The answer is simple, yet we tend to overlook it. We need God’s grace because without His grace, we cannot grow to be more like Christ. We’re never alone, Christ promised us that He will send the Comforter so we could live a life that reflects the righteousness given to us by faith. He promised He would be always with us until the end of the age, and He’s with us through His Spirit, giving us grace day by day to grow and be Christlike. 

We have already seen the reality of the conscience in all humans, the horrible reality of a guilty conscience, and how it can affect us. Now we’re going to see the beautiful reality of a godly conscience. 

With the fall, every area of our life as humans has been affected by sin in such a way that we’re all inclined to evil; there are no innocent human beings. That means that our reason, our emotions, our desires, etc., are inclined to evil, not that they are as evil as they can be all the time, but we’re not by nature good since the fall. Human nature has gone astray; we’re now selfish people who look for our own good and our own benefit above anyone else. That also means that every good gift given to us by God has also been stained by sin, including our consciences. 

As we saw in the last post, it is a horrible thing to experience a guilty conscience; it is something that affects us to the core of our being, both psychologically and physically. We can try to escape, but we will never be able to. Unfortunately, our consciences in our fallen state are not always awoken; sometimes we sin, we do evil deeds, and the judge doesn’t condemn us at all. Sometimes we sin so much in the same area that the strong voice of the conscience is asleep until it is awoken again, and the judge within us torments us.

This means that the conscience is not an infallible judge and a perfect guide regarding our morality and how we should live to please and glorify God always in everything we do. Stained by sin, the conscience by itself cannot be the absolute judge by which we live our lives; many times, we are not judged by the conscience when we lie, or when we have idols, or when we don’t rest, and if we don’t feel judged by our conscience, that doesn’t mean that we’re not sinning. 

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