Dear all at IPC,

What is it that makes the difference between hearing God’s words, even listening to God’s words, and then responding to him in the way that we should?

What is it that makes the difference between the days when we are actually arrested, grabbed by the word of God and have to change because of it, and the days when we treat God’s word like background noise that we can safely ignore?

According to the bible, it is our conscience that makes the difference. It is our conscience which pokes and prods us into active listening to give an active response. It is our conscience that the Spirit uses to lovingly say to us, ‘hey, he is talking to you. This is for you and you need to do something about this: now’. We all know that difference. The days when we’ve been spectators of preaching, or critiquers of it, and then the days when we walk out of church knowing we have been addressed by God. The problem is that our conscience doesn’t actually work that well. Unfortunately, our consciences have been badly damaged in our arrival in to this world and the way in which we have treated our own consciences hasn’t helped either.

What that means is that our conscience functions slightly sporadically. Some days it works accurately, and the next it does not.

It is the apostle Paul who pays most attention to this, in part because he has thought longest and hardest about why his fellow Israelites had such a lousy record of listening and responding to God for generations. And Paul speaks of three separate issues that can affect our consciences, and the epistle to the Hebrews adds a fourth.

Even though we have a conscience, we can have a seared conscience.  1 Timothy 4:2 –  ‘through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared’, Paul says by not responding to the word of God, we damage our ability to listen and respond. Which is a frightening thing. 

When it comes to our consciences, it is a case of use it or lose it. When it comes to listening to God, if we fail to do it, it gets harder to do. The less we listen, the less we will listen. Our consciences malfunction. We won’t hear God critiquing our legalism, our smugness.

We don’t really use the word ‘seared’ apart from in cooking. I can go on YouTube and see people searing steaks – burning, scorching the surface of meat with sudden, intense heat. On the outside the meat is sealed, but the flavour is on the inside.  Biblically speaking, it’s a little different – the damage is done on the outside and seals anything getting through to the inside. To have a seared conscience means that nothing gets through.

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