7585	Forums / Main Forum / Conscience & Feelings Or The Word Of The Lord?	on: April 08, 2007, 08:09:09 PM
There was no one who rivaled the sensitivity of Martin Luthers conscience. In fact His insistence on confessing every sin that is taking whole days to confess individual sins would drive those who were around him to the limits of their patience. The thing that Luther learned was that He would try to get to the point where he had confessed every sin that he was aware of, but when he had listed the last one and confessed it , he was stricken once more by his conscience that there were other ones that he needed to confess. Luther realized after studying Romans that he was doing his whole religious practice in self righteousness. It wasnt until he had come to the Just shall live by faith that he was finally released from the legal relationship to the law and saw that grace covered all of his sins. Our consciences have a place in teaching us that we are sinning but the conscience has no saving power. The conscience is the condemning agent that takes the law and dives it into our hearts through condemnation. Satan can use a sensitive conscience to hold people in the jail of the condemning power of the law so that they hardly ever get familiar with gospel conviction. Our consciences must be trained by the word of God to discern good and evil. We must obey the Spirit and the word and not make the conscience the moral compass through action. Any one who thinks that they can have a completely clear conscience has only deceived themselves as to the depth of their sin , making a law unto themselves. Our consciences can be cleaned by the word of God only and not by our trying to make up for past wrongs. When we trust in our own ability to clean our consciences by a moral standard we set up, then we are only deceiving ourselves and we will never get to the root of sin. Because sin must be killed by grace, obeying God is mortifying the flesh by the Spirit, who uses the word to clean our consciences. It is done when we examine ourselves and we see our sin, and we turn our sin over to Christ. Even if we are not aware of all of our sins His work on the cross has taken care of sin for all eternity. We are always going to have our consciences active. The problem is we are always more trusting of ourselves to relieve our consciences rather than really having the forgiveness of Christ get to the bottom our cleaning our whole soul. David wanted all of His parts cleaned by the work of the Spirit. He wanted the Spirit to enliven His confession so that He would have assurance of Gods forgiveness. It is only when we can take our sin before God and experience His unfailing love, His faithfulness, His condescending kindness toward us as sinners in our worse sins, that we are able to get a grip on the work of guilt and the conscience. We are completely open before God. He knows when we are going to sin before we commit the act. He knows us deeper than our feelings of guilt. His eye is on our deepest desires which go much deeper than feelings of guilt. He is working in us and it is at the root of sin in its inception in the desiring part that God does the work rather than our corrupted knowledge of ourselves. The Spirit of God does not deal with us in a self determined paradigm. Our desires cause us to choose. We never choose by moral accusations. Our Father is not an accuser of the saints. He is not a prosecuting attorney.Christ is our advocate, who has taken care of our sin once for all. Our consciences are the prosecuting attorney, and only has a small place in grace. Our consciences make us go to Christ by helping us cling to grace away from the sting of the law.