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What is a conscience?
What is the conscience? The conscience you can think of as being like a referee.
Hebrews 9:14
What is the conscience? The conscience you can think of as being like a referee. And you know how a referee calls things inbounds or out of bounds, or it can be like an umpire and you know that an umpire will call the pitch high or low or outside, but sometimes straight down the middle. The conscience is like that. It’s like a judge. It judges whether something is right or wrong. It judges what’s right or wrong in what we do so that we can think about it and say, was that right or was that wrong? And we might feel guilt or we might feel okay about what we did.
The conscience judges and what we see around us in what people are doing around us and the conscience also judges on what’s on the inside of us. Is that good? Is that bad? And so the conscience needs to be formed in the right way because we can be misled and we can start to think of what we already know as being right or wrong in a different way. And this simply underscores the importance of having a Christian home, having good Christian friends who won’t lead you astray in your thinking because that’s the safest place for the conscience. But most important for us is the role of God’s Word in forming our conscience. God’s Word in faithful law and gospel teaching will tell us what God says is right and wrong.
A rightly formed conscience, then, is sensitive so that when you do something wrong, when you have a sin, it should hurt a little like a pin pricking your skin when the conscience is working in the right way. So that we feel shame or we feel regret for something we’ve done and we don’t want people to know about that. This is how we can have a bad conscience or a guilty conscience, a troubled conscience. And the Bible has another term for it, and that is an unclean conscience. Hebrews nine, verse 14 speaks to this. It’s a great promise.
The blood of Christ will cleanse our conscience from dead works so that we serve God. (Hebrews 9:14)
And this is a great promise. And it’s good news for us because it tells us first that God wants you to have a clean conscience. He doesn’t want you to go along struggling with this guilty and troubled conscience, but he wants to do something about it. And so he sent his son, Jesus, to die on the cross, to take away your sins. First, to live a perfect life, to count for you and to win your salvation and your cleansing for your conscience by the blood that he shed.
And then Jesus comes to you. He comes to you in his word and in the sacraments of baptism in the Lord’s Supper. And do you know the reason he comes? It’s to cleanse you, to give you a clean conscience. Baptism washes away your sin. In the Lord’s Supper, we think of the forgiveness of sins that it brings. But also we can think of it in terms of cleansing. It cleanses you from the inside out, so it cleanses you not only from the sins that you’ve done, but also the effects of all the sins that have been done to you. In the Lord’s Supper he cleanses you so that you don’t have to struggle for your clean conscience. But God gives you a clean conscience.
And in fact, that’s what the church service is for. It’s for God to give you a clean conscience. Do you have a troubled conscience? Do you feel unclean, perhaps? Call your pastor. Find a church of our fellowship in the Evangelical Lutheran Synod. The pastors of our churches are there for one reason, really, and that is to deliver you the clean conscience that God wants to give you. They are there to care for the conscience because that’s what God wants for you.
