Careful thinking

We started our series at Church yesterday on the Christian and conscience.  It's not an easy series to prepare or preach and I have a hunch that yesterday's first in the series will prove to be the easiest of the three.  It very much laid the foundations: Our Conscience is God given so that we have an ability to weigh up and determine right and wrong, we should always listen to our conscience, yet our plasticine, malleable, conscience is affected by the fall in a number of ways so that it does not line up with God's will.  Before finally we looked at the joy to be found in our conscience driving us to Calvary where as we confess and repent we find cleansing from guilt and the promise of the Spirit to change us.

This coming Sunday I'll be preaching on how as Christians we calibrate our conscience.  So here's the challenge that I've been increasingly aware of as I've been doing the background preparation on this for the last month of so.  We simply don't take the time to work God's word into our conscience in every area of life.  We also underestimate the influence of our culture, family, education, peers and media in shaping our conscience in those very same areas of life almost without our realising it.

As I've been preparing this series I've been aware of the challenge of doing that personally.  Have I allowed God's word to shape my conscience about; tattoo's?  Burial or cremation?  Sunday?  Clothing?  Relationships?  Family?  Care of ageing parents?  Bank Accounts?  The items in my shopping basket?  What I watch, listen to, read?  My friendships? and so on...

If I believe there is no square inch of my life over which Christ does not claim Lordship then I need to be giving myself over in community to working out what that Lordship means.  In forming my conscience, recalibrating it, realigning it by the Spirit through his word.