Living in Line with Your Conscience with Bobby Jamieson
Have you ever struggled to navigate those grey areas where another believer's conscience leads them to a different answer or action step than you? How can we understand our consciences, know how to listen to them, and offer grace to those who land differently than us? As Bobby Jamieson reminded us in this week's episode, we can "tune our consciences" by saturating ourselves in God's Word and dwelling in unity in our church communities.
As believers we are united in Christ—and there will still be issues about which we disagree. As Bobby Jamieson reminded us in this week's episode, "Those disagreements can always threaten to become divisions." But there is hope! We can learn how to understand our conscience, listen to God's leading, and engage those we disagree with by showing kindness and respect and remembering the unity we share in Christ. We pray the practical and Scripture-based encouragement this episode offers will help you think through how to both understand and live in line with your conscience.
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
What is your conscience? Why does it matter? Where do we find the concept in Scripture?
What are some matters of conscience that we might be familiar with?
Why is understanding the conscience essential to the Christian life? Why is learning to relate to others’ consciences essential to the life and health of the local church?
What does your conscience do? What does it not do?
How can we get a clean conscience? How do we calibrate our conscience to God’s standards? How can we grow in keeping a clear conscience?
How might we stifle our consciences?
What would it be like to desensitize, disable, or distract our consciences?
What shouldn’t you do to your conscience?
What would it look like to outsource our conscience? What’s the danger of this in discipling relationships? What’s the difference between principles and methods?
What should we do to our consciences? How do we obey, question, and calibrate it? What are some helpful questions to ask ourselves?
NOTES & QUOTES
“Believers will have differently-formed or differently-informed consciences. We will not all agree all down the line about acceptable moral boundaries, about what exactly is an implication or a requirement of one of God's commands.”
“We could look at one of God's commands and go, ‘Of course we mean to obey that,’ and then we look at this thing out in the world and one of us goes, ‘Yeah, it's fine,’ and the other one says, ‘No, it's not. Are you crazy?’ And so there's a gap there between the principle and the application. And part of what Paul is saying here is you can have those disagreements and still worship God together, be united, be in harmony with each other, and that's actually his prayer for them.”
“Conscience is our inner judge, or you could even say our inner courtroom, whereby God's Word is mediated to us through ourselves, meaning it's our inner sense of right and wrong.”
“If I am contemplating a certain action, my conscience might warn me not to. If I commit a sin, my conscience will convict me. It's kind of like the flashing red light letting me know I've done something wrong and I need to address that, to repent, and to confess to the Lord.”
“None of our consciences are perfectly aligned with God's will. That's part of what it means to be fallen and finite. That's part of what it means to still have remnants of sin within us. And that's one of the reasons why believers' consciences don't perfectly map onto each other.”
“Because our consciences are imperfect, not only do we need to obey our consciences, but we need to educate our consciences to try to bring them into greater conformity with God's will. And what it means is there will be places where believers' consciences simply disagree.”
“[In Romans 14, Paul is] recognizing a kind of latitude within the church. You should have your own conviction. You should try to figure this out and obey God as best you can. But he's not insisting on a uniformity of conviction or practice.”
“And on the other hand, so that we don't wrongly tolerate something that really is a grave error that could divide or split a church.”
“A judgment of conscience always involves understanding a biblical principle and applying it to some real-world reality.”
“There will always be things we disagree about. Those disagreements can always threaten to become divisions. And the worse we do at accommodating others' consciences, the more divisive of a presence we'll be in the church, the more we'll be the kind of people who are threatening to split a church over this kind of thing.”
“Even if the disagreement persists, I can maintain my love, respect, affection, and unity. So those categories of conscience and charity are really important to make us the people who can repair and stitch back together the fabric of church unity, or are we the people who are always threatening to unravel it?”
“Part of what the ministry of a healthy church should be doing is regularly exposing all of its members to the whole Bible through expositional preaching, faithful topical teaching, Sunday school, equipping people to read the Bible for themselves, and publicly teaching and instructing, forming people's minds and hearts with sound doctrine. And especially that regular exposure to the whole counsel of God should have the effect of tuning up our consciences over time.”
“Listening to Scripture being preached and taught with a humble willingness to have our internal radar adjusted…that's just one key attitude to have as a church member.”
“When an issue like this comes up and you're rethinking a certain stance or stand, go to a pastor, go to a faithful church leader, and ask for resources that will help you dig into biblical principles and foundations.”
“One danger is outsourcing your conscience, letting someone else's conscience do the judging for you.You're the one who's going to have to answer to God for your decisions. You're the one who's going to give an account of yourself on judgment day. You want to be careful about not just adopting wholesale somebody else's life or bundle of issues or model just because they appeal to your vibe.”
“Violating your conscience is often very subtle. It's often more about passivity or inactivity or being pulled along, whether with the force of habit, like streaming or scrolling, or whether through influence of other people.”
“In regular Christian experience, there is a gap between what we know and what we do. We frequently fall short of what we know. And so our heart condemns us. We still sin, we still stumble, we still fall short. And so it's a regular Christian experience to have your conscience condemn you. And part of what John is saying is don't conclude from that experience that you are not a real Christian. There are times when God knows the truth about you better than you know the truth about you, and what God knows about you is better than what you think about you.”
“If your conscience is blaring that warning light at you, confess your sins, pray to God, and plead with him for a sense of assurance and forgiveness.”
“There's also a sense in which keeping a clear conscience gives you a kind of boldness. It makes you a little bit more impervious to slander, to gossip, to what people think about you. If you're honoring the Lord and you have a clear conscience before him, it matters a whole lot less what anybody else would say about you. And so you can see a kind of gospel freedom.”
“Especially today, in a world that is so polarized, hostile, in a way that seems to sort of coming apart at the seams, I think that the church's witness of a deep kind of unity and diversity can be all the more compelling.”
RESOURCES
Caleb Morel’s teachings on conscience
Your Conscience on a Spectrum (and a Flowchart), article by Bobby Jamieson
Capitol Hill Sermon: The Conscience and the Christian (1 of 2)
Capitol Hill Sermon: The Conscience and the Local Church (2 of 2)
SCRIPTURE REFERENCES
Romans 14:1-15:7
1 Corinthians 1:8-10
1 John 3:19-21
Psalm 19:12-14
Psalm 139
Hebrews 9:13-14
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
What are some differing matters of conscience that you have encountered either personally, in relationships with others, or with those in your church?
Are there friends or influencers who you have been tempted to “outsource your conscience” to, meaning you adopt their practices without gauging your own conscience?
Bobby mentioned several passages (listed in our show notes) that would be helpful to better understand conscience. Perhaps select one today to read through or study with a friend.
Is there a trusted pastor, friend, or mentor with whom you could have a conversation about your own personal questions about issues of conscience? Perhaps reach out to them today.
What might you do or implement based on what you learned in this week’s episode?
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Journeywomen interviews are intended to serve as a springboard for continued study in the context of your local church. While we carefully select guests each week, interviews do not imply Journeywomen's endorsement of all writings and positions of the interviewee or any other resources mentioned.
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