Our Conscience is Watching

Copyright 2009 Gloria Fisher.
All rights reserved.

While sitting in the car waiting on my husband in the grocery store a shiny SUV pulled into the handicapped parking space next to us, and a 20-something young man in a baseball cap hopped out and ran into the store. There was no handicapped license plate on his car. There was no handicapped card on his mirror. And he had no idea the trouble he was causing a handicapped person who might actually need the parking space close to the building. Nor did he have any idea of the damage he was doing to himself.

Some people might think that stealing a handicapped parking space from a truly handicapped person might be a small thing. After all it’s only a few minutes or so. What harm could it do? Yes, there’s a chance that no one else wanted or needed the spot. But what does it do to us when we deliberately choose the wrong behavior over and over again?

In my experience as a spiritual director I observe that there is an underlying thread that connects the events in our lives to create what becomes the fabric of our lives. That thread connects our past, runs through our present, and flows right into our future. Part of that thread is our conscience.

St. Paul talks about our conscience in 1 & 2 Corinthians, Timothy, Titus, and Hebrews. He talks about various states of our conscience: a good conscience, a clear conscience, a blameless conscience, a weak conscience, and an evil conscience. In 1 Corinthians Paul talks about a weak conscience in verse 8:7. What makes a weak conscience? I would submit that a conscience is made weak by continually choosing what is wrong behavior over what is right. What we fail to see is that our conscience is watching us. Our conscience is observing our behavior all the time. When we choose to do the right thing, we feel good about ourselves. Our conscience is clear. Our conscience is good. It doesn’t bother us.

However, if we choose to do the wrong thing, our conscience sees it. And it does bother us. It may even make us feel guilty when it knows that we have deliberately chosen to do what we know in our hearts and/or in our minds is the wrong thing to do. When our conscience feels guilty, we feel bad. If that bad feeling grows we may even start to feel depressed. Fortunately, God has given us confession as a way to ease our guilty feelings. We can talk to God. Tell Him how badly we feel and almost instantly we feel better. Not that God does not know what we did. He does know. But we need to say the words in order to ease our conscience.

If we ignore a guilty conscience. If we continue to make bad choices, our conscience could get weak. When it becomes weak, it stops feeling guilty. It sees us doing wrong and keeps quiet. It no longer functions in the way that God meant it to function as an alarm to warn us to do right. When our conscience is quiet, we no longer notice that what we do is wrong. But somewhere on a very deep level our conscience is recording our behavior and sending messages to our minds and hearts that we are becoming bad. Continual wrong behavior over time, ignoring messages from our consciences, eventually will convince us that we are bad people and not worthy of blessings, not worthy of prosperity, not worthy of God’s love. At that point we truly need a savior who will come and rescue us from ourselves. That savior is Jesus Christ.

These thoughts were going through my mind as I watched the young man stealing a handicapped parking space. Maybe that’s not a big deal to him now I thought. But his conscience is watching what he does. It records that decision to do wrong. Continued bad decisions will mount up until something has to break. Either he’ll make a very large wrong decision and hurt himself or someone else or hopefully, he’ll break down and ask forgiveness before much real damage is done. I prayed for him. Lord, forgive him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing or how it effects other people. Show him before it’s too late. May he come to know You and Your forgiveness very soon. Amen.