If you ignore your conscience, it will stop working
Sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell. Those are the traditional five senses with which God has endowed us so that we can perceive the realities of the physical world. (It’s now thought that there are considerably more than five; we can include temperature, pressure, balance, proprioception, pain, hunger/thirst, oxygenation, and as many as ten more.)
These senses are essential to optimal living in this world. We can survive without one or two of them, but our capabilities are severely impaired. It’s hard to function in the physical world without all of our senses working.
Our physical senses aren’t the only senses we have. We also have senses that point beyond the physical world, that make us perceive something that transcends the material. One of these senses is the conscience.
The conscience, as we know, is the sense that tells us right from wrong. It indicates that there are certain things that are right and wrong, good and evil, a standard that transcends simply what is beneficial and detrimental to us or anyone else. Not only that, but it tells us that this standard is something we are supposed to adhere to. It alerts us (sometimes even when we don’t want it to) of when we’re doing wrong, pricks us with guilt, and pushes us to do right instead. And it makes us feel joy and satisfaction when we do good.
Everyone, regardless of spiritual belief, acknowledges that the conscience is important to functioning in the world — we consider someone without a working conscience to be mentally ill. But still, we often make the error of believing that the conscience is just a feeling. A useful feeling, maybe, but just a feeling nonetheless.
But if we believe in a God who is himself the standard of perfect goodness, this isn’t true. The conscience is not just a feeling. Good and evil are not just relative to cultural values or personal feeling; they are absolute, objective truths measured by the nature of God. Good and evil are not just perceptions, values, or opinions; they are realities, as real as the physical world that our physical senses help us perceive. We don’t each set our own standard of good and evil; God is the standard. So, just as our physical senses help us correctly perceive the realities of the physical world, the conscience is a spiritual sense that helps us correctly perceive the realities of the spiritual world.
In fact, in many ways, the conscience works remarkably like a physical sense. For one thing, it’s not perfect. Just like your eyes and ears sometimes play tricks on you, your conscience can also play tricks on you. But it’s usually a pretty reliable guide to how we need to interact with the world.
However, our conscience, like our physical senses, is also subject to corruption, decline, and loss of effectiveness. That means that, just like our physical senses, we have to keep our conscience healthy and take care of it, otherwise it won’t work like it should. And chances are, we won’t even realize it.
So here’s what I think we need to do to take care of our conscience:
Learn to rely on the conscience. If we didn’t rely on our sense of sight, we would walk into poles and stare directly at the sun. If we didn’t rely on our hearing, we would stand next to jackhammers and hang out at firing ranges with no ear protection. If we didn’t rely on touch, we would pick up porcupines and rest our hands on the stove burners. And when we ignore the warnings our senses give us, it’s not only painful, but we also damage those senses so they don’t work as well. Your sight gets dimmer, your ears can’t pick up as much sound, your nerves get desensitized, and you have a hard time perceiving future dangers. When we ignore our conscience and do what it tells us not to, our sense of conscience also becomes dulled, and it becomes harder to recognize when we are walking on dangerous ground spiritually. Paul seemed to recognize this when he told people to listen to their conscience even if it pushed them to adhere to unnecessary rules (Romans 14, 1 Cor 8).
Ignoring your conscience is a lot like shining a laser pointer in your eye. The damage happens slowly and subtlely, but it does happen and is very hard to repair. Things we could once see, we won’t be able to, and we might no longer feel that push toward right away from wrong. Paul describes some people’s consciences as being “seared as with a hot iron” (1 Timothy 4:2); they no longer even have a sense of guilt, because they don’t know how to listen to their conscience anymore.
Nourish the conscience. Our physical senses need to be nourished with nutrients from physical food, water, and the environment. Our conscience also needs to be nourished with spiritual food. It’s appropriate, then, that Jesus refers to the Scripture as our food (Matthew 4:4). We don’t need the Bible to tell us the basics of right and wrong, but the Bible does help us see things from God’s point of view, and that will make our conscience stronger. It can be our glasses when our conscience isn’t able to give us a clear picture. And it gives us a detailed and personal picture of the standard our conscience directs us toward: the perfection of goodness found in God.
Train the conscience. While our conscience is usually a reliable sense, we can’t always see things the way God sees them through conscience alone. Sometimes our conscience may even contradict God’s word. This is seen again in the example in Romans 14, where some people’s consciences were telling them they should only eat vegetables (because a lot of meat sold in the market had been used in a sacrificial ceremony to an idol), even though Scripture clearly said it was okay to eat meat (Acts 10). We train our conscience by connecting with God, understanding the way he thinks, and recognizing the Holy Spirit is more authoritative than conscience.
All our consciences have been damaged by sin. But unlike some of the damage that may happen to our physical senses, the conscience can be repaired. I think if we make these things a practice, we can prevent our conscience from becoming “seared as with a hot iron,” and it can work as God made it to.
