The Mind Fully
Aware
Joshua 1:8 NIV
Do not let this Book
of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you
may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and
successful.
Are You Alert Right Now?
Several years ago my wife gave me a gift certificate
for a massage at a local spa. It is a
spacious, clean, popular, legitimate spa with a good reputation so I was happy
to go down and get my hour massage. As I
sat in the waiting room with several others, I rehearsed in my mind the
determination to have a man give my massage.
After about ten minutes, I was ushered in through the walk-way and into
the large central room where there were perhaps twenty cubicles and I was
brought to one of them. A young woman
came in and gave me a towel and said that I was to undress and then place the
towel over my waist area. I asked her if
a man was going to give me my massage and she said there weren’t any male
masseuses available. With that she left,
giving me the opportunity to privately take off my clothes. Now if this were some dimly lit room with a
closed door and no one else around, I would have immediately gotten up and
walked away but this was a public setting and a reputable spa. I sat on the massage bed for what seemed like
hours, trying to decide what I would do.
Was I going to take off my pants and underwear and let a young woman
give me a massage with just a towel to cover me, would I leave on my pants and
just take off my shirt, would I get up and walk away from the spa? My conscience was working at full speed,
evaluating this situation and trying its best to come to the right
decision. Should I as a Christian man
and a pastor have a woman give me a full massage with only a towel covering me?
Is it possible that some of us spend too much time
fussing over moral and ethical issues?
Are we sometimes overwhelmed by a super stimulated conscience? When everyone else says something is fine to
do and we don’t think it is fine to do it, do we go along with the crowd? Do others make us feel guilty or are we alone
responsible for any guilt we feel? How
much guilt should we let get hold of us?
Is guilt good for the soul or just a trouble maker? Does your conscience ever crush you?
Sigmund Freud is universally given credit for
dramatically developing and energizing the field of psychology. It is easy to come up with a large list of
his significant contributions…some would even speak of them as inventions. He brought us the concept of carefully
listening to patients and encouraging free association as they rambled on about
whatever they wished. He popularized the
analysis of dreams, the concept of psycho-sexual forces within the personality,
the importance of early childhood experiences and the oedipal complex. However, by far his most critical and
influential impact upon Western society and culture was his dismantling of
conscience as a critical component of a healthy personality. He coined a term, the super-ego, to discredit
the conscience and render it ineffectual.
The super-ego was essentially what we call the conscience but over
reaching. He claimed that many if not
most people suffer from too much guilt, silly, frivolous guilt that sickens us
and makes us neurotic. The enlarged
conscience he treated like an enlarged thyroid or an enlarged heart, as
something needing treatment. Much of
western culture became convinced that Freud was right, a functioning conscience
was not good for people; we need to have less of a conscience, we don’t need
its guilt and the bad feelings it produces.
Many in the Christian community agreed with Freud…even many pastors and
so it became almost “anti-godish” to give the conscience credence or encourage
feelings of guilt. We are generally
thought to be doing Christendom a disservice to incite guilt and support the
functioning of the conscience.
Suppose however the conscience is more like a muscle
that needs to be exercised and developed rather than a vestigial organ that
sophisticated and healthy people let shrivel until it no longer functions. Most of us have been raised to believe that
what used to be called sin is actually just a minor mistake, a slip-up or maybe
something to ignore. We have given Freud
the store so to speak and let him define God for us. God (although he actually had no theology of
god) thinks it is ok if you don’t get things right, struggle with your
decisions, don’t live up to other’s expectations. God is comfortable with whatever choices you
make because after all, it’s all fine in the end. What though if God is not like that? What if He does expect us to be holy and pure
and to live lives of righteousness? What
if it is not ok to sleep with your girlfriend, gossip about your boss or hold
grudges? What if God really does hate
sin and it is truly unbearable for Him when we sin? What if we have been wrong all along about what
sin really is?
A typical example of the modern approach to
conscience and guilt and sin is found in John 5. A man who had been crippled thirty-eight
years was healed by Jesus but seemingly did not appreciate what had been done
for him nor show any loyalty toward the healer.
Later, Jesus found him in the crowd and spoke harshly to him. "See, you are well again. Stop
sinning or something worse may happen to you." (John 5: 14 NIV) How this man responded to this strong rebuke
is fascinating. He gave it not a
moment’s notice. He instead went to
Jesus’ enemies to betray Him. Surely he
knew it was wrong to turn Jesus over to the authorities and we would think his
conscience would have warned him against it, especially after he had just been
healed of his thirty-eight years of misery by the very Savior he now was rejecting. The point though is that Jesus defined
sinning as something to stop doing or something worse may come your way. Sin, to Jesus, is not just a mistake or a
learning opportunity or a throwing off of the constraints of an over reaching
super-ego. Sin that continues is worse
than being crippled thirty-eight years.
We all laud Jesus’ kindness in rescuing the woman
caught in adultery from certain death by stoning but rarely do we ponder deeply
Jesus’ strict admonishment to her when the crowd of accusers had left. “Go and leave your life of sin!” (John
8: 11) To leave a “life of sin” you must
realize you have a life of sin and have begun to abhor it. This means you have thought about it, turned
over what you have done in your mind and grown to hate it. Otherwise you just continue doing what you
are doing because it brings you some desired pleasure, some comfort from your
difficulties, some relief from your pain.
We sin because it does something for us we want and the only way to
break away from sin is when something has converted our thinking about it…our
conscience has concentrated on the sin and become its enemy. It is only then that someone like the woman
caught in adultery has the will and determination to leave her “life of sin”.
When Thomas the disciple doubted the reports that
Jesus had been raised from the dead and questioned the evidence brought him by
eyewitness accounts, he was left with seven days of pondering his
reaction. Of course it was logical at
some level that he not believe Jesus actually was alive because He really had
been dead. There was no question Jesus
died. And yet He was wrong to doubt that
Christ was alive. Jesus had already
promised He would live again after dying.
For a week Thomas had to process with his conscience his lack of faith
in Jesus to actually come alive again after the crucifixion. When that next Sunday Thomas was in the upper
room with the other disciples and Jesus indeed did return and approach Thomas,
the disciple was left with the realization that he had been wrong and his
wrongness was sinful. He had doubted not
the resurrection but Christ Himself…He had not believed in Him. The words of Jesus make sense to us
then. “Stop doubting!” It was not stop doubting resurrection but
stop doubting me. “Believe!”
We want to encourage Thomas. You had every right to doubt. The crucifixion of Jesus was brutal. You were traumatized by it. Any one of us would have questioned the
resurrection accounts. Doubting is
normal. Not everyone is honest and
sometimes people think they see something but are mistaken. Of course you would have questioned the
resurrection. Jesus did not give Thomas
wiggle room on this sin though. Just as
forcefully as He confronted the sin of the woman caught in adultery and the sin
of the man who turned on Jesus, so He confronted Thomas. Stop doubting.
There is a strong urge in us to make excuses for sin
and ignore them altogether. By doing
this, we wreck our conscience. We make
it powerless to stop us from the evil at our door. Before Cain’s anger blew up, he had a
conscience that we must guess was warning him against the direction he was
going. God Himself spoke to him. If you do what is right, will you not be
accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it
desires to have you, but you must master it." (Genesis 4:7 NIV) We mustn’t believe Cain is the only one of us
given warning before he sinned. We are
warned moment by moment. We have the
conscience God has given us to send the alarm.
We have a tremendous picture in the Old Testament of
the Conscience of God given to man. When
the Law was being presented on Mt. Sinai, a miraculous event occurred. The Cloud of God descended upon the mountain
and rested upon the Law being poured out of the Mind of God. For forty days the Cloud brooded upon the
mountain with the Law word by word coming forth. This was the original Cloud, before the
Silicon Valley invented its own much, much smaller version. Like our conscience broods over our sins and
the decisions we make, the Lord brooded over the giving of the Law to man. It is normal and wise for us to follow the
Scripture that tells us, “Do not let
this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so
that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be
prosperous and successful.” (Joshua 1: 8 NIV)
If you meditate upon the rights and wrongs of God’s
structure of the universe, you will naturally with your conscience think long
and hard about the rights and wrongs of you.
It is the most normal part of life…to evaluate your deeds through God’s
eyes. “I drank too much last night.” “I was judgmental and critical.” “My gossip was hateful and destructive.” “I looked at her too long because I was
lusting.” “I trusted myself rather than
pray.” “I am not reading the Bible
enough.” “I gave my wife grief.” “I did not respect my husband.” “I was mean to my mom.” I was bitter and took out my problems on my
children.” “I have not been
patient.” This is not a super-ego gone
manic; this is a healthy conscience taking seriously sin and its consequences.
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