The goal of this book is “to put conscience back on your daily radar, to show from Scripture what God intended and did not intend [the] conscience to do, and to explain how your conscience works, how to care for it, and how not to damage it.”¹

Definition & Understanding

As their titles suggest, the first two chapters deal with defining the conscience. Chapter 1 defines the conscience as “your consciousness of what you believe is right and wrong.” Chapter 2 examines how the New Testament writers taught about conscience and develops a biblical understanding of the conscience from these data. Included in this is a definition of the “weak conscience”: an “uninformed moral consciousness.”² As we’ll see later, this is the first of two definitions given in this book, and this presents a dilemma.

Chapter 3 answers, “What Should You Do When Your Conscience Condemns You?” The answer is the gospel, for nothing but the grace of God in the atoning work of Jesus can free us from guilt. This applies to the lost man approaching the cross with his guilt and the long-time believer who must again and again return to God in confession and seek forgiveness. We must never allow our guilt to become a tool for the accuser to bring us to despair. Read more about Review - Conscience: What It Is, How to Train It, and Loving Those Who Differ (Part 1)

Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. (1 Timothy 4:1-5)

These verse were probably written 5-10 years after Romans and 1 Corinthians. Paul’s teaching on the conscience was well circulated in writing and taught in person throughout his three missionary journeys. This seems to allow him to be very brief with his statements in 1 Timothy. He gave Timothy a warning about false teachers who will come into the church. They will have two false teachings: forbidding marriage and certain foods.

These are familiar conscience issues. Marriage is an issue of the conscience in 1 Corinthians 7 and 9. Food is perhaps Paul’s most commonly used example (Romans 14, 1 Corinthians 8-10) of an issue of conscience. But there are new things to be learned from this short passage. Read more about Adjusting the Conscience Through the Word & Prayer (Part 12)

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We often think of “weak” and “strong” as though they are static and unchanging. Are they? Is change possible, either from strong to weak or from weak to strong?

Weakness, properly done, is nothing more than God’s Word applied to our lives. He says, “Put no other God’s before me.” We respond by refusing to involved in idol-worship. But what does it mean to be involved in idol-worship? There is a whole spectrum of positions.

The weakest brother can’t eat any meat, for what is sold in the market could be tainted.¹ Another would eat meat so long as no one around was conscientious of tainted food. A third brother would go right into the temple and, ignoring the ceremony honoring the idol, eat with his friends and colleagues. Read more about Adjusting the Conscience (Part 10)

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When we apply Scripture, we arrive at convictions and we obey God by living according to them. But then why the differences? Why would different believers apply Scripture differently? Why would some believers be unable, or “weak” to do things, while others, apparently, don’t apply those Scriptures, at least in that way?

If each Scripture passage has one meaning that doesn’t change based on the reader, should all readers apply it in the same way?

To answer these questions, it helps to know that all these convictions of conscience can also be thought of in terms of heart-issues. I’ll give a personal example. A few years ago, in one of our deacon meetings at church, one of our group didn’t take his hat off when we prayed together. Read more about An Aside: Conscience and Heart Issues (Part 8)