Please turn in your Bibles this morning to Romans chapter 9 as we look at man’s conscience and how it can become deceitful to us. Let me show you what I mean with the following story. We are told:
The haunting story of fourteen-year-old Rod Matthews serves as a warning to a culture gone adrift. Rod was not interested in the things that normally interest teenagers. Neither sports nor books were enough to quench his insatiable boredom. Only one thing excited him: death. He spent hours watching the video Faces of Death, a collection of film clips of people dying violently. Rod’s curiosity about death led him to want to see death personally, not just on the television or movie screen.
Eventually, he found a way to satisfy his curiosity. One winter afternoon he lured a friend out into the woods and proceeded to beat him to death with a baseball bat. During his trial for murder, the most telling remark was made by a child psychiatrist who was asked to give a clinical evaluation of Rod’s condition. The doctor’s assessment was that Rod was not insane in the conventional sense but that he simply didn’t “know right from wrong . . . He [was] morally handicapped.”
- Mark DeVries, Family-Based Youth Ministry, p. 53
As you look at this nation today it seems like many people don’t know right from wrong, and this extends to many Christians as well. You see, according to Focus on the Family, two-fifths of people who claim to be Christians believe you can do anything you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone! You see, the conscience of Americans, both Christians and non-Christians has been seared with a hot iron and we have become insensitive to the things that God hates, the things that God abhors!
My prayer for our study this morning is we would become sensitive to these things, to the things of God instead of hardening our hearts and then blaming God for the consequences of our actions or saying that God is blessing our evil behavior! We are first going to look at some examples of how far away from God we have gone and then we will look at how to get back on track, what we need to do so that are hearts are not hardened to God but sensitive to His leading. So with that said, let’s beginning reading in Romans chapter 9, starting in verse 1 and see what that Lord has for us this morning.
In this section Paul is speaking of his love and his sorrow over Israel’s rejection of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. All that God had given to them, to the Jewish people, the things He entrusted to them; He adopted them into the family of God, the glory of being a child of God, the covenants of God, the Law of God, the service of God, the many promises of God to them, and yet, they are lost in theirs sins because of their rejection of Jesus, the one who paid in full the sins of not only the Jews but of the world!
Paul is so concerned, that if it were possible he would be accursed from Christ, sent to Hell, if his brethren, the Jews would receive Jesus as their Lord and Savior! Now some would argue that those words are just plain empty, but I don’t believe that they are, I believe that Paul was very sincere when he said that, that this came from the heart of Paul who was in tune with God’s heart. How do I know that? Because Paul said “I tell the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart.” Romans 9:1-2. You see, Paul’s own conscience is bearing witness to this fact along with the Holy Spirit!
Now, in saying that, the human conscience apart from God is not a reliable guide, and we will see that in a few minutes. You see, the trouble with the advice that we should “follow our own conscience” is that most people follow it like someone following a wheelbarrow – they direct it wherever they want it to go and then they just follow behind it! The problem comes, as H. C. Trumbull said, “Conscience tells us that we ought to do right, but it does not tell us what right is – that we are taught by God’s word.”
I believe that God has placed in our hearts what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, even as corrupted as that has become with sin. The thing is you can short-circuit that system that God has given to us and become totally insensitive to what God has said, what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, and you do as you please. It is as Paul said in I Timothy 4:2, “speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron.” The idea is that you have become calloused, insensitive to the things of God and the only way to know then what is right and what is wrong is from the Word of God. As Christians, the Word of God needs to be our guide because we can let the world’s philosophies; the world’s ideas influence our lives!
As I look at Americans today they are truly confused about morals, what is right and what is wrong, we can fight to save the whale and stand up for abortion, the killing of a child in the womb! Our conscience has been seared with a hot iron as these examples show us.
This is from the Christian Research Institute:
U. S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recently published a disturbing essay entitled “Defining Deviancy Down.” In the Nov 22 issue of The New Republic, Commentator Charles Krauthammer writes that “Moynihan’s powerful point is that with the moral deregulation of the 1960s, we have had an explosion of deviancy in family life, criminal behavior and public displays of psychosis. And we have dealt with it in the only way possible: by redefining deviancy down so as to explain away and make ‘normal’ what a more civilized, ordered and healthy society long ago would have labeled – and long ago did label – deviant.”
- Christian Research Institute letter, December 6, 1993
Do you see how our conscience has been seared with a hot iron and that which was immoral, deviant, has now become normal, acceptable, but not before God and it should not be before us either!
This is a story from Confident Living and we are told:
In Charles Swindoll’s book, The Quest for Character (Multnomah), “sociologist and historian Carle Zimmerman, in his 1947 book Family and Civilization, recorded his keen observations as he compared the disintegration of various cultures with parallel decline of family life in those cultures. Eight specific patterns of domestic behavior typified the downward spiral of each culture Zimmerman studied: Marriage loses its sacredness . . . is frequently broken by divorce; traditional meaning of the marriage ceremony is lost; feminist movements abound; there is increased public disrespect for parents and authority in general; an acceleration of juvenile delinquency, promiscuity and rebellion occurs; there is refusal of people with traditional marriages to accept family responsibilities; a growing desire for, and acceptance of, adultery is evident; there is increasing interest in, and spread of, sexual perversions and sex-related crimes.”
- Confident Living, November 1987, p. 34
And as you watch television you are seeing these abnormal behaviors or immoral behaviors accepted as normal as we laugh about them. We see this from the Simpson’s to Will & Grace, to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and the list goes on. The thing is we watch this as if God accepts it but He doesn’t! Our conscience has been seared with a hot iron!
And it only gets worse. Listen to this scary study regarding the right to force sex:
Consider the results of a survey conducted in 1988 by the Rhode Island Rape Crisis Center. Some 1,700 students between the sixth and ninth grade attended adolescent assault awareness classes conducted in the schools across the state. Each boy and girl was asked if a man should have the right to force a woman to have sexual intercourse if he had spent money on her.
The results were shocking. Nearly 25 percent of the boys and 16 percent of the girls said “yes”! Then 65 percent of the boys and 47 percent of the girls in the seventh through ninth grades said it is okay for a man to force a woman to have sex with him if they have dated for six months or longer. And 51 percent of the boys and 41 percent of the girls said a man has a right to force a woman to kiss him if he spent “a lot of money on her” – which was defined by 12-year-olds as $10 to $15.
I must admit to being shocked by these findings, and yet, not really. These young students merely learned the lessons they were taught by the value-free educational system. Their teachers taught them in sex education classes that there is nothing right or wrong, no standard for moral judgment. “It all depends on how you see the matter, Johnny.” It turns out Johnny sees it rather brutally.
Johnny’s older brothers learned their lessons well, too. In a classic study at UCLA, Malamuth and Feshback found that 51 percent of male sophomores said they would rape a woman if they knew they would never get caught. This is the legacy of moral relativism, just one generation removed.
- J. Dobson & Gary Bauer, Children at Risk, Word, 1990, 00. 258-259
Shocked! I hope you are and yet these young men, really children, think it is okay to have your way with a woman or girl if you spend enough money on them! And what is even more shocking is that these woman, these girls see it the same way, that it is okay to be abused like that because the boy took you out for a meal! Our conscience has been seared with a hot iron!
This is an E-mail to the Editor in response to Joseph Farah’s article on homosexuality. Franklin Kameny tells us:
Our true God gave us our homosexuality as a divinely-inspired gift and blessing, to be enjoyed to its fullest, exultantly, exuberantly, and joyously.
Gay is good, Godly, moral and virtuous, and American. You homophobes are evil, ungodly, immoral and sinful, irrational to the point of utter lunacy and beyond, and un-American and anti-American. You don’t have a clue to what America and true Americanism are all about.
- Franklin E. Kameny
Isn’t it amazing how the ungodly can turn things around and call evil good and good evil? And think about it, to be American means you have to embrace homosexuality, if you don’t you are anti-American! Give me a break! You see, man’s conscience is evil apart from God; there is no guide for them, they just do as they please and as you can see, they come to some bizarre conclusions because their conscience is seared with a hot iron!
In response to the Super Bowl halftime show, Deborah Green had this to say:
In my assessment, the exposure of Janet Jackson’s mammary gland was clearly planned. I have been in the entertainment industry all my life. Costumes don’t do that. Zippers give out, skirts get stepped on and ripped, straps break, buttons pop, trousers seams rip from too much derriere, but bra cups do not come completely off. It just doesn’t happen. Ever.
What was the MTV-CBS-NFL motive for this gratuitous display?
That should be as obvious as Janet’s tasseled t-t. It was a ruse. It was to distract attention from the really vile content of the rest of the halftime show. Instead of focusing on obscene song lyrics and the overt celebration of sexual perversion on display during the entire show, America will now accept all of that as no big deal and focus on two seconds of a stage “accident.”
That is a shame. As offensive as that moment was – and it was horrific – considering the demographic of the TV audience for a Super Bowl game, it was small in comparison within the context of the entire halftime show.
- Deborah Green
I have to agree, the suggestive sexual dancing, the grabbing between their legs when they would sing was even more offensive. And yet, notice the focus, very little attention on the singers and dancers and the way they behaved and all the focus on Janet Jackson and what she did, which was horrible, was wrong and there should be consequences for her actions as well as the male singer who did it. But what about all the lyrics and suggestive dancing, isn’t anyone offended by that? You see, they keep pushing us farther down the path where we accept any kind of ungodly behavior as if it were sent from God, as if it were good, and it is not! Our conscience has been seared with a hot iron!
Dennis Prager makes these interesting comments on the state of America as he looks at High School students:
It is no wonder that in 15 years of asking high school students throughout America whether, in an emergency situation, they would save their dog or a stranger first, most students have answered that they would not save the stranger. “I love my dog, I don’t love the stranger,” they always say.
The feeling of love has supplanted God or religious principle as the moral guide for young people. What is right has been redefined in terms of what an individual feels.
- Dennis Prager, Good News, July/Aug., 1993
Again, our conscience is being seared with a hot iron so we are the guides of our conscience not God, as Thomas Sowell tells us:
“I think it’s fairly obvious why I was married. As strange as it may sound, I am a very moral woman. I was taught by my parents that if you fall in love, if you want to have a love affair, you get married. I guess I’m very old-fashioned.” Elizabeth Taylor after seven marriages, five divorces, in the San Francisco Chronicle.
All across this country, the undermining and destruction of the values that children were taught at home is going on in public schools. One of the first things a family tries to teach its children is the difference between right and wrong. One of the first things our schools try to destroy is that distinction.
The up-to-date way to carry on the destruction of traditional values is to claim to be solving some social problem like drugs, AIDS or teen-age pregnancy. Only those few people who have the time to research what is actually being done in “drug education,” “sex education” or “death education” courses know what an utter fraud these labels are.
For those are courses about how right and wrong are outmoded notions, about how your parents’ ideas are no guide for you, and about how each person must start from scratch to develop his or her own way of behaving.
- Thomas Sowell, Creators Syndicate, quoted in Reader’s Digest, March 1993, p. 178
That is the problem, each of us is developing our own ideas of what is right and what is wrong and God is out of the picture, what He has said has no affect upon us! And we can go on-and-on showing you examples of how our conscience has been seared and is being seared with a hot iron and we are moving farther and farther away from God and His standards, but I think you get the idea here, you can see where we are at. Thus, with the remainder of our time this morning I would like to focus on how we can rectify that problem, to become sensitive to the things of God, His will, His desire for our lives. It is as Oswald Chambers said:
Conscience is that faculty in me which attaches itself to the highest that I know, and tells me what the highest I know demands that I do. It is the eye of the soul which looks out either toward God or toward what it regards as the highest authority. If I am in the habit of steadily facing toward God, my conscience will always introduce God’s perfect law and indicate what I should do. The point is, will I obey? I have to make an effort to keep my conscience so sensitive that I walk without offense. I should be living in such perfect sympathy with God’s Son that in every circumstance the spirit of my mind is renewed.
The one thing that keeps the conscience sensitive to Him is the habit of being open to God on the inside. When there is any debate, quit. There is no debate possible when conscience speaks.
- Oswald Chambers
How true that is, there is no debate, it is God’s way or the highway! It is not my way, it is not your way, but it is YAHWAH! In saying that, let’s look at what the Scriptures tell us regarding a godly conscience, for God alone can be our guide, especially when we look at our society, our nation and see that the basis for our behavior is our own will instead of the will of God and thus, we need Him to be our guide, not the world, not the flesh and not the Devil!
Peter, on the day of Pentecost, spoke forth the Words of God, showed the people they were lost in their sins apart from Christ and their response to what Peter said is given to us in Acts 2:37, “Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Men and brethren, what shall we do?’” Their conscience was stirred, they felt conviction and they wanted to know what they needed to do to get saved. Also, in II Samuel 24:10, after David sinned by numbering the people, we are told, “And David's heart condemned him after he had numbered the people. So David said to the LORD, “I have sinned greatly in what I have done; but now, I pray, O LORD, take away the iniquity of Your servant, for I have done very foolishly.’” Thus, God’s Word convicts our hearts to save us and then once we are saved it convicts our hearts when we sin. We can harden our hearts to the conviction of God, to what God is saying to us, but don’t, be open to the Lord and what He is telling you and then do it!
Also, Paul in Hebrews 9:13-14 tells us, “For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” Our conscience before we got saved was dead to God and the things of God but Christ has come to soften our hearts, to remove the hardness that has encased them so that we can be sensitive to the things of God!
You see, if we neglect our fellowship with God, if we are disobedient to the Word of God, even we as believers can have a conscience that is unreliable and insensitive to God. I knew of a pastor, a great Bible teacher, who was convinced that he was to marry another woman in the church, even though he was already married and had several children. This relationship went so far, it got so bad and so bizarre that they already picked out and bought a wedding dress! And please understand, God had told him that this was to take place, this was of God, God spoke to them both regarding this matter! GARBAGE! But do you see how we can become so hard to God and His Word that we can come up with bizarre activities, ideas and say God has blessed it, He has spoken when in reality He hasn’t! But you see, our conscience can become so hardened that we believe it to be true when God’s Word says it isn’t, but we are not listening. Obviously, when this was made known, he stepped down from the ministry, but how tragic it was and still is!
To help get a better perspective of this, listen to what John MacArthur said regarding this issue. We are told:
The human conscience by itself is neutral. It is activated by and according to the nature of the person to whom it belongs. The conscience of an evil, unregenerate man is no guard against sinful thoughts and actions. The conscience of a faithful believer, on the other hand, is reliable, because it is activated by the truths and standards of God’s Word and is energized by the power of God’s indwelling Holy Spirit. When we live in the Spirit, walk in the Spirit, and obey the Spirit, we can trust our conscience because it is under divine control. The Spirit’s perfect prompting will either commend or condemn what we are doing or are planning to do.
- John MacArthur, Romans
Who is controlling your life? Who is guiding your life? You see, if it is not God by His Spirit it is then your flesh nature, the world or the Devil who is guiding you, and that is dangerous because the flesh, the world and the Devil are in opposition to God, they are at war with God. It is as Paul said in Titus 1:15, “To the pure all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; but even their mind and conscience are defiled.” You see, our conscience is pure because the Word of God through the power of the Holy Spirit is guiding us. Outside of the Word of God and the power of the Holy Spirit is defilement, uncleanness, and it is not pure, and that is what we see today as people do their own things and they are an abomination before God!
Do you ever wonder what would happen if we would go to “G” rated movies instead of “R” rated movies? Do you ever wonder what would happen if we didn’t watch those sexually explicit television shows? Did you ever wonder what would happen if we didn’t buy those sexually explicit magazines or books? I will tell you this, these industries would take notice because they would be losing money and lets face it, they give to us that which sells! I think the problem today, even as Christians, is we grab for what we want and thus, these industries continue to grow.
Maybe this is a wakeup call for us, to take a stand for morality, for what God desires so our conscience won’t become dead to the things of God, but soft and sensitive to the things of God! You see, if we don’t, once we lighten or soften our conscience to the flesh, the world, and the Devil and call these things a “necessary evil,” it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil! May we not forget that!
And I have to agree with what Georgia Anne Geyer had to say regarding turning this nation around, because it is not going to be done by passing laws, only God can transform a persons heart. She tells us:
I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to have a moral community or nation without faith in God, because without it everything rapidly comes down to “me,” and “me” alone is meaningless. Today Americans have stopped acting in terms of their own moral, ethical and religious beliefs and principles. They’ve stopped acting on what they knew was right – and the “me” has become measure of everything. However, moral societies are the only ones that work. If anyone thinks there is not a direct and invaluable relationship between personal integrity in a society and that society’s prosperity, that person has simply not studied history. And this should not surprise us. Great moral societies, built upon faith in God, honor, trust, and the law blossoms because they are harmonious; because people love or at least respect their fellowman; because, finally, they have a common belief in something beyond themselves. It simplifies life immensely; you do not waste and spend your days fighting for turf, for privilege, for money and power over your fellowman. Alexis de Tocqueville said it best when he realized even at the very beginning of our national life, “America is great because America is good. If America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”
- Georgia Anne Geyer, Bits & Pieces, September 17, 1992, pp. 23-24
As I begin to rap this up this morning, maybe you heard the story of the man who went to the doctor with the following problem. He said: “I’ve been misbehaving, Doc, and my conscience is troubling me.” The doctor responded back, “And you want something that will strengthen your willpower?” “Well, no,” said the man, “I was thinking of something that would weaken my conscience!” May we not respond like that, short-circuiting our conscience so we can do what we want, so we can do evil, may we be open to God and then respond as He leads!
May I leave you this morning with these words from Martin Luther to think about and apply to your life so that your conscience will be in tune with God’s will, His Word, His desire for your life. Martin Luther said this: “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” If you will do that you won’t go astray! You see, a conscience that is surrendered to God’s Word is a conscience that is submitted to the Holy Spirit! Thus, walk accordingly; keep your heart soft before the Lord!