Training and Retraining Our Conscience
The conscience is our inner sense of right and wrong. It’s a basic, built-in, internal moral compass so to speak, and every one of us as human being is born with a conscience. This fact is clear evidence that a moral God has created us and that he designed us with clear intentions, that we would reflect his moral nature through our lives. Even so, we must come to grips with the fact that:
No one’s conscience matches God’s will completely.
It’s there and it functions, but it needs to be adjusted, fine-tuned, and even repaired. That’s because we’re also born with a sinful nature that pushes away from God. As a result, we suppress what our conscience tells us, and when we do this, we tune our conscience to function differently (inaccurately) and may eventually turn off our conscience completely on that point. This is a dangerous place to be.
We also need to retune or repair our conscience because we may have believed wrong teaching or applied biblical truth in unnecessary or inaccurate ways. While this scenario may not be as flagrant as willfully suppressing the truth to do what it is wrong, it is also a dangerous and undesirable place to be because it means we are not thinking God’s way. This disadvantage will limit our ability to serve people on God’s behalf.
As believers, we should tune our conscience to match God’s will and ways more closely for at least two reasons.
- First, there’s a vertical reason: we want to please him.
- Second, there’s also a horizontal reason: we want to reflect him to others.
When we put these two reasons together, we can say that our goal is to be what he wants us to be and to show others what he is like in a way that they can see.
Training our conscience is a deliberate process.
When a person believes on Christ for salvation, he become God’s child completely, immediately, and permanently. But this doesn’t mean he’s a mature child all at once. Just as a human child must gain knowledge and experience over time to become a skilled and responsible adult, so God’s spiritual children must gain knowledge and experience over time to become mature and godly Christians in the way they think and live.
Hebrews 5:13-14 describes this process for us in a helpful way. It says, “Everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.”
In this passage, milk likely refers to the basic doctrine and theology of the Christian faith and the recognition of what is obviously right and wrong from a moral standpoint. This would include doctrinal truths such as, “Jesus is God,” and moral beliefs such as, “adultery is wrong.” But God expects us to expand our perspective beyond these basic, obvious realities.
As Hebrews explains, we need to “by reason of use have our senses exercised to discern both good and evil.” We could also say that we should use (“by reason of use”) the spiritual and psychological abilities God has given us (our mind, will, and emotions enabled by the Spirit of God – which includes our conscience) to distinguish between what is right and wrong in the more nuanced and complex aspects of life. The words by reason of use underscore the fact that we need to be deliberate about doing this.
Tuning and training our conscience is not a passive experience we go through; it’s a deliberate process we pursue. The word exercise emphasizes this even more strongly. It’s the word we get our English word gymnasium from. Now, it doesn’t mean “a gymnasium.” It actually means more of what is supposed to happen inside a gymnasium because it describes the kind of physical exercise and rigorous discipline that’s involved in what we call “working out” or a “personal training regimen or routine.” As you can tell, this isn’t a casual activity or something that happens to you – it’s a deliberate activity that we should devote ourselves to doing in a regular and intentional way. How does this process work, of training (or retraining) our conscience to match God’s will?
We must recalibrate our conscience to the Word of God.
We do this as we learn what it says and doesn’t say, or what it means and doesn’t mean. The word unskillful means something like “to be unacquainted with” whatever is in view, which in this case happens to be the Word of God. Training our conscience requires us to become more acquainted with the Word of God – not just one or two verses here and there, but with everything that Scripture says – this is the meat we need because it gives a more complete perspective about what God thinks about things.
Now regarding this point, let me emphasize here the following important qualifications:
- Training our conscience is not as simple as being as strict as possible on everything.
- It’s also not as simple as just learning to be tolerant and acceptant of whatever may have bothered us before.
- Furthermore, it’s not a matter of just doing and not doing what this church or that church does, or what one Christian or another Christian does, whom we respect.
Training our conscience requires us to become as thoroughly acquainted as possible with what the Word of God says about various things so that we can tune our consciences to his will more accurately and completely. When we do this, sometimes we’ll become stricter and more careful than before, but other times we’ll become less strict. To illustrate how this works, let’s consider the example of what the Apostle Peter went through.
Peter had to retrain his conscience.
Acts 10 and Galatians 2 give us a window into one of the ways that Peter had to retrain his conscience to better correspond with God’s will. His experience had to do with the food he ate and the people he hung out with.
In Acts 10:9-16, he faced a difficult situation. He was visiting the home of a man named Simon in a town called Joppa. On that particular day, Peter had gone up to the rooftop of Simon’s house. (Rooftops were flat, open spaces which functioned like a deck, patio, or porch function today.) Though he intended to pray, he became very hungry and really wanted to eat. So he fell asleep due to the weakness brought on by hunger, even as they prepared the late-afternoon meal below. (In those days, it was customary to eat a light, mid-morning breakfast followed by a more satisfying and substantial dinner later in the afternoon.)[1]
As Peter snoozed, God sent him an apostolic vision, a large piece of cloth (like the sail on a ship or a large tent covering).[2] Inside this sheet were all kinds of living, writhing animals, reptiles, and birds. (This threefold list resembles the list given to Noah in Gen 6:20 and refers to “all kinds of animals,” not just three specific kinds.) Then God commanded Peter to eat the animals, to which he replied very forcefully that he simply could not do it. Why? Because he had never eaten any animals which were “common or unclean.” His conscience felt quite strongly about this point.
Why was Peter so adamant? Because he had trained his conscience from childhood not to eat certain kinds of animals which the Law of Moses forbade Jewish people from eating. This was part of what we know as the Jewish kosher laws, which were given to Israel by God for a specific reason (which was not necessarily for health reasons, as some claim). God intended for the Jewish kosher laws to distinguish the Jewish people from the pagan, godless Gentile nations around them (Lev 20:24b-26).
“I am the LORD your God, who has separated you from the peoples. You shall therefore distinguish between clean animals and unclean, between unclean birds and clean, and you shall not make yourselves abominable by beast or by bird, or by any kind of living thing that creeps on the ground, which I have separated from you as unclean. And you shall be holy to me, for I the LORD am holy, and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.”
You see, Gentile people had no problem eating these animals, so these laws discouraged the Jews from eating with or doing trade with the people of these nations at their markets, in their homes, and so on. This measure would minimize the influence that these pagan people would have on the faith and worldview of God’s people.
However, now that Christ had died on the cross and risen from the dead, he brought the old covenant from Moses to Israel to an end and introduced a new covenant to his people and the world through Christ’s atoning work of redemption. Christ himself foreshadowed the limited significance of these kosher food laws when he taught that eating any kinds of foods doesn’t actually cause any kind of spiritual defilement in a person (Mark 7:14-23). In Mark 7:19, the comment “thus purifying all foods” foreshadows the edibility of all kinds of foods, not just kosher ones.
Christ offset this teaching by turning our attention to what really matters, which is that which comes out of our hearts. This includes things like “evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness” (Mark 7:22). Interestingly enough, Mark (who wrote from Peter’s perspective as Peter’s secretary), followed up this teaching with a story about Jesus traveling to the home of a Gentile (non-Jewish) woman. This may be significant because Scripture connects kosher food laws with “social distancing” from Gentile people.[3]
Here in Acts 10, Peter reminded the Lord that had observed these kosher food laws carefully all his life and would be extremely reticent to violate that sensitivity now. Indeed, his conscience was trained to think this way. Nevertheless, Peter was reminded that God had now declared these foods clean to eat, and then he repeated the dream and instructions to Peter two more times. Then remarkably, just as Peter woke up from his rooftop snooze and views, messengers from a Gentile man arrived at Simon’s home to request that Peter visit his home to offer them fellowship through the gospel.
According to Acts 10:48, Peter stayed at Cornelius’s home for a few days, which would have meant that he ate food from Cornelius’s home, thus violating Old Testament kosher laws but not actually committing a sin. So, can you see how important it is to train (or retrain) our consciences to align with God’s will? In some cases, as with Peter, we can allow our consciences to become so strict that we prevent ourselves from being able to reach people with the gospel. Now to be sure, we should never sin to reach people with the gospel. (It’s not right to do wrong to do right.) But if we think that something is sin when it’s not, we can limit opportunities for the gospel.
Do we sympathize with Peter?
Do you know what he felt like when God told him to eat some food that his conscience felt strongly was wrong to eat? In fact, Peter continued to struggle with training his conscience on this detail months or maybe even years later (Gal 2:11-13). We know this because sometime later, Paul confronted him for leaving the table with Gentiles when certain Jewish people came around. He didn’t want them to see him eating with Gentile Christians. The struggle to train or retrain our conscience to match God’s Word is not always about getting stricter, is it? And it’s not always easy to do, at least not quickly.
The key to retraining our conscience is not waiting until our conscience feels okay with doing a certain thing or not. It’s doing what we know the Word of God clearly teaches, even when our conscience disagrees. Once you’ve acquainted yourself with the clear teaching of the Bible on a certain subject (not just one isolated verse or another which may easily be taken out of context), you are free (even obligated before God) to act in a different way, even though your conscience disagrees. Over time (sometimes quicker than others), your conscience will adapt to God’s Word. But in the meantime, you should humbly do what God’s Word teaches you to do, just as Peter submitted to God’s will and ate kosher food.
Do you have any experiences like this in which you’ve had to retrain your conscience by what you’ve learned from God’s Word? I have many examples of this in my life but will share one of them here. Though I wore shorts as a child (my parents didn’t teach me otherwise), the church I attended in college taught differently. At this church, it was considered immodest for men to wear shorts. In all sincerity, I accepted this teaching out of a heart that desired to please the Lord and represent him well. This meant that I wore nylon wind pants or cloth warm-up pants for all athletic activities, such as basketball or running – even in sweltering heat. As you might guess, people found this a bit strange when I played ball at the city courts, especially on super-hot days, and wondered whether I was thinking clearly. Now, we should all be okay with other people thinking we’re strange, but not for unnecessary reasons, right?
Eventually, I began to ask myself the question, “Where does the Bible teach or even intimate that wearing shorts is a wrong and immodest thing to do?” And as you might guess, the answer is “nowhere.” The best explanation anyone could give me was that the priests in the Old Testament Temple wore long robes, and since we are priests before God, we should be equally modest. But this seemed to be a very faulty way of reasoning. Should I also wear sandals and an apron, too? And what about pants? Should I exchange my pants for a robe?
Then I realized all throughout the Bible, there’s this thing called “girding up your loins.” What did this entail? It’s what people did when they had serious work to do or needed to run or move quickly. They would lift up the bottom of their robe or tunic and tie it into the belt around their waste (or tie it as a belt around their waste) so that their legs were free to move without a hindrance.
When you study this phrase throughout Scripture, you find that it was a very normal thing for people to do. Godly people like the prophets and disciples did this. In fact, God commanded all the Israelites to do this when they observed Passover and escaped from Egypt (Exo 12:11). I’m assuming that this applied to men and women alike, not just the men, and interestingly enough, Prov. 31:17 tells us that sometimes a virtuous woman “girds up her loins” to get work done for her family. In the NT, Peter uses this image to teach us that we should “gird up the loins of our minds,” using this as an ordinary, positive illustration for getting our minds ready to think about hard things.
Needless to say, this was an important Bible study for me to think through. It was what Hebrews is teaching when it says that we should be “skilled in the word” and “exercise our sense to discern both good and evil.” As a result of this study, I retrained my conscience to realize that wearing shorts is a fine thing to do when needed. That being said, I felt a little funny wearing them at first, but I didn’t let that stop me because I knew what God’s Word said. Even today, it’s not my favorite thing to do, but it’s no longer the problem that I once thought it was.
Now you may be listening to this and thinking to yourself, “Wow, Thomas was crazy. He had a seriously weak conscience there. Why, it never even occurred to me that shorts could ever be wrong!” And if you feel this way, I’ll smile right along with you. Yet at the same time, we all need to ask ourselves the question, “Is there anything that my conscience feels strongly about based upon past teaching or bad experiences that is not in line with God’s Word (whether too careful or not careful enough)?”
We need to be committed to shaping our consciences to God’s Word.
It’s not good enough just to say, “Well, this is what I’ve always thought, so I’ll just stay that way and everything’s fine.” This autopilot mentality will not do. Doing so means that you’re accepting the possibility that you’ll be perpetually out of tune with God’s will. It means that you’re okay with being that piano with one or two keys that’s always out of tune, and whenever the pianist plays those keys, everybody winces, even though you’ve totally accepted it.
Refusing to study God’s Word with the prospect of training your conscience more accurately also means that you may be choosing to permanently cut of possible witnessing opportunities for the gospel. Is that okay with you? It shouldn’t be.
[1] John B. Polhill, Acts, vol. 26, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1992), 254.
[2] Polhill, New American Commentary, 254.
[3] Ibid., 255-256
