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A Clear Conscience

There are many precious things that we can possess. Health, love, friends, a great family - these all are blessings. But perhaps one of the most important of all is a clear conscience.

Read Hebrews 10:19-22 and 1 Timothy 4:1, 2. What does it mean to have an “evil conscience” and a “conscience seared with a hot iron”?

Our conscience functions as an internal monitor of our outward lives. A conscience needs to attach itself to a high and perfect standard: God’s law. God wrote His law on the heart of Adam, but sin almost obliterated it - not just in him but in his descendants. Only fragments of the law remained. “[Gentiles] show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness” (Rom. 2:15, NIV). Jesus succeeds where Adam failed because God’s law was “within [His] heart” (Ps. 40:8, NKJV).

What does Paul say is our only solution to a bad conscience? See Heb. 9:14.

“The cobwebbed closet of conscience is to be entered. The windows of the soul are to be closed earthward and thrown wide open heavenward that the bright beams of the Sun of righteousness may have free access. . . . The mind is to be kept clear and pure that it may distinguish between good and evil.” - Ellen G. White, Mind, Character, and Personality, vol. 1, pp. 327, 328. When God’s law has been inscribed on the heart of the believer (Heb. 8:10), and the believer by faith seeks to follow that law, a clear conscience is the likely result.

If you have ever struggled under the strain of a guilty conscience, you know how terrible it can be, how it can be a continuous presence, never giving you relief. How can focusing on Jesus, and His death on the cross for you and your sin, help free you from the curse of a guilty conscience?