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The Reformation Study Bible contains a good article on “Conscience and the Law.” It says,

Conscience is the built-in power…to pass moral judgments on ourselves, approving or disapproving our actions, thoughts, and plans, and telling us, if what we have done is…wrong, that we deserve to suffer for it…Paul says that God has written a certain knowledge of His law on every human heart (Rom. 2:14-15) and experience confirms this (The Reformation Study Bible, Ligonier Ministries, 2005 edition, p. 415).

Our text says,

“Their conscience also bearing witness” (Romans 2:15).

Let the Bible answer four questions about the human conscience.

I. First, where did the human conscience come from?

When God created man, we are told,

“The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7).

The thing that made man different from the animals was the “breath of life.” The Hebrew word is “neshamah.” It is translated “breath of life.” Strong points out that it means “spirit” (#5397). The “neshamah” became man’s spirit, separate from the soul (mind) and body in function. This “breath of life” gave man two things that no animal has – first, the ability to know God and second, the ability to know right from wrong. Or, we may say, the “breath of life” in him gave man his human spirit after which his mind (known as soul) was activated. With this mind he could think and make decisions. But animals also have minds. It was man’s spirit, that came from the “breath of life,” which made man different. The “neshamah,” or “breath of life,” became man’s human spirit, and it gave man alone the ability to know God personally, and the ability to know right from wrong.

The function of the conscience is given in Proverbs 20:27,

“The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the belly.”

The “spirit” in this verse means “divine inspiration” or “spirit,” and comes from the same word for “breath of life.” Proverbs 20:27 shows us that the “neshamah,” given by God to Adam, became “the spirit of man.” This is the first of the three functioning elements in man – spirit, soul, and body. The soul is the mind. The spirit is the conscience and ability to know God. The body is the flesh. The “neshamah” became man’s spirit, with its conscience searching man’s inward parts. That is man’s conscience. That is the part of man that tells him when he is wrong.

“And David's heart smote him after that he had numbered the people” (II Samuel 24:10).

“Heart” in that sense refers to David’s “neshamah,” the function of his conscience. That is, his conscience was troubled because he sinned by numbering the people. (Our pastor, Dr. Hymers learned some of these insights from Dr. Timothy Lin, his long-time pastor, and former professor of Old Testament Hebrew in the graduate department at Bob Jones University and former president of China Evangelical Seminary in Taipei, Taiwan.)

The classic story of “Pinocchio” tells of a puppet who longs to be a real boy. As long as he is a puppet, he has a cricket as a substitute for a conscience. But when he became a real boy, he received a real conscience in his heart, to tell him right from wrong. Our first parents were created with living functioning consciences, but their consciences were later disfigured. Their consciences became unreliable.

II. Second, what happened to the human conscience?

Our first parents sinned in the Garden of Eden. At the Fall, the image of God was corrupted within man, and the human conscience became defective. For this reason, when Adam was confronted by God for his sin, he made excuses, as did Eve (Genesis 3:11-13). Neither one of them felt sorry because their consciences had been degraded. The same was true of Adam’s first son, Cain. Even when God caught him murdering his brother, he felt no conviction. All Cain could do was to excuse himself. This shows that man’s conscience was no longer reliable after the Fall in the Garden of Eden. Thus, an unreliable, degraded conscience has been passed down to us from Adam.

But it gets worse. The more a person sins the more defiled and ruined his conscience becomes. The more man sins the darker and more unreliable his conscience is. In the ancient world, we are told, that they

“…became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened” (Romans 1:21).

And, by the time of Paul, man is described as,

“Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness” (Ephesians 4:18-19).

“Unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure; but even their mind and conscience is defiled” (Titus 1:15).

And as people go on in sin, they numb their consciences by sinning more and more,

“Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron” (I Timothy 4:2).

In the “side show” of a circus you could once see a man with scales like an alligator. It was real. You could see a woman with two heads. You could see the tallest man in the world. You could see a man that could put a sword in front of a hot flame until the metal was glowing red. Then he could put the glowing red sword across his tongue. Steam would come out of his mouth. This was not a trick. The man could put the red-hot metal right on his tongue! The man could put a glowing red sword on the skin of his tongue without feeling any pain! The reason why he could do this was because he had done it over and over. He had done it so many times that he could no longer feel any pain at all. His tongue had been seared so many times that it developed a callous, so he could no longer feel any pain! That is what happens to your conscience when you sin. You “have [your] conscience seared with a hot iron” (I Timothy 4:2)! In other words, the more you sin, the more calloused your conscience becomes, until it is so seared by the flame of sin that you no longer feel any pain in your conscience, no matter how much sin you commit.

Hitler had sinned so long that by the time of World War II he could order the torture of Jewish children. He could order ruthless Nazi serial killers to cut Jewish children’s stomachs open to see how long it would take them to die. Hitler could order 6 million Jews to be gassed to death, simply because they were Jews, without the slightest pain in his conscience. So, Henry VIII could cut off the heads of two of his innocent young wives. Afterwards, without the slightest twinge of conscience, he could eat a big meal and go sound asleep, so “seared with a hot iron” was his conscience!

Your consciences were already defaced when you were born. You inherited a broken conscience from your forefather Adam. So you already had a malfunctioning conscience as a child! Added to that were the sins of your childhood. Each time you lied to your mother, your conscience was defiled. Each time you stole something, each time you cheated in school, each time you thought about sexual sins, your conscience became more and more defiled – until finally you began to actually sear it. As with a hot iron, you began to actually sear your conscience. You seared it intentionally. You purposefully applied the red-hot iron of sin – searing your conscience again and again with ever greater sins. Sins that only you know about. Sins that would make your mother ashamed of you. Some of you have seared your conscience so much that you enjoy taking part in your sins. You know what your sins are. You know how they seared your conscience. You know how they dulled your sense of wrong. You know how it became almost impossible for you to feel any guilt over them. And you have thought, many times, that you may have been given up to reprobation. You have thought that you have committed the unpardonable sin. That because you deliberately seared your conscience, and deliberately sinned, that you have ruined your own once sensitive conscience, until you no longer have any hope of being saved.

And in the solitude and quiet of the night you feel afraid. You wonder if your chance has passed you by. You mask your panic behind a face of composure. But inside you are afraid that you have gone too far. What can we do for you? It is you that has ruined yourself. It is you that has seared your own conscience. What can I do to help a man who has killed his own heart? How can I fix someone who has burned his conscience beyond repair? I am helpless. I can only look on you with sadness – as a sinner, without future and hope. I can only pity you. I cannot help you in any way. You are doomed. Someone with a seared conscience is already a doomed and condemned. Jesus said,

“He that believeth not is condemned already” (John 3:18).

It is not that you will be condemned when you die, in the future. You are “condemned already” (John 3:18). Your seared and ruined conscience cannot be restored, and so there is no hope for you. You are “condemned already” – as sure of Hell as though you were already there. And nothing that I say or do can help you in any way.

III. Third, how can a Christian’s conscience be defiled?

When you are born again, Jesus saves you, and renews your conscience. But after you are saved you are not immediately raptured into Heaven. You remain on earth. You remain in your own life. You remain in a life surrounded by sin. You remain in a life that will be attacked by the Devil. After you were first converted, your conscience was sensitive to sin. You would never go an entire day without prayer. Your thoughts often returned to Jesus. You were happy to be forgiven and be accepted by God.

But then the storms of life come. The challenges of life start to make you rely on yourself again. You and Jesus become more distant. At first, you may think that you will do better next week, or next month, or next year, but your distance becomes habitual. You pray less and less now. You feel less guilty if you do not read your Bible every day. The urgent need you once felt to be in prayer often has disappeared. The sins that would have once offended you, now do not seem to be so dirty. However you may feel throughout your day, you are not glad to be in church. You start to see faults in other Christians. The faults you see in others justify your own. Your conscience has become seared.

The experience of life is defeating you. When you see other Christians that are happy, you remind yourself how much you have been through. You tell yourself that they are only happy because they are not experienced yet. Once they become experienced, they will be just as unhappy as you are. You imagine, that once they go through some tragedy, like you have, they will be begin to become skeptical and calloused as you are. The tribulations of life have not had the effect that God had intended for them to have on you. Your conscience has slipped into coldness.

Your life does not have hope. Your life is faithless. You do not believe God can do the things that He has promised. Do you treasure the fifteen minutes of time that it takes to do your daily Bible reading, or do you neglect it? Do you look forward to spending time in prayer with brothers and sisters in Christ? Do you have love for people who are lost, or do you try not to worry about them? Then you are backslidden. Your conscience has become defiled. You must return to Jesus. You must return to the Saviour and be washed again with His Blood. Be humbled, and confess your sins, so that your conscience – so that your life – can be revived. “Confess your faults, one to another, and pray for one another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16).

IV. Fourth, how does God come into the picture?

It is an extremely dangerous thing to take this matter for granted. So with caution, I tell you that – it may be that God will grant you conviction. He does not promise to give conviction to everyone. If he has given you some conviction before, there is no guarantee that He will give it to you again. Very often those who once experienced some conviction are never again visited by God’s Spirit. But He may, He just may, give you some conviction

“of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment” (John 16:8).

After all the rejecting and foolishness you have done, you deserve to go to Hell without ever being convinced of your sin and need for Jesus. But, if God gives you any conviction of sin, do not be careless with the heaviness and conviction that God is allowing you. If you lose your conviction, you may never again have the Holy Spirit return to you!

You have spit in the face of Jesus in your heart all these years. Think of how often you have rejected Him. You have rejected Jesus by your attitude and your conduct. Christ owes you nothing. You deserve Hell and Judgement. If you say within your heart, “It is true – God owes me nothing but the flames of Hell. I deserve nothing else!” If you feel that an awful judgment is all you deserve; if you know that you must be rescued, because you are doomed: then I urge you to come to Jesus. Come to Him like the helpless sinner you are. Come to Jesus – crying, spent, exhausted, and broken. Come to Jesus as all of us had to: as an undeserving enemy of God who appeals to mercy. Trust Jesus and He will wash your sins in His Blood. Come to Jesus and He will make you clean by His Holy Blood. The Bible says that only “the blood of Christ” can

“purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God” (Hebrews 9:14).

I was farther away from Jesus than anyone here this morning. I sinned without regret. I intentionally pushed Jesus away, and yet He loved me. When I realized that Jesus loved me, my heart was broken. Jesus overpowered me with love. Jesus loved me so much he took my sin upon Himself. As a result of my sin, He sweat Blood in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus was God in the flesh, and Jesus left the perfection of Heaven to suffer for my sin. How could I hate Jesus? How could I hate Jesus after He loved me so much? There was something wrong with me. I needed help. I needed to be rescued. I needed to be saved. Jesus loved me. Jesus loves you. Jesus loves you so much that He died for you. Do not overlook that. Someone actually died for you. And not just anyone – the only begotten Son of God died for you on the Cross. Jesus died in the worst way possible, so that you could be forgiven. Will you trust Jesus and be washed in His Blood? Will you trust Jesus who loves you in spite of your sin? Jesus will not judge you. Jesus will not condemn you. Jesus will accept you as His sheep that had gone astray. Jesus loves you; Jesus has always loved you; Jesus loves you now. Trust Jesus and let your sin, your conscience, everything that you are, be washed in His Blood.

Dr. Hymers, please come and close this service.

(END OF SERMON)
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Scripture Read Before the Sermon by Mr. Aaron Yancy: Titus 1:10-16.
Solo Sung Before the Sermon by Mr. Benjamin Kincaid Griffith:
“I'd Rather Have Jesus" (words by Rhea F. Miller, 1922;

      music composed by George Beverly Shea, 1909-2013).