Sometimes criticisms that come to us are utterly unfounded and utterly unjust. And yet, often it is the case that there is some truth to the criticism. What we need to do at that point is examine ourselves and see if any of the criticism is true. We sometimes say in common speech, “Let your conscience be your guide.” But when we say that, we are treading on difficult ground because our conscience might not be able to tell us what the right thing is if it is not illuminated by the Word of God. In fact, your conscience can lead you in the opposite direction to do something that is profoundly wrong.
One of my predecessors at Tenth Presbyterian Church, Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, used to compare the conscience to a sundial. A sundial gives an approximation of good time when the sun is shining on it. But if the sun is not shining on the dial it does not give good time at all. If you go out in the garden at night where there is a sundial, and the moon is shining on it, it might indicate that it is 7 a.m. when it of course is not. The point Dr. Barnhouse was making was that unless our conscience has the Word of God shining on it—which I think is what Paul is talking about here when he says he conducted himself not according to worldly wisdom, but according to God’s grace—we are not going to act according to God’s revealed will for us, but according to the misguided ideas of our natural inclinations bent toward human wisdom. Unless we do that, we can make our conscience say anything we want, if we present it with the particular argument that satisfies it.
If we do something wrong, our conscience may well tell us that we must not do that. We respond, “Well, that may be true, but let me think about it a little bit.” So we think it over and come up with a reason for why it is right anyway. Once again our conscience tells us, “No, that’s not right. That’s not a good argument.” We think about it some more and come up with yet another argument. Our conscience whispers that it is still wrong, but it does not say it quite as strongly as it did at the beginning. Finally, we come up with a third reason for doing whatever it is we want to do, and this time our conscience is quiet, and so we go ahead and do the very thing that earlier our conscience had objected to. That is what a conscience will do that is not illuminated by the Word of God. On the other hand, as we study the Scriptures and examine what God has to say about our relation to Him and His standards for personal integrity, a conscience governed by that is valuable.
