Passions

Hosea 7:6 NIV

Their hearts are like an oven; they approach him with intrigue.  Their passion smolders all night; in the morning it blazes like a flaming fire.

What Is The Source Of Your Passion?

A few weeks ago I was coming out of the church parking lot and traffic on my side of the road was packed.  Two lanes merge into one right at the driveway of the parking lot and no one was moving due to the stop light at the cross street on the next block.  Normally I just inch into the traffic and drivers let me through.  After all, they aren’t going anywhere and I am not trying to get ahead of them.  I just want to cross into the lane going the other way.  As I began to work my way into the traffic, the first car waved for me to come through and so I started but then all of a sudden, the driver in the car in the second lane quickly lurched forward to block my way through her lane.  At first I could not believe what I had just seen.  Why did she do that?  What good did it do her to not let me through?  Was she crazy?  I did not recognize her and when I stared into her head, she would not look my way.  There I sat in my little car, blocking one lane of traffic but unable to let that lane move forward because I was prevented from going on into the other side of the road.  As soon as the traffic light turned green and the woman was able to move forward and clear the way for me, I wondered at my temper.  What had happened to it?  Why didn’t I get mad at the woman for being rude to me?  More importantly, what if I did get angry and try to retaliate.  What would I have done?

Unless you are a robot, you have passion.  It could be blocked or stymied by your will but you have access to passion, a treasure trove of it.  What you do about your passion is up to you.  It can be poisoned by sin and become a source of tremendous turmoil for you or it can be transformed by God into a valuable part of your personality.  Many are afraid of the passion they possess and try to keep it in check by either fighting against it or attempting to dismantle it.  Others are controlled by their passions and like Legion with his many demons, find themselves taken captive by their passions and made a slave of them.  Perhaps you have known people who showed no emotions and although they seem passionless, it is more likely that they live in constant fear of being dominated by passions that scare them.  Shows like Star Trek romanticize the passionless person and yet that is a mistake.  Passion is a critical part of who we are and how we have been made.  To discount or discredit your passion is like rejecting your lungs or hating your blood vessels.  What we need is an approach to our passions that is not only reasonable but even beneficial.  That is what we shall consider today.

Passions can be defined psychologically as the ruling forces within the heart that drive our actions. They are the powerhouse motors we possess that get us going.  They push us into actions that our will alone can’t initiate.  Without passion we live and act mechanically; just going through the motions of daily life without ever leaving our comfort zone.  Biblically, the heart is the center of who we are.  It is the root of our thinking, our will and our passions.  Sometimes in the Old Testament a term which in the Hebrew is translated kidneys or “reins” is used but it is essentially the same as the heart.  When you read the term heart in the Bible, don’t think of it as the pumping muscle in your chest but as the idea of you and who you are internally.  The heart however, which is the source of the passions, is broken by sin.  As we see in Jeremiah 17: 9, The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.  Who can understand it? (NIV)

The question of course is rhetorical.  Our hearts are a great mystery to us and nearly unfathomable.  Sin has corrupted them to the core and whether it is the damage brought about by the sins we commit or the sins committed against us, they are a wreck of what God intended them to be.  Each of us is stymied by the heart we have.  We may change a certain behavior or alter some habits, but in the end, there are depths to the heart that make a mess of our “good intentions”.  Paul, in speaking of the heart and its warping of passion said, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” (Romans 7: 15 NIV)  This a universal experience.  Whether you are from Asia or Africa or Australia, you have acted in ways that were unfathomable to you and maybe even embarrassing.  Why is that?  It is because your heart is warped and unpredictable.

Jesus has a strong take on how damaged your heart is.  For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. (Matthew 15:19 NIV)   You cannot count on a heart that is so unstable and wrecked.  Any sin imaginable can come out of you and without warning.  Out of this pot come your passions; unpredictable and unreliable.  It is possible though to not be dominated by the passions coming out of your sin damaged and corrupted heart.  The Bible says, So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. (Galatians 5:16 NIV) “Desires” is nothing more than your passions as they flow out of the sin percolating in your heart.  There is nothing laughable about what is possible with a heart such as the one you and I possess.  The worst that humanity has to offer is there in your heart and my heart and the passions can drive them out of us like dynamite.

Before we have been born again with Christ living through us, all we have to rein in our corrupted passions is the conscience.  Depending on how strong or weak our conscience is morally and how developed it is will determine what our passions drive us to do.  Of course, as is hinted in Romans 7, the law also can constrain our passions.  But when we have been transformed by the power of Christ crucified into Christians, there is a new force working in us.  For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. (Galatians 5:17 NIV)  The Holy Spirit wages war with the corruption in the heart and this can have tremendous psychological ramifications.

Some of the most anxious and depressed individuals are often Christians who struggle to accept the changes God wants to make in them.  Anger and stress manifest themselves in believers who don’t want Christ to change everything in the heart.  Galatians 5:19-21 provides an ugly picture of what comes out of the heart that is not converted fully by Christ.  The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. (NIV)  The only curb other than conscience against such behavior is the fear of being caught for doing something bad.  We can hold back some of this ugliness but eventually anything we see in this list of fruit produced by corrupted passions can come out of us without warning.  We find we are angry or bitter or jealous and we say that isn’t us but it is us.  All of this is floating about in the heart unchanged by the work of Christ.  This is the fruit of passion developed in a sin corrupted heart.

We discover in Galatians 5: 22 what God can do with our passions when He remakes them.  They can produce a lifestyle straight out of heaven.  But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23 NIV)  How can our passion begin to develop these qualities?  Romans 5: 5 gives us a hint at the mechanism God utilizes for the transformation of our passions.  And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. (NIV)  How can the passion in your heart be changed into something that generates the goodness of God in you?  It can only happen when God’s own love is poured into your heart by the Holy Spirit. 

Ends and Means

Have we caught the vision God has for us?  Are we prepared to be wholly His?  When Israel by neglect and indifference failed to capture all the land God had for her, she tragically left herself open to all the curses that come to those who sin.  The nation, rather than doing away with the idolatry and immorality of the region, embraced it and welcomed it.  Bethlehem felt the wrath of Israel's new heritage as a religious half-breed when Herod, rather than welcoming the Christ child tried to stamp him out by killing all the other babies of the village.  The Pharisees and Sadducees thought their religious ways had blotted out the corruption of their hearts but instead the religion they coddled betrayed the God they claimed as theirs when with one voice they cried, "Crucify him!"  Was it just David who suffered when he slept with Bathsheba or did all the generations that followed him fall under the shadow that sin cast?  It is a narrow way, this pursuit of God's grace in normal activities, letting the life of Christ work through our lusts, jealousies and frustrations.  You have a conscience, not so you will be hang-dog guilty but so you will act in the crucified life of Christ at the dinner table and the office.  A redeemed Christian has at his or her disposal all the power of the resurrection to get right the little things that make a life big and eternally good for every generation that encounters it.  Holiness is the heritage you leave behind you and later the heritage you take with you when you "share in your Master's happiness".

 "His master replied, 'Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!'   Matthew 25:23 NIV

The Mind Fully Alive

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.

Jesus told us without reservation and with all His faculties in place that we are to be “perfect”.  This doesn’t mean He expects us to never trip over the clothes in the house or never misspell a word we send out in a text.  But it does mean that God expects us to do what He has told us to do and never make excuses for not doing it and never pretend as if it doesn’t matter.  The person who wants her prayers answered by God and wants His blessings upon His life must do what He says to do.  We gripe and complain that God doesn’t care about us, God isn’t real because our prayers aren’t answered; God is cruel because of the difficulties we face.  God is waiting for us to take seriously our lives and do what He tells us to do.  This means we must listen to our conscience and think about the sins we have committed and hate our sins.  When we look at our sins and hate them with enough hatred to really love God and love the people God has given us, the Lord will unleash His power and give us the desires of our heart.  Because only when we truly hate our own sins will our heart be ready for God to bless it through and through.

Conscience Reboot

Acts 24:16 NIV

So I strive always to keep my conscience clear before God and man.

Do You Have a Clear Conscience?

I don’t ever remember a time when I was taken to school by my parents.  It must have happened but my only memories of getting to school were walking or riding my bike. My mom at some point stopped walking with me to elementary school…I know this because I can’t think of a single time that she actually accompanied me.  Those trips to school have long ago all blended together into a single blur except for one particular morning that is perhaps forever etched in my mind.  As I always did each day on my treks to school, I came to a since closed mom and pop grocery store on E. 14^th Street that was a constant curiosity to me.  My mom as far as I knew never shopped in it and so I never had an occasion to see what was inside.  Each day I went to school and then returned home I went past the little store and wondered what it would be like to look around.  One morning, I was a bit early for school so I finally decided to see what deep magic the store held within.  I walked up and down each aisle like I belonged, as if I intended to buy milk or bread or green beans.  I did not have a penny in my pocket; I was only on a fact finding mission.  Eventually I came upon the candy aisle and now I had found nirvana.  I looked at each candy bar, at every ball of gum, at each wrapped piece of hard candy and thought long and hard about what it would be like to have one of those candies.  In the most split of split seconds, I had a most delicious idea.  Why don’t I just take one?  No one was looking.  I was perhaps nine years old…too young to realize how stupid that idea was since I was the son of a police officer and too old to blame my action on ignorance of right and wrong.  I glanced about, stuck my hand down, grabbed a single Jolly Rancher, shoved it in my pocket and hurriedly walked out the door and down the street.  I kept waiting for the clerk to come running after me, for the police to chase me down and frisk me, for my dad to pull up in his car and confront me…but nothing happened.  I had gotten away with stealing the little piece of candy.  I wasn’t arrested.  I did not get a spanking.  I was not pulled out of class and sent to the principal’s office.  No one ever discovered my crime…as far as I knew.  But, my conscience knew what had happened and it would not let me off the hook.  It attacked me with a vengeance and despite the success of my great crime, I never unwrapped the little candy because I felt too guilty to eat it.

Not everyone is like me.  Many don’t feel guilty about all sorts of matters that are considered wrong.  They feel no qualms about stealing or lying or the use of swear words.  They don’t sweat it if they watch pornography or run through a red light or take too long of a shower.  They are unmoved by no trespassing signs, they are perfectly fine with cheating on their biology tests, don’t worry a bit about driving on a suspended license and will drink and drive without giving it a thought.  What are we supposed to do about such people who don’t seem to ever have a guilty conscience; who aren’t bothered by their bad behavior?  Are they hopelessly lost?  Should we try to make them see the error of their ways?

There is a mature, well thought through examination of the conscience in the Bible and it provides rich insight into the psychology of the conscience.  For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.  They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong.  They are free from the burdens common to man; they are not plagued by human ills.  Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence.  From their callous hearts comes iniquity; the evil conceits of their minds know no limits. (Psalm 73:3-7 NIV)  “Hearts” in this verse is speaking of the conscience.  Who hasn’t had at least a little bit of jealousy that some people seem to feel no guilt over what they do.  They live wild lives with impunity and no one can get through to them that what they are doing is wrong.  It seems impossible to convince such people to change; their consciences are nearly immutable.

Consider the strange case of Jonah who had a profound hatred for Assyrians.  He refused to go to their capital city and warn them of God’s coming judgment because he did not want them to get out from under the destruction the Lord had planned for them.  Even after God had Jonah swallowed by a great fish and in its belly he stewed for three days, he still was unbending in his loathing of the Assyrians.  He did go and preach in the Assyrian city but nothing inside him changed even after the people repented   He was furious that God did not destroy Nineveh; his conscience felt no guilt over his hatred of the Assyrians whom the Lord clearly loved.  Not even three days in the gut of a great fish could rework Jonah’s conscience.

Likewise it is odd that the great Solomon who experienced several miraculous encounters with God did not seem to feel the least bit guilty about taxing the people excessively or dabbling in paganism.  His conscience was unmoved by the scriptures he read or the poverty he saw all around him.  Even while living in the golden age of the church when the pastors were Apostles like Peter, James and John, Ananias and Sapphira seemed to feel not the least twinge of guilt when they lied about the extent of their charity.  The great Paul seemed to feel no guilt over all the atrocities he committed against the Church even while facing the resurrected Jesus Christ in the middle of the road.  The conscience in many ways is as unbending as a steel bar and no amount of supernatural signs and wonders can force it to change its opinion of good and bad.   All of us have tried to talk someone into believing some action or attitude was morally wrong to no avail.  Just think of the times pro-life demonstrators have tried their best to convince abortion advocates of the horrors of abortion without success or how many have tried to get alcoholic family members to feel guilty for their actions.  We can wreck a conscience by our actions but rarely can we build up a conscience by our rhetoric.

We are thoroughly ineffective at trying to convince others of the wrongness of their wrongs.  We can try interventions, guilt-tripping and emotional pleas and rarely, if ever will we get far with another person’s conscience.  There is only one way for a conscience to be significantly altered.  It must be transformed by the presence of the Spirit of God.  Isaiah provides the perfect example of a converted conscience.  When He came up into the presence of God, he realized just how filthy and disgusting his speech had been before.   "Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined!  For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty. (Isaiah 6:5 NIV)  Before this encounter with the Lord, Isaiah thought nothing of what sort of things he said…at least his conscience was unfazed by his words.  The moment he met the real God, he came undone with guilt for his conscience had been converted.  He knew that the sorts of things he had said before were ugly and wrong.  This did not come to him as an intellectual unearthing, it was a Spiritual revelation that not only uncovered the sin he did not before think was sinful but also brought deep remorse for what he realized he had been doing.

The Apostle Paul is a clear example of how the conscience is altered.  As mentioned before, Paul did not seem to feel guilty about his past persecution of Christians when he first met Jesus in a blazing manifestation of His glory.  It was much later that his conscience convicted him of the wrong he had done and he saw himself clearly as a sinner and really a sinner.  This is how he put it after the Spirit of God had changed Paul’s conscience.  What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? (Romans 7:24-25 NIV)  This is not false guilt…not like someone weeping over the death of a mosquito he killed; this was the guilt of having done rotten things that before he had never thought were wrong.  This is the guilt of an alcoholic who suddenly realizes what horrible consequences his drinking has brought his family but more importantly, how it has wrecked his life with God.  This is the guilt of a stockbroker who had merrily cheated his clients out of their savings but now saw clearly the evil of his actions.  This is the guilt of young mother who finally realizes how terrible it has been for her to abandon the church.  No one can make her see how truly bad her own sin is; only God can reveal it.  The Bible puts it this way in 2 Corinthians 10: 4.  The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. (NIV)  God alone can break through into a conscience that is unable to see its own sin and change the way the conscience interprets badness.  Divine power can accomplish what we are powerless to undertake.

There is a second way our conscience is awakened to real sin within and it is a terrible discovery.  Let the Apostle Paul explain.  Timothy, my son, I give you this instruction in keeping with the prophecies once made about you, so that by following them you may fight the good fight, holding on to faith and a good conscience. Some have rejected these and so have shipwrecked their faith.  Among them are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme.  (1Timothy 1:18-20 NIV)  There are times when even a Christian has abandoned his conscience and it becomes wasted on him.  What does God do in those situations?  Honestly it is terrifying but it is the epitome of “tough love”.  The Lord turns over the person to Satan.  We know what happened when God let Job be in the hands of Satan.  It can feel like “hell” but it isn’t.  God lets the person who has turned off her conscience and given up on it be in the grip of Satan.  It happened to Nebuchadnezzar when he went crazy for a year.  It happened to David after he committed adultery with Bathsheba.  It happened to Jonah when he was cast into the raging sea and it happened to Peter after he denied Christ in Caiaphas’s courtyard (see Luke 22: 31).

The church is given authority to do this and it must happen for the good of those who are ruining their consciences by going against them.  The Bible says that it is strong medicine for the sick spirit that is reeling from sin.  When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord. (1 Corinthians 5:4-5 NIV)  In this instance it was a man who was sleeping with his father’s wife.  It could be someone cheating on her husband, another who is an angry man who won’t control his temper, it might be a person who is cheating God out of the tithe or someone destroying her family by her drug addiction.  But we have to be careful here.  This is an extreme measure and only to be done if someone has completely shut out the conscience.  When that happens and there is no remorse for sin, you just quit praying for the person and stop trying to change his behavior.  You let Satan have his way with the person and in the end, God will have freed him or her of the taste for sin.  All rebellion against God will be gone and a craving for the Lord’s presence will surface and dominate the personality.

It is most dreadful when God turns us over to Satan…the most horrible of turns.  That is why we must keep our conscience clear and let the Holy Spirit of God direct our actions.  You see misery and unmitigated corruption in the personality turned over to Satan, a complete blindness to the destruction that person faces and yet, when like Nebuchadnezzar, he turns back to God, when he gets free of Satan’s grip by praying and seeking the mercy of Christ, it is like a fresh and exciting new dawn, filled with promise and hope and the joy of God.  When we walk in the light and trust Jesus Christ to direct us in each and every way whether it is something we see to do or stop doing in Scripture or when the quiet prod of the Holy Spirit through our conscience guides us, we have the peace of God surrounding us and protecting us and keeping us safe.  

Hidden But Never Far From You

The last time we saw an age of "no morality" and "no religion" we witnessed the bloody French revolution.  Rationalism brought with it the loss of religious faith and the era of amorality but there was no freedom in it.  There never is such a species of man who lives outside law; the morals of the whorehouse are just as binding as those of the monastery and the debased sorority is far more dictatorial than any fundamentalist.  Jesus said that out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.(Matthew 15:19 NIV) This is not modern; it is ancient morality that began in Adam.  We all have this mush of values roiling about below the surface of our consciousness and it is our moral baseline.  The myth of our time is that we can live above ourselves somehow, beyond  the values of our grandparents but it is a lie.  The morality of this age is just as rigid as that of the Canaanites and Philistines.  The drug dealer's moral code is more fundamental than a Baptist's and of much greater risk to cross.  Stalin had the morality of Cain etched upon his soul; millions would have wished it were instead the morality of Christ.  One's conscience is nothing more than the biggest values he holds and a conscience is of no use if the morals it knows are of no higher standard than those of Picasso or Jack London.  We do not need a conscience, we need a Savior and it is the Cross of Christ that dips down below our consciousness and raises us up to a new morality, one of love and patience and faith.  The blood of Christ does not make us more aware of right and wrong; it buys us back and transforms us that we can begin to be holy, not out of fear of a rampaging angel but out of a redeemed heart that has been changed with the heart of God implanted within it.  Your thoughts, if you are honest have never been as warm and cool as a teddy bear; you are more like  a snake in your deepest points.  Only Jesus Christ can make your thoughts pure and clean and vibrant with love as you let Him have His way with you.  The Lord is not your polish to bring out your shine, He is the furnace out of which all things are made new.  Never put faith in yourself; but always trust God to make you right.

Trust in God.  Trust also in me. John 14: 1b

The Movement Past Conscience

At what point do you suddenly realize you have gone too far, looked too long, reacted too harshly, listened to too much, pushed past where you should have stopped?  Is it when you heard something telling you to stop, when you felt a tug to quit, when your mind began to cloud over with guilt?  When is too much too much? We speak of the conscience as the perpetual nerdy friend who doesn’t like to have a good time.  Or else the conscience is the ultimate arbiter of good and evil, the one sure scale on which to measure right from wrong.  We hear this sort of statement often.  “Well, it may not be right for you but it is for me.”  The implication is that personal conscious is the guide for right living.

Every one of us has some sort of conscience; it is along with language the mark of being human.  Shades of right and wrong do not slip into the thinking of the beasts; it is we who sink into that abyss, or would it be better to say who climb those heights.  Because the conscience is natural and organic, it is also arbitrary.  There is not a “uniform” conscience; one that defines us all.  Your conscience will not be the same as your friend’s or even your brother’s. Joseph Stalin had one conscience, your uncle another.  It is impossible to say conclusively that Adolph Hitler did not follow his conscience in what he did nor that Mother Teresa always followed hers.  My “too far” probably is not yours and will not be Mick Jagger’s.

Is there though a real “too far”, just as there is a real mile or a real pound?  How do we measure right and wrong, good and bad in actual time and space?  Does it exist…such a true measure? Jesus was asked by the rich young ruler what good thing he had to do to inherit eternal life.  This was not a simpleton’s question.  It was asked by a true thinker who recognized the human condition.  At some point we cannot just rely on our conscience; we need to look into what is always right and what is always wrong because it does matter.

There is something most casual readers of the New Testament fail to realize and that is how Jesus analyzed his own behavior and approach to situations.  He let the scripture and the guidance of the Father determine each step He took.  At the time of temptation in the wilderness, Jesus used the Bible to arbitrate for Him how He should act.  That was almost an unconscious guide because He used His mind to know it so well.  Clearly Jesus studied the Bible enough to know at each space in life what it might have to say about a matter.

But there was another hedge He had in deciding right and wrong.  He constantly communicated with the Father on what He was doing and thinking and facing. 

This statement of Jesus in John is most informative.  “For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it.”  (John 12:49 NIV)  Somehow, and we are not told how, Jesus heard from the Father even in the details of His behavior what He was to do.  At the point of what specific things to say at any given moment and in what tone of voice to use, Jesus had direction from the Father on good and bad, right and wrong.  This is different from the prodding of conscience; this is a direct line to what is really right and what is really wrong.  If we could get past our individualistic and arbitrary conscience to the actual measure of right and wrong, we would know where to start in living.

How was Jesus so perfectly in tune with the guiding of the Father?  He was, like the first Adam free of sin and so had the same ability the first Adam had.  He could and did walk with the Father as He went about His business.  Like the two disciples who went with Jesus on the road to Emmaus and heard the real accounting of how the crucifixion and resurrection fit into the plan of God, we too can “walk with God” and hear from Him as Jesus heard from the Father.  We have the promise of Jesus that the Holy Spirit, God too just as the Father and Son are God, would by faith in Christ be with us.  And Jesus also has promised to be with us always.  What do we make of this?

We have at our finger tips, or even closer always the right and wrong there to know and understand.  It is not a matter of my right and wrong or your right and wrong; it is right and wrong as it really is.  We are within reach at any moment when Christ is ours by faith the knowing of good and bad.  Not just knowing by a swing and perhaps a miss but a knowing that is certain.

How do we get to this point where we know exactly what to say and how to say it, what to do and how to do it?  The caveat is simple.  You must have decided that is what you want to know.  If you do not really want to know, Jesus will let you walk away from it just as easily as the rich young ruler did.  But if you want to know, you must be determined to know the scriptures.  You must be able to tell the difference between what is a really right or wrong and what is merely a tangle of your conscience.  There are miles of issues we can discuss that have a level of right and wrong to them but if we do not know the scripture…really know the scripture, we cannot be certain we are not just sifting them through our conscience rather than the actual right and actual wrong of a matter.  That is why it is so difficult discussing the big moral issues of our age: abortion, homosexuality, integrity, war, globalization, pornography.  The scripture is either ignored or not known well enough to arbitrate between consciences.

There is a bigger issue though before us and that is how to get at the details of right and wrong as arbitrated directly by God.  It is easy to just lay out three bullet points or six directives but if that were the case, we would have far more Christians acting upon right and wrong.  The hearing from God is much more organic and familial.  You must become familiar with the way God speaks to you directly. It is an experiment in holiness.  As God prods you in a right or a wrong, whether by the remembrance of a scripture or some very personal way He guides you, then you act upon it and even if you feel guilty from your conscience or disappointed because of your lusts, you fight through it and do the thing or don’t do it.  The next time you sense the prod of God, you act upon it then and there.  The more you do this, them more familiar you will be with the actual God behind you way of seeing and thinking.  You will become more comfortable with the real presence of God; more alert to Him too.  Every child has a conscience; only the child of God has the true right and wrong within.  You must though like Jesus give God room in your heart to guide you and holiness will not just be something you consider, it will be yours as a real possession.