions, and the will.
And then of course, you can see that the body is a kind of trinity
also.
And loved ones,
that’s normally what the Bible regards as the outline of our own
personal inner lives. We have a spirit inside, and a soul around
that, and then a body around that again. And the spirit of course,
is able to communion or converse with God. That’s where we pray to
God, that’s where we fellowship with him, that’s what communion
means. And then intuition -- we hear it often in regard to ladies'
intuition you remember, a woman’s intuition. And really there is a
natural intuition that exists apart from God because there is a
spiritual world of course that operates apart from God’s spiritual
world.
So intuition that we
talk about in regard to the ladies is in some sense what spiritual
intuition is. Intuition is the sense of knowing what God wants you
to do, just knowing it in your spirit. Not knowing it through
working it out in your mind but just knowing what God wants you to
do. So sometime you’ve been walking into a room and you just know
you should say that and you say it. That’s what intuition is.
It’s the sense of knowing what God wants you to say.
It’s interesting
-- I remember 'intueor' in Latin is 'to see'. And intuition is seeing
what God sees. It’s seeing what God sees, seeing things as he sees
them, so that you know what to do intuitively. Your conscience is
that part of you that makes you want to live up to the best that you
know. That’s what your conscience is. Conscience really, itself,
does not contain information.
That’s where I
think a lot of us get into kind of semantic arguments, because we
think, “Oh, living by your conscience means you have to live by the
knowledge in your conscience.” Your conscience really has little
to do with knowledge. Your conscience is simply that function or
that factor inside you that was always raising you up, and makes you
want to live up to the highest that you know. Now, of course, if you
don’t know very much, if you don’t know that it’s wrong to eat
people then your conscience can only raise you up to that level. So
I know it sounds wild, but I suppose a cannibal could be living with
a clean conscience and eating his wife, and his children. But you
can see that there is a distinction there between knowledge and
conscience: that conscience makes you live up to the best that you
know. And it can’t go beyond that. So that’s what your
conscience does.
Now your will loved
ones, is the part of your soul that makes decisions. You make
decisions with your will. You do things with your will. You exercise
power over your mind and emotions with your will. And many of us of
course, get into real difficulty, because we don’t think we ought
to do that. We let our mind and emotions go just as a chance thought
takes them, or a chance feeling. But the will is meant to exercise
power over the mind of the emotions.
So that’s why the
whole practice of free association is a dangerous thing, you know.
And I remember, Dave Johnson bringing it up to me in regard to art.
The free association of ideas is a tricky area. And normally God
expects you to control your mind, and not allow your mind to daydream
or freely associate.
So your will is
there to exercise power over your mind and emotions. Then your soul
of course, exercises power over your body. [Shows graphic of the
personality showing 3 concentric rectangles with the 'spirit' being
the innermost, then the 'soul' around the spirit and the largest
outside rectangle being the body. The 'spirit' contains communion,
intuition and conscience. The soul contains mind, emotions and will.
The body is the physical being that the outside world sees.]
Now loved ones,
that’s the way God intended us to operate, just that way. [Shows on
diagram arrows from God into our spirit and from our spirit out into
our soul and then from there out into our body and out to the world.]
The way you see there. That if we would depend on his love, and
depend on his love alone, he would give us a great sense of his
affection for us, give us a great sense of his awareness of us, and
give us a great sense of his will for us. And so we would have a
great deal of happiness just through our love of him. We’d have a
great deal of security through knowing that he had every hair of our
head numbered and was going to provide for us. And we would have a
great sense of position and purpose in the world as we did what he
put us here to do and that was the Father’s will for us.
And as we operated
that way, depending on him for our security, on him for our
happiness, on him for our sense of significance, so his Spirit, the
Spirit that moves in him and his Son Jesus would come through us in
communion, and would tell us what he wanted us to do day-by-day. And
our conscience then, would constrain our will -- in the light of this
information that we were receiving -- constrain our will to do those
things. And our will would obey our conscience and direct our mind.
And our mind would work out in deductive detail what God was telling
us to do. We would understand it. And we would be able to explain it
to others. And our emotions would express the joy of our fellowship
with God. And we would express that through our body to the world, so
that the world would be filled with the very character of God’s
life, as we ourselves expressed it to other people.
So actually, we
would end up being sources of security. We would not be trembley,
shaky, uncertain people full of inferiority complexes, and fears, and
anxieties. But we would be rocks in the world. And we would be
sources of security. And we would appear more and more as fixed
points in God’s universe. And of course, that would spread a sense
of security to little children, and even to the animals. And the
whole of the world would gradually be redeemed by us, and by the
sense of security that we spread to others. We would spread
happiness to others.
We would not always
be looking for happiness from people. But we would have this great
delight in God morning-by-morning. We would get up -- it wouldn’t
matter whether somebody smiled at us or not -- we would be smiling at
them because of our delight in our Father’s presence, the affection
of the one 'significant other' in the whole universe that really
matters. And so we would be sharing happiness with others and we
would be sources of delight and joy.
And of course, we
would not be climbing over somebody else to be establishing our
significance. We wouldn’t be worried about our significance. We
wouldn’t be choosing a job because it made us feel important. We
would be doing a job because God put us here to do that. We would be
happy to nail chairs together in the back woods. We would be happy to
wash floors with nobody looking at us. We would be ready to do
anything because the sheer delight of doing what God put us here to
do would be all the sense of significance, and identity, and
importance we needed.
And so, of course,
the executive wash rooms would be delightful places, and the
executive dining rooms would be delightful places, and the benches in
factories would be great places because people would not be
scrambling over one another to make themselves feel important. And
that was God’s plan.
And loved ones, you
know what we’ve shared so often, that we’d resolve we would not
depend on this God for this. We would not depend on this God for
love. We would get our love from the world. And so we began to live
the other way. [Shows diagram again, and shows arrows coming in from
the world to the body and in to the soul and in to the spirit.]
And we began to try
to get our security as we wanted it from the world. Get as much
money as we felt would give us security. Get as much praise and
approval from other people as would give us a sense of significance.
Get as much enjoyment from other people, and from experiences, and
personal relationships as we could from thrills and excitement so
that we would be able to live independent of our God. And we would be
able to get these things from the world, so that we would be free
from him. We did not want to be ruled by God.
And loved ones,
that’s what that is. You need to see that -- that that kind of a
life is simply the life of a god. Do you see that? It’s important
to see that. Sometimes we miss that. And we think, “Oh no, that’s
just a little mistake.” No, no, that’s a life of a god there
that you’re looking at. That’s the life of a god who wants to
get everything his own way, her own way, when he or she wants. And
that’s what we wanted to be. We wanted to be gods. And so it’s
good for us to see that when we sin, we’re nothing less than
challenging God’s position. We’re saying, “We want to be gods.
We want it our way, in our time, for our sakes.”
And loved ones,
that’s what happened and of course, the result was our
personalities became utterly perverted. So our dear little eyes were
always hunting for somebody’s approval, always looking for
somebody’s approval. Our dear little hearts beat faster every time
the bank balance went down. Every time we lost an opportunity for a
good job, our sense of security began to fade away. Every time we
missed the girl, or the guy that we thought would give us happiness,
our happiness disappeared. If the sun went away and it was raining,
we were depressed. If the sun was up, we were happy.
But we were suddenly
at the mercy of all the things, and the people, and the experiences
of the world. And so our personality became enslaved to these
things. So it depended on how circumstances were going whether we
were happy or not. It depended on how people treated us whether we
felt a sense of identity or not. It depended on how the money was
going, or the job was going whether we felt secure or not. Suddenly
we found ourselves at the mercy of temporal things, things that were
changing all the time.
And of course,
several times we tried to change. We tried to work the other way. We
tried to ignore what people said about us. Somebody would say, “Oh,
do you know what so and so said about you?” And you steel
yourself, and you try to say, “No, I don’t care what they said
about me.” But you find your whole personality was working that
way now. And you couldn’t ignore it. You couldn’t ignore it.
It was like the things we talked about before, your body gets used to
the nicotine. Your nerve endings get used to the kind of soothing
effect of the nicotine. Your mind gets used and your emotions to the
stimulation of the Coke, or to the drug, or to the alcohol. And it’s
impossible to get out from under those things and do without them.
And that’s really
what happened loved ones, and that’s why the Bible says that that’s
what God did, you see. [Shows personality diagram with a big cross
obliterating all of it.] That was the only thing he could do. He
crucified that. That’s what it means, "Our old self was
crucified with Christ." That whole miserable personality had to
be remade. And that’s what God did in Jesus on Calvary. And
Calvary is only the temporal, physical expression of a mighty,
eternal, cosmic death that took place before even the foundation of
the world. Because of course, God foresaw all this happening. And he
provided for it. And actually there is a version of you, a version
of your personality that has been crucified and raised with Jesus.
And that’s what the Holy Spirit testifies to.
Now, it is important
loved ones, to see that God requires nothing more than that. Some of
you behave as if God wants to grind you into the dirt. Now, do you
see, God is not a mad God? He’s not an angry God that wants to
make you suffer. That’s not our God. He’s not a God who wants
to get you up against a wall and do that to you. He isn’t. Our
God is a wise, all wise Father. And he wants to redeem us. And the
reason he crucified us with Christ was to redeem us. It wasn’t to
punish us.
And we keep on
thinking, “Oh no, he wanted to punish us.” No, no, it says it
clearly, “Our old self was crucified with Christ so that the body
of sin might be destroyed.” That is, the personality that was a
servant of sin might be rendered inoperative, and we might no longer
be enslaved to sin. That was why God crucified us. And he doesn’t
require anything more than that. And loved ones, it is just
blaspheming God to believe that God wants to kill you, or he wants to
punish you.
Our Father -- if he
had wanted to punish us, he would have just sent another flood as he
did in the old days. He would have just destroyed us utterly, he
wouldn’t have give us these 70 years in which we can enter into
this miraculous deliverance that he’s worked out on Calvary. He
wouldn’t. He would have just destroyed us. Or he would have let
the world destroy itself, but he hasn’t. He crucified us with his
son Jesus, and remade us in Jesus’ resurrection so that we could
turn back the clock, and so that we could begin to live like that.
[Shows original graphic of the personality with the arrows from God
to our 'spirit'; to our 'soul'; to our 'body; and out to the world.]
Now loved ones, your
conscience testifies to that. Your conscience is always testifying
to that. Your conscience is always testifying, "You’re
willing to enter into this deliverance that your Father has wrought
for you in Jesus." Or, "You’re not willing to enter into
this deliverance that your Father has wrought for you in Jesus."
That’s what your conscience is testifying to.
See I think, some of
you think, “Oh your conscience is always raking up old sins.”
No, your conscience is only mentioning old sins if those old sins are
still present in your life. And, if the attitude behind those old
sins, and the reluctance that is in them to be crucified, and remade,
and changed around by Christ -- if that is still present in you, your
conscience then, brings to mind old sins.
But do you see your
conscience isn’t involved in raking up all kinds of old sins so
that you have to drag them forward before the Father, and you have to
plead for each one individually? That’s not why you have to
confess every sin. Do you see that? It’s not a payment business.
It’s not, “Lord, I remember I spoke harshly to my mother when I
was seven. Lord, I confess that to you. I repent of that. And now
will you apply the blood of Jesus to that?” That isn’t it. Your
conscience only brings to you the fact that you once spoke harshly to
your mother, because there’s something of that attitude still in
you which shows itself in other ways to other people.
So loved ones, your
conscience is always testifying to a present unwillingness of your
will to be crucified, and raised, and made new in Jesus. In other
words, your conscience is always testifying to something of that.
[Shows graphic of personality with arrows the other direction, from
the world in to the body, etc.] It’s always testifying to some way
in which you’re still trying to get from the world the love that
you should get from God -- some way in which you’re still depending
on the world for the love that you should depend on from God. But
that’s what your conscience testifies to.
Now brothers and
sisters, I do think that a lot of you would have an easier time
dealing with conscience and would have a freer time with your
conscience if you would see that that’s what your dear conscience
is after. Your conscience is a dear, dear friend. Your conscience
is not a miserable old resident policeman who is trying to make you
feel bad, or is trying to bring up lots, and lots of old bad things
that you’ve done to try and take away the sense you have of God’s
favor. That’s not what your conscience is doing.
Your conscience is
trying to bring to your mind any way in which you are not willing to
be crucified with Christ -- any way in which, at the moment, there is
an attitude in your present life that is not willing to walk the way
Jesus walks.
Now, can you see
something else? The only way to satisfy that conscience is to
exercise your will in obedience to it. That’s what you do to have
a good conscience. You exercise your will in obedience to your
conscience.
And the amazing
thing about this miraculous conscience we have -- and you notice it
is part of your spirit, you see. [Shows conscience as being in the
spirit on graphic.] It is part of that invisible part of us that is
close to God. The amazing thing about your conscience is, it will
not be satisfied until you have really set your will in the direction
that it has shown you. That’s right. Your conscience is like a
gyrocompass. It doesn’t matter how you roll around. It doesn’t
matter if you stand on your head. It doesn’t matter if you pull all
kinds of tricks and deceptions with it -- and I used to do that. I
used to say, “Yeah, yeah, well I’ll be really serious now, 'Yes,
Lord, I will never be indolent again.' And I’ll be really serious
so that he thinks that I’m really serious. Then tomorrow... well
who knows.”
But, you can’t do
that. You can’t bluff your conscience. Your conscience knows if
your will is really ready to go the way God wants. Now, it does,
loved ones. You can’t bluff your conscience. Your conscience is a
supernatural part of you. It’s a part of your spirit. It is, in a
sense, not quite God’s voice to you, but in a sense it is part of
God’s voice to you. And the only way to quiet your conscience is
to exercise your will in obedience to it.
Now, do you see why
I shared last Sunday how mad this other approach to an evil
conscience is? This approach remember, that feels, “My conscience
is convicting me of something I did last year, and something I did
the year before, and convicting me of two or three things that I’ve
done today, and two or three things that I did yesterday. And my
conscience is trying to make me feel that God won’t accept me.
Boy, that miserable conscience is just being used by Satan." And
so it’s not long before we begin to identify our conscience with
Satan and we say, “Satan is trying to make me feel that God doesn’t
accept me. But God does accept me.” And then, "'For God so
loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever
believeth in him should not perish but have eternal life.' That’s
true, that’s true. God is love, God is love."
And here’s what we
do. Instead of simply exercising our will to obey our conscience, we
try to move the whole battle into the realm of the mind. And we think
our mind needs to be stored up with more assurance of God’s
forgiveness.
And do you see? It’s
madness? It makes it all foolish. Your dear conscience is not trying
to make you feel bad. Your conscience is not a weapon of Satan. Your
conscience is lovingly showing you some ways in which your life is
still not willing to be crucified with Christ. And it has to be
crucified with Christ so that your life again, can work the way God
intended it to. And so the only answer to an evil conscience is the
submission of your will to it.
But, do you see how
foolish we are? We think, “Oh no, I somehow can’t feel God
forgives me, because I’m thinking of all these things that I’ve
done wrong. I just have to persuade myself that God has forgiven
me.” That’s dumb. Your conscience will immediately sense God’s
love if you submit your will to your conscience. That’s it.
That’s it. It rises up like a fountain in you -- the fountain of
forgiveness, the fountain of the assurance of God’s favor. It comes
upon you like a benediction from above. You don’t need to struggle
and grab for God’s forgiveness, it rises up. All the demons in
hell couldn’t hold it down. That’s the testimony of Luther;
that’s the testimony of Wesley, of Calvin, of everybody that has
been truly saved. It didn’t matter what everybody else was telling
them. They knew that God had forgiven them. Why? Their conscience
testified that it was satisfied with what their will was now doing.
But loved ones, the
other is silliness, you know. Oh, we do it with our emotions, we
remove the whole battle into the emotional level. And we say, “Oh
well, I can’t believe that God forgives me because you see, well,
my father was a depressed person, you know. He was a bit like
Beckett [Samuel Beckett 1906 – 1989 was an Irish playwright] and a
bit like oh, Eugene O’Neill. And really that’s the kind of house
I was brought up in. It was kind of down and depressing, you know,
so I’m a kind of down person. And of course that’s what makes it
hard for me to realize that God has forgiven me.” Well, loved
ones, there have been people like you who have lived before, you
know. And there have been people who’ve been saved who have had
depressing fathers before.
And it’s nothing
to do with your emotions, loved ones. God’s salvation is surer and
firmer than that. God’s salvation does not even require -- I know
this is strange -- but God’s salvation does not even require a
perfectly balanced psychological person. Really! Really! God’s
forgiveness can be extended to a person who is utterly unbalanced.
And God’s forgiveness is sure, because it works just on one
principle: his favor and forgiveness comes through as soon as the
conscience is satisfied that the will is obeying it.
Now loved ones,
that’s so important that I know it could be the wrong thing to do,
but are there any questions on it? Because, I do think it would
settle a whole lot of things in your dear hearts if you’d see how
plain it is, and how simple. Does anyone have any questions?
Question from
Audience:
Is the peace that
passes all understanding present?
Response from Pastor
O’Neill:
The peace that
passes all understanding is a peace with God at that point. It’s a
peace and an assurance that all is well between your soul and his.
And then there is the peace 'of' God that begins to fill your whole
personality as your will begins to obey your conscience. So yes,
that’s it, sure, 'peace with God' and 'peace of God', yes.
Question from
Audience:
The conscience will
testify to one way to follow God and the way to oppose God. And I’ll
find a great battle inside myself. And I’ll find myself at times
opposing God.
Response from Pastor
O’Neill:
Loved ones, I have
to say to you that the Bible is full of exhortations that we have to
live with a good conscience. And the only way to live with a good
conscience is to obey it. There’s no substitute for that. And
that’s where I think brother, we do have – I do feel we have
something of a disadvantage. Though, I think we have to be careful
that we don’t excuse it you know, and say, “Our pet dog bit us
every morning when we were five years old, and that’s why we hate
people.” I think we have to go gently on this kind of thing
because we’re so good at making excuses for ourselves.
But, I think it is
true that we have been brought up in a present educational system
that has been very reluctant to run the risk of causing the 'poor
child' a complex by asking him to do something that he doesn’t want
to do. And of course, the only way to get the 'poor child' to become
a child of God is to get him to do stuff that he doesn’t want to
do. And so, a lot of us have come up under that kind of teaching.
And we have come up with a will that has not been used to being
exercised. And I do think that we have to see that the only reason
God believes that our will can obey our conscience, is because of
that. [Shows the diagram with a cross through it.]
I mean if that had
not taken place, then I agree, I agree, the personality is just
intractable. But because of our crucifixion with Christ it is
possible for us to exercise our will to obey our conscience. And
there’s no way around it. I have tried, you know --because I have
heard you loved ones say that kind of thing before -- I have tried to
think, "Is there some way to get you to obey without exercising
your will?" But there isn’t. You know, there just isn’t --
unless to put you to sleep and put you through the motions without
you knowing. But God does not do that. God wants you to willfully
choose him and willfully reject Satan. Willfully choose Jesus and
willfully reject self. And there is no answer.
Question from
Audience:
Is it a kind of
learning process, because I find at times when I obey God’s will
then it’s somehow so wonderful and so great that I’m encouraged
to obey it again?
Response from Pastor
O’Neill:
Undoubtedly that is
partly true, that the Father gives us such a sense of what eternal
life is that it encourages us to go on next time. I just think there
are times, too, when it is 'cold turkey'. And it is simply, “I obey
God’s will against the whole demons of hell and against
everything.”
And finally -- I
have to say that finally it comes down, in most of our lives to cold,
dry, naked obedience against all the powers of hell. And I don’t
know that there’s one man or woman here who has been delivered into
liberty who has not had to eventually come to the point that you did
what God told you to because he was God, even though you could
rationalize it away like mad, and even though it caused you
tremendous loss. I think loved ones it does -- it costs you finally,
everything you’ve got, to follow God and to obey him.
Question from
Audience:
Is the will always
aware of everything that the conscience is telling it?
Response from Pastor
O’Neill:
Loved ones, it is
important to see -- and I think I’ll go around behind it brother,
because I think it brings out something important -- it’s
important to see that the conscience is not testifying to your
'absolute perfection' or your 'complete imperfection'. Do you see
that? The conscience is only telling you what God wants you to deal
with 'now', at this moment -- just the one thing that he wants you to
deal with at this moment.
That’s why it is a
good way to be able to distinguish between the 'false accusation' of
Satan and the working of your conscience. The 'false accusation' of
Satan is usually such a mass of things that you can’t – his job
is to confuse you, not to get you to act, but to confuse you.
Whereas the conscience always brings before you the 'one thing' that
God wants you to deal with 'that moment'. Maybe in the next second
he’ll give you something else, but he’ll give you one thing at a
time.
So brother, that’s
what’s important, the will is aware of what the conscience is
pointing to at that moment. Now, there are many other things that
the conscience isn’t bothering you about and the will, to that
extent, is not responsible for those. And that’s the meaning of
that verse, you remember it’s, I think, James 4:17, “Whoever
knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”
You can’t be responsible for all the things you don’t know about,
but for the thing the conscience is bringing before your mind at that
time, you are responsible to act on that.
And that was a great
help to me when I realized that verse in the Old Testament, you
remember, “God does not quench the flickering torch.” And I
suddenly realized, “God does not allow any trial come to me above
what I’m able to bear. And so he does not command me to do anything
that I am not well able, at that moment, to do.” And that was such
a relief to me because I used to think, “Oh now, what if God gives
me something that I can’t do?” Then I realized, God is a loving
and faithful God, and he only allows our conscience to bring to us
something that we can rectify at this moment.
And so loved ones,
of course, it is a great walk you see. It’s a great walk! It’s a
light walk! The walk with Jesus is a light walk! Whether you’re
born of the spirit, filled with the spirit, baptized with the spirit,
wherever you are, if you’re walking in response to your conscience
it’s a light -- and I have to use the word because I don’t think
they should steal it from us -- it is a gay walk. It is a walk with
brightness, and lightness, and delight, and happiness. It is a walk
that is on the air! It is not a heavy walk. And any time you get
into a heavy walk, be assured loved ones, it isn’t because your pet
dog bit you. It isn’t. It isn’t because your emotions are down.
It isn’t because you need to store yourself up with more of the
promises of God. It’s because you are not submitting your will to
your conscience, and therefore your blessed spirit cannot have
applied to you the promises of God which you know already. And that’s
it. Do you see that?
It’s never that we
need to be reminded of the promises of God. We have the promise of
God stored in our head. But we can’t get them down into our hearts
and our consciences, simply because our conscience refuses to let
that happen, because our will is not submissive. The Christian walk
is a delightful walk -- and I say that even when you’re hungering
and thirsting after righteousness. I say that even when you’re
striving for the baptism of the Holy Spirit, even when you’re
deeply aware of your pitiful hypocritical life. As long as you are
walking up to the level of your conscience there’s still that
'favor of God' upon your life, and that assurance of his favor.
And I’d just
finish with this one comment. A loved one came up to me several
weeks ago and he said, “I just feel dead. I mean, I just feel dry
and dead. I don’t feel anything of God’s presence in my life, I
don’t feel any life inside me at all.”
And I said to him,
“Well, is there any sin in your life?” And I have to tell you
that for a moment I was thinking, “Well, are you praying? Are you
reading the Bible?” -- That kind of thing. And I was for a moment
going to go into a 'can you distinguish between Satan’s
accusation?' and all that kind of stuff. And then something inside me
said, “Have you any sin in your life?”
And he looked up,
surprised. And it seemed so funny to me, because of course, after a
few years on the 'Calvary Road', you begin to look first to sin as
the source of any problem. And he said, “Sin? Well, yeah, yeah I
suppose there is.” And kind of laughed, you know.
And I thought,
“Well, boy, you know, do you see that that’s serious? Do you see
that that’s why there’s no life in you? It’s not that you need
to praise God more, you need to speak in tongues, or you need to go
to more Hallelujah meetings. It isn’t that, it’s you just need
to deal with the sin in your life and submit your will to your
conscience and you’ll have no trouble. The Spirit of God will rise
up within you and give you a sense of his favor.”
And then loved ones,
he went into the prayer room to deal with the sin. But that’s it.
That’s why I think of Reverend Carlson and Mrs. Carlson
[missionaries whose son attended Campus Church] sitting back there.
And that’s why they, and many other dear old saints down through
the years, know that the walk with Jesus is a simple life. It’s a
simple life. And it’s good for us to talk about all the deep things
of God but the walk in the brightness of God’s favor and presence
is a simple walk. It’s simply an obedient walk and a trusting
walk. It is just, "Trust and obey for there’s no other way to
be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey."
And you know, if
you’re tempted to say, “Oh no, Satan is overcoming me and he’s
loosing all of his demons upon me.”
Well, maybe you’re
such a great saint that he is. But I, myself, tend to think, “Well
he probably hasn’t much time to bother about a pitiful little
creature like me and I'd better just look at my conscience and clean
that up first.” And then after you’re sure -- after you’re
sure your conscience is clean and you’re submitting your will to
your conscience and you’re doing everything that God tells you,
then you have no trouble taking your position in Jesus at the right
hand of God, and warring against Satan and resisting him in faith.
It just comes naturally. In fact, Jesus just lifts you up into that
place.
And that’s the
truth loved ones, you see that work has taken place [Indicates the
cross through our personality on the diagram.] And that has all taken
place, and all that power is lifting all the time. See it’s like a
power that opposes the law of gravity, or works and supersedes the
law of gravity. It’s lifting you all the time. And actually, to
avoid being lifted you have to jump out of his hands. That’s it.
You have to jump out of God’s hands, because the Father is pulling
you up. Ever since Calvary he’s drawing you into his arms. And to
avoid being in his arms you have to jump out of his arms. And the way
to do that is to refuse to submit your will to your conscience.
But, if you submit
your will to your conscience the Father continues to lift you up and
into his arms, and into his heart. And that’s the normal place for
us.
So will you do what
you need to do? And that applies to all of us, however deep we think
we are, or however young we think we are in the faith. Let’s start
submitting our will to our conscience. And remember that there’s
nothing as vital for a relationship with God as a clear and a good
conscience. And there’s nothing as vital for a victorious prayer
life as a good conscience. And there’s nothing as vital for the
ministry of Jesus’ life to your friends tomorrow as a good
conscience.
Let us pray. Dear
Father, we thank you for the way your truths are so plain and the way
they appeal to our own sense of what is right. And Father, we
apologize for the way we have tried to walk with a conscience that is
active and whose life we have tried to drown with auto suggestion,
and with emotional uplift. Lord, we see that we are tackling a
spiritual problem with psychological weapons. Father, we see that
there’s only one way to have a clean conscience, and that is to
submit our wills to that conscience, and to exercise our will over
our mind, and emotions, and our body, in accordance with what our
conscience is revealing to us.
And Lord we thank
you that it is such an easy and a plain way. And oh, Holy Spirit, we
thank you for our conscience. We thank you Holy Spirit that under
your energizing of our spirits, our conscience has become the very
voice of God to us. And they are heightened, and energized, and they
are informed, and enlightened by you and your knowledge of what God
wants from us. And we thank you therefore for our conscience. We
thank you that our conscience is what keeps us from taking over our
own spiritual experience and managing it, and making it a technique.
We thank you Holy
Spirit for the numbers of times obeying our conscience delivers us
from engrossment with ourselves and preoccupation with a
psychological method of deliverance. Thank you, thank you for the
blessed conscience that you have put within us, our Father. And we
intend to keep that conscience clean and to have it sensitive within
us. And we know Lord, that as we have sensitive consciences we will
beget others with sensitive consciences. And we will beget families
of God that will work in favor, and in joy, and in an assurance of
your forgiveness and love.
And now the grace of
our Lord Jesus, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy
Spirit, be with each one of us now and throughout this coming week.
Amen.
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