{"id":2270,"date":"2007-06-11T15:54:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-11T19:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=2270"},"modified":"2015-10-24T10:46:17","modified_gmt":"2015-10-24T14:46:17","slug":"1-timothy-and-misdirected-conscience-of-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=2270","title":{"rendered":"1 Timothy and the misdirected conscience of the West"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m preaching a series on 1 Timothy (yesterday was 1:12-20<\/a>), and it’s started me thinking about the whole concept of conscience, and how so many in the American church abuse it. Literally the word means \u201cto know together with,\u201d and it refers to the things we know together with God about the way the world is supposed to be and the way we\u2019re supposed to live; it’s the awareness God has placed within us of his character and will. We might almost call it a sixth sense, as it gives us the ability to perceive reality in its moral aspect. The problem is, it’s only valuable as far as it accurately reports reality\u2014in this case, moral reality, what is right and wrong in the eyes of God\u2014but that’s not how we want to use the idea of conscience; rather than recognizing it as something objective relating to real right and wrong and actual guilt, we want to take conscience as subjective, reflecting how we feel about something, whether we feel we’ve done right or not. We strive to unhook our conscience from God’s character and will, so that far from challenging our own preferred standards of right and wrong, our sense of conscience merely reflects them.<\/p>\n

As I was thinking last week about why this is, and reflecting on Paul’s paean to the mercy of God, it hit me that at some level, we don\u2019t want the conscience God gave us because we really don\u2019t want what God is offering\u2014we don\u2019t want his solution, and we don\u2019t even want to believe what he\u2019s telling us about the problem. The word of God tells us we are sinners, rotten at the core, who need to accept his mercy, to be saved by his grace, through none of our own doing and none of our own merit, and we just don\u2019t want to hear that. We want to believe we\u2019re basically OK\u2014and if we run up against something we can\u2019t get around, that everyone agrees is bad behavior, we want to redefine it as a disease; that way, we\u2019re not bad<\/em>, we\u2019re just sick.<\/p>\n

When the Bible tells us that we do bad things just because we like to do bad things, and that the purpose of our conscience is to convict us of our sin, not to justify our behavior, we resist. As much as we call the gospel good news, it often doesn’t come to us as good news. We don’t consider it good news that we\u2019re sinners saved\u2014despite the fact that we do not and will not ever deserve it\u2014solely by the loving grace of God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. That kind of thinking is for losers, and we all want to think we\u2019re winners, if there\u2019s any way we possibly can; we want to believe that God saved us because we\u2019re such all-fired wonderful people that we just had it coming. And the truth is, we aren\u2019t, and we didn\u2019t. The truth is, Christianity is<\/em> for losers\u2014and that means us. Even the best of us.<\/p>\n

That’s one reason 1 Timothy is so important for us. Paul was far more of a winner than most of us could ever hope to be, a man who would tower over the church of our day just as much as he did in his own time, and yet he gave all the credit for all his success to the power of God; for himself, he said this: \u201cIt is a true statement and worthy of acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners\u2014of whom I am the foremost<\/em>.\u201d He understood what folks like the Covenant Network don’t<\/a>, or at least don’t seem to (any more than bad drivers in Dallas), that the good news of the gospel has nothing to do with lessening our sin and our guilt. Instead, it has everything to do with the marvelous, infinite, matchless grace of God, this spectacular gift we have been given, which overwhelms our sin and guilt, washing it all away through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the power of his Holy Spirit. The good news of the gospel is that yes, we are sinners, yes, there really is a problem with us, and that God has fixed that problem, because Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m preaching a series on 1 Timothy (yesterday was 1:12-20), and it’s started me thinking about the whole concept of conscience, and how so many in the American church abuse it. Literally the word means \u201cto know together with,\u201d and it refers to the things we know together with God about the way the world […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[62,65,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-and-society","category-religion-and-theology","category-scripture"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6R3Ax-AC","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1734,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=1734","url_meta":{"origin":2270,"position":0},"title":"1 Timothy and the misdirected conscience of the West (repost)","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"16 October 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"(I have in general decided against reposting old material, which is why I\u2019ve started doing the \u201cretrospective\u201d links posts; but I\u2019ve been thinking this week about this post from June of last year, and it seemed sufficiently apropos that it made more sense to me to repost it, lightly edited,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Culture and society"","block_context":{"text":"Culture and society","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=62"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":295,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=295","url_meta":{"origin":2270,"position":1},"title":"God’s Grace, Our Counterfeit","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"14 June 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"(Psalm 103:8-18; 1 Timothy 1:12-20)\u201cConscience\u201d is a problematic word. That might seem like a strange thing to say, but it\u2019s true. It\u2019s not the word\u2019s fault, mind you\u2014what the word is supposed to mean is plenty clear. In the New Testament, \u201cconscience\u201d means the awareness God has placed within us\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Sermons"","block_context":{"text":"Sermons","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=45"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1248,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=1248","url_meta":{"origin":2270,"position":2},"title":"Thought on the true nature and purpose of the conscience","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"22 June 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"As I\u2019ve noted before, \u201cconscience\u201d is a problematic word in our culture\u2014not because it\u2019s a hard concept to understand, but because we find it a hard one to accept. We don\u2019t want our conscience to be something that pokes at us and makes us face the fact when we\u2019re doing\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Culture and society"","block_context":{"text":"Culture and society","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=62"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":296,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=296","url_meta":{"origin":2270,"position":3},"title":"The Glory of Truth","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"7 June 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"(Exodus 20:1-21; 1 Timothy 1:1-11)While we were living in British Columbia, the governing party\u2014a socialist labor party called the New Democratic Party, or NDP\u2014held a leadership race; the provincial premier, a deeply unpopular little mountebank called Glen Clark, got himself indicted for corruption, so they had to replace him. It\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Sermons"","block_context":{"text":"Sermons","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=45"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1641,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=1641","url_meta":{"origin":2270,"position":4},"title":"Reader’s guide: posts on grace","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"3 December 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"A few weeks ago, I wrote that \"The developing center of this blog, I think, is a core of reflections on the interrelationship between Christian theology and praxis and American politics.\" That said, there are other major themes running through these posts as well; of those, surely the most important\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Religion and theology"","block_context":{"text":"Religion and theology","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=65"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2041,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=2041","url_meta":{"origin":2270,"position":5},"title":"Moral arguments and the political process","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"26 May 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I have believed for quite some time, as have many others, that one of the biggest problems with public discourse in this country is the insistence by folks on the left that religious and moral arguments are illegitimate in the public square; there are voices on the left who have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Culture and society"","block_context":{"text":"Culture and society","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=62"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2270"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5641,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2270\/revisions\/5641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}