Up and Running

Okay, that's enough of a break. I didn't even get any of my random thought stuff down. Oh, well. Found out today we're having a baby girl - you can't get close to my cloud. Hehe.

So here's the post for the day - a poem.

I don't know what led that author to believe that the voice inside them was God. It certainly wasn't the Bible. Does the Holy Spirit indwell Christians? Absolutely. But God speaks through His Word, not through that little voice in your head. That voice is 1) heavily influenced by society and experience and 2) subject to the sinful nature that infected us all through the Fall. So, yeah. That little voice? Not to be trusted on it's own.

That's not to say that God can't use that voice, that conscience, your logical thought process, or the sometimes intact innate feeling that a thing is wrong. But God is not your conscience and your conscience is not God. This is clearly seen in I Corinthians 8. The truth is that eating the meat isn't wrong, but he FEELS like it is. So if he eats it, thinking that what he's doing is wrong, he's sinning because he's choosing to go against what he believes God desires. Conscience is NOT a substitute for the Bible. Conscience is why so many people - Christians are sometimes the worst it seems - have such sharp disagreements over what is "right and wrong." Conscience varies from person to person; the Bible does not. If it's not of faith - don't do it! In other words, if you can't do it assured that it's right, Don't! (This does not mean that everything you're sure is right, actually is.)

This is something that I think needs to be brought out more from the pulpits. Because I don't think I've ever heard anyone say, "Be careful of your conscience! It can trick you into causing problems in the church, and into teaching as God's Word the commandments of men!" I've heard warnings against legalism - lots of those - but never anything that says, "And just because you FEEL that something is wrong, doesn't make it wrong." They'll tell you that your heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, but most people don't bring up, "And your conscience will tell you that things are wrong that really aren't and cause trouble that way."

That was a large issue when I was dating my husband. I grew up in churches where things were "wrong" that weren't really wrong. It's because someone FELT like it was wrong and used the Bible to try to prove it. And I grew up wondering why I heard that it was wrong, but never heard HOW or WHY it was wrong. I didn't really question what made it wrong though, because I also felt like it was wrong. My conscience was heavily influenced by environment and superstitious, nebulous feeling, rather than what the Bible actually said.

Bottom line of the whole thing - if it comes from inside you, don't trust it. Not if it's what you feel, what you think, what you've heard, or what you've experienced. Compare EVERYTHING to Scripture before you call it good or evil.