Acts 15:1-21 | Discerning God's Will预览

Our Conscience

There’s a second way to go about discerning God’s will. It’s our conscience. It serves as an additional way the Spirit goes about guiding us into truth. Our conscience is not meant to stand over and against the Bible. It’s meant to work in tandem with it.

Here’s why.

People have done abusive things with the Bible. People have misread it, misinterpreted it, and misapplied it. People have used it to support their own agendas, and have extracted bits and pieces of it that seemingly support their own will. People have used it as a weapon in ways God never intends, and drawn conclusions from it that can even seem logical on the surface, but just aren’t true. The Bible is the word of God, but it’s a word people can misunderstand and distort.

Sometimes people do this maliciously. Other times it’s out of innocent ignorance. Our conscience is meant to be a safeguard and corrective.

Have you ever read something in the Bible that seems so wrong it just can’t be right? It’s possible you’re misinterpreting the Bible, misapplying it somehow, trying to draw more from a single passage than it intends, or isolating a passage from other things God has to say on the matter.

This can happen among the sincerest of believers who rightly cherish the Bible so highly, that they begin to hang all their beliefs and understanding of God’s will on one passage alone. It’s been compared to coming to a stop sign, believing in the importance of what it says, and staying there until it tells you to go. It makes too much of the word and turns it into something it doesn't intend. It fails to realize that all language is shorthand and situated in context.

This is where your conscience comes in. It can course-correct ways you’re wrongly using the Bible. The Bible says God has made his existence evident, and that when it comes to right and wrong, good and evil, it’s obvious. God has written these things into nature and hardwired them into our hearts. And it’s a good thing. Not many of us have the Bible memorized. But all of us have that guiding sense, in general, of God’s will.

This isn’t to say our conscience is perfect. Far from it! It’s become as corrupt and fallen as the world around us. Jeremiah warns, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9). And yet God’s will is still written upon it. Those who trust in the Lord have their hearts renewed, and the Spirit will both convict and shape it.

Which leads to obedience.

The more we sin, the more we desensitize our conscience. (The Bible calls it hardening of heart.) The more we desensitize our conscience, the harder it can be to hear God’s voice and discern his will. But the more we obey God, the more we give ourselves over to the transforming power of God within us, which leads to greater ability in discerning his will.

Where does that leave us? When you go about trying to discern God’s will, submit to the Bible and listen to your conscience. Since your conscience and worldview are distorted, let the Bible challenge you and shape you. Always submit to its worldview over your own. But if someone is telling you “The Bible says…” or you’re reading something in the Bible that seems to go against the grain of God, let your conscience guide you to dig more deeply, question more fully, and explore more intently what the Bible actually says and guard against misapplications of it.

This is what we see in Acts 15. Peter, Paul, and Barnabas all experienced God at work in the Gentiles. They couldn’t deny what they had seen. Despite the fact that other believers from Judea were standing on the Bible saying you must be circumcised, they let their consciences guide them into a deeper understanding of what God had been pointing to in the Bible, and therefore into God’s will and way.

Today, read some passages about how God interacts with our conscience. Tomorrow, we look at the final leg of the stool.