Shepherding the Conscience
A bruised reed he does not break
As an undergraduate at a Bible college, I was “required” to go to chapel three times a week (I put required in quotes because I decided to interpret that rule somewhat liberally).
One chapel in particular sticks out to me. A missionary agency came to do a chapel on missions, and it became clear quickly that the goal was to make us all feel entitled, indulged, and lazy. I remember feeling my conscience pang, as I was predisposed to be affected by this kind of shaming.
When I walked out of the chapel and into the foyer, there were tables set up with pictures of little boys and girls who needed sponsoring. I sponsored a child that day, imagining that it was faithful to do so. The real truth is that my conscience was panging and I wanted it to stop, and so I found a way to placate an angry conscience and told myself it had something to do with God.
The problem with the conscience is that when it awakens guilt and shame in the heart (which it should, since we are, in fact, guilty and shame-worthy), it is easy to assume that the solution is to quiet the conscience. Put differently, the problem with the conscience, after the Fall, is that it tends to lead us to ourselves rather than to God.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer notes, “Conscience is concerned not with man’s relation to God and to other men but with man’s relation to himself.” In this regard, he explains, the conscience “derives the relation to God and to men from the relation of man to himself. Conscience pretends to be the voice of God and the standard for the relation to other men.”
As a good Lutheran, Bonhoeffer understands the law-Gospel dynamic at the heart of faith, but also the temptation to moralism that the conscience awakens in the heart. All Christian people, like the church of Galatia, will be tempted to begin in the Spirit but continue in the flesh, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to equate your conscience with God. But as Bonhoeffer notes, many people are placating an aspect of their psychology and telling themselves that when it stops panging, that God has stopped being angry. In relating to themselves they falsely believe they are relating to God.
The problem with relating to yourself and calling that God, beyond the obvious fact that you are not God, is that the way you tend to represent God does not align with who God is. The god of your imagination is often either much easier to placate, or impossible to placate, and so you turn to either accusing or defending yourself (as Paul says in Rom. 2:15).
This does not mean that we should avoid panging people’s consciences when we preach. All biblical preaching will inevitably awaken the conscience of people. But that is not the goal. The goal is to shepherd a people to the Lord, which means we have to understand the inner-dynamics of the conscience.
As Bonhoeffer explains, “it is the function of the conscience to put man to flight from God…Conscience drives man from God into a secure hiding place. Here, distant from God, man plays the judge himself and just by this means he escapes God’s judgment…Conscience is not the voice of God to sinful man; it is man’s defense against it.”
Or, as put by Puritan pastor-theologian William Gurnall, there is a vast difference between a “heart thirst” and a “conscience thirst.” You can quench the latter and assume you have satisfied the former. The reality is that only the blood of Jesus, as the author of Hebrews reminds us, can cleanse the conscience (Heb. 9:14). Importantly, what Hebrews tells us is that the blood of Christ cleanses us from dead works. One of the greatest temptations in preaching is to encourage people to dead works - to get them to do things - to feel better about themselves. Rather, we must shepherd people away from their inward-turning moralism to Christ himself.
This is why we are called to shepherd people to the Lord, and not simply to awaken the conscience to get people to do things. There was something profoundly unfaithful about the talk I heard that morning in chapel. They knew what they were doing. Like a lot of pastors, they came to think it was their job to get people to do things, and ceased to care about the reason why people were responding.
In 2 Cor. 7:10 Paul says, “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.” The preacher is supposed to shepherd souls into a godly grieving of their sins. The fantasy that many give in to is to believe that any grieving of sin will be godly. Rather, in our continued corruption, we are all tempted to advance ourselves in the flesh rather than the spirit.
I often ask my classes how many of them have heard a sermon on the conscience, and I don’t think there have ever been more than 1 or 2. More often than not, there are none. One of the most common aspects of our life with the Lord will be how we navigate our guilt and shame, and that is directly related to the conscience. If we are not teaching about it, people will relate to it in the flesh, since that is all they will know. Here is my attempt to preach on the conscience to help people understand how to navigate it:
Wherever you find yourself, as either preacher or hearer of God’s Word, it is important to open your heart to the Lord and consider with him: “Lord, in what ways am I tempted not to draw near to you, but to just placate my conscience?” Or, perhaps, “Lord, how am I tempted not to stand before your Word long enough to really feel my conscience, turning instead to the “accusing or defending thoughts” (Rom. 2:15) and thinking that navigating those is the same as managing you.” Ultimately this should lead us to pray: “Lord, I don’t want to manage you. I don’t want to wrestle with myself in your presence. Lord I need you. Draw me close to yourself.”