Vanishing Consciences–Why Parents Must Pray For Their Children to Maintain a Clear Conscience

DWM-14 & WFF-20 & WFP-17
Short Clip

What is conscience and how can we pray for our children’s conscience? When two planes collided in midair over Germany–the investigation found that the sensor that warns of a collision was switched off. That system is very similar to what God has designed as our conscience. It is an automatic warning system that tells us, “Pull up! Pull up!” before we crash and burn.
   Our conscience is a part of our personhood as being made in God’s image and is an innate ability to sense right and wrong. Everyone, even the most uncivilized heathen, has a conscience (Rom. 2:14–15). Our conscience begs us to do what we believe is right and hinders us from doing what we believe is wrong. If we violate our conscience, it condemns us, triggering feelings of disgrace, torment, penitence, dismay, apprehension, dishonor, and even fear. When we follow our conscience, it praises us, bringing joy, tranquillity, self-confidence, security, and cheerfulness.
o So in God’s Word a tender heart (Josiah in 2 Chr. 34:27), refers to a responsive conscience.
o The “upright in heart” (Ps. 7:10) are those with pure consciences.
o And when David prayed, “Create in me a clean heart, O God” (Ps. 51:10), he was seeking to have his life and his conscience cleansed.
o A troubled conscience should spur us to seek the spiritual growth that would bring our conscience more in harmony with God’s Word. Psalm 139:23-24
o Our goal should be to “master biblical truth so that our conscience is completely informed and judges right because it is responding to God’s Word. A regular diet of Scripture will strengthen a weak conscience or restrain an overactive one.
o Conversely, error, human wisdom, and wrong moral influences filling the mind will corrupt or cripple the conscience. Our conscience is like the nerve endings in our fingertips. Its sensitivity to external stimuli can be damaged by the buildup of callouses or even wounded so badly as to be virtually impervious to any feeling. Paul also wrote of the dangers of a calloused conscience (1 Cor. 8:10), a wounded conscience (v. 12), and a seared conscience (1 Tim. 4:2). The word seared means “cauterized.” Just as a person’s flesh can be “branded” so that it becomes hard and without feeling, so a person’s conscience can be deadened. Whenever we affirm with our lips something that we deny with our lives (whether people know it or not), we deaden our consciences just a little more.
   Effective Christian warriors have a conscience bound with God’s truth. “Charles Colson believes that our American society’s constant, mindless engagement with the media, where trash is heaped upon trash and the bizarre is commonplace, has left us morally exhausted and without discernment.