PREFACE

Buy One, Get Ten Free

Some subjects in Christianity are so fertile, so abundantly promising and useful on so many different levels, that studying them reaps a harvest far beyond expectations. It’s like buy one, get ten free. Conscience is one of those subjects. It touches on salvation, progressive sanctification, church unity, evangelism, missions, and apologetics. Yet hardly is a topic more neglected in the Christian church:

•When was the last time you heard a sermon about conscience?

•Have you ever mentioned your clean conscience in your testimony, as Paul did?

•Did those who discipled you talk much about keeping a clean conscience?

•How many ministry books emphasize the unbreakable link, as Paul did, between getting your conscience under the lordship of Christ and achieving success in church ministry and missions?

•Did you know that a proper understanding of conscience is a key to church unity?

We’ve written this book to help you get to know your conscience better, to put conscience back on your daily radar. Many Christians have neglected their conscience, quite possibly you as well. And as the two of us found, this neglect is serious, a failure to give a priceless gift from God the care it deserves. For most of our lives, we didn’t spend much time thinking about our conscience. Then certain events forced us to take a closer look.

For me (J. D.), conscience started catching my attention when I came back from Cambodia on home assignment and found that I couldn’t make myself step over someone else’s outstretched legs. I was at a family get-together and had just gotten up from the couch to grab a refill of chips and salsa when I found my way blocked by someone’s legs propped up on the coffee table. I stopped and waited for him to do the decent thing: pull his feet off the table so I could get by. But he just sat there like an uncultured boor. Then I remembered I was in America, a country famous the world over for the Statue of Liberty, baseball, and stepping over other people’s legs with impunity. So I forced myself to do That Which Must Not Be Done. In Southeast Asia, one could hardly do something more offensive.

I began to wonder about my involuntary inability simply to cross over someone’s legs. It felt like a pang of conscience, yet I knew that the matter had nothing to do with moral right and wrong, just proper etiquette. How had that new rule wormed its way into my conscience without my knowing it? Should it have been in my conscience at all? What is conscience? Where did it come from? How does it work? Does it always judge correctly? Can it change? How does it change? Why did mine change? How do I take care of my conscience? How is my American conscience different from the conscience of my friends in Cambodia? And so began my quest for a deeper understanding and appreciation of this gift from God.

For me (Andy), I started thinking more deeply about how the conscience works when my wife, Jenni, and I moved from our fundamentalist context in Greenville, South Carolina (we both graduated from Bob Jones University), to a conservative evangelical context in Chicago (I attended Trinity Evangelical Divinity School). We knew godly brothers and sisters at both institutions, but two actions repeatedly grieved us: (1) people in both places often lobbed verbal grenades at one another as if they were opponents, and (2) they painted each other with a broad brush that lacked sufficient nuance. The reasons for such behaviors are many and complex.1 But I began to realize that a key cause of the divide between these two groups of Christians has to do with the conscience.

A Modest Agenda

If you’re hoping that this book will directly address a particular conscience scruple with which you’ve been wrestling, you’ll probably be disappointed. Our purpose is not to referee controversies. Neither will you find in this slender volume an exhaustive theology of conscience (though we attempt to leave no conscience verse unturned).

Our modest but potentially life-changing goal is to put conscience back on your daily radar, to show from Scripture what God intended and did not intend conscience to do, and to explain how your conscience works, how to care for it, and how not to damage it. We’ll show you how awareness of conscience increases church unity and strengthens evangelism and missions. We’ll talk about how to get along with others whose consciences enable them to hold different personal standards. And we’ll give you principles for how to calibrate your conscience to better conform to God’s will. We’ll even include a chapter on how missionaries and other cross-cultural servants can avoid pitfalls that arise from misunderstandings over differing consciences across cultures.

We believe you’ll benefit greatly from studying the conscience if

•you want to know how conscience relates to your spiritual maturity;

•you want to know how to get along with people who have different personal standards than you;

•you’re a pastor who suspects that a significant number of your church’s problems stem from disagreements about disputable issues of conscience;

•you’re a missionary who needs help negotiating the minefield of differences between missionary and local consciences and who wants to avoid importing merely cultural Christianity;

•you want to help people in your church understand why they have culture clashes with those of different opinions and habits;

•you want to learn how to adjust your conscience to match God’s standards without sinning against your conscience; or

•you feel the weight of a guilty conscience and want to experience the freedom and sheer happiness of a clear, cleansed conscience.

There’s a misperception that conscience-related controversies occur only in strict churches. But really all of us are incurably judgmental. As creatures made in the image of a moral God, we are incapable of not making moral judgments, whatever our situation. A church that thinks it has gotten beyond last generation’s debates over music and wine will find that this generation’s debates over recycling and child discipline are just as divisive. A believer who has prided himself on being generous on disputable matters will suddenly find himself judging a fellow believer who doesn’t buy fair-trade coffee. Conscience issues will remain an important part of your personal life, your church life, and your ministry life for the rest of your life. Take a moment to think about these questions:

•What exactly is the conscience?

•What should you do when your conscience condemns you?

•How should you calibrate or adjust your conscience?

•How should you relate to fellow Christians when your consciences disagree?

•How should you relate to people in other cultures when your consciences disagree?

If you can’t answer these questions, then you might be

•living under a perpetual weight of guilt;

•sinning against God by ignoring or disregarding your conscience;

•missing out on the joy that attention to conscience can provide;

•hesitating to adjust your conscience because you don’t know how to do it safely;

•harming fellow Christians who hold different convictions than you;

•contributing to sinful divisiveness within Christ’s church; or

•proceeding unwisely in the way you’re spreading the gospel to non-Christians in other cultures.

This book addresses these issues in three steps:

1.Chapters 1–2 describe what conscience is.

2.Chapters 3–4 talk about how you should deal with your own conscience.

3.Chapters 5–6 explain how you should relate to other people when your consciences disagree.

We wrote this book because we feel so deeply that people today need clear and accurate answers to these questions. Not only do people need them; they want them. We’ve had many opportunities to preach, teach, and counsel about the conscience in many different venues to many different kinds of Christians, and in our experience, people love to learn about the conscience because it helps them practically.

We pray that God will use this book to educate you in how to handle your conscience for his eternal glory and your eternal good.

Christian, meet Conscience.

1 See Andrew David Naselli and Collin Hansen, eds., Four Views on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism, Counterpoints: Bible and Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011).