Prayer: Heavenly Father, may we serve you with pure conscience and teach us to pray for one another without ceasing.
Scripture: I thank God, whom I serve from my forefathers with pure conscience, that without ceasing I have remembrance of you in my prayers night and day. 2Timothy 1:3
Note: Webster’s definition for conscience is the sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness of one’s own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of obligation to do right or be good. It is the conscience that serves as the faculty, power, or principle enjoining good acts. It serves as the moral guide for what’s considered right or wrong.
Conscience manifests itself as the feeling that you know that compels you to do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong. It’s that inner feeling that makes you feel guilty when you have done something you know is wrong. No matter how one pretends to show to the external world, nobody is able to run away from his own conscience. It’s like an inner force that’s very much part of who you are.
When Paul was writing to Timothy making reference to a pure conscience, his emphasis and concern for the young man, Timothy, was to guard all the spiritual legacies that he deposited in him and entrusted into his hands to lead others. He reminded the young man of how faithful he (Paul) had served God with a clear conscience, citing the rich background and examples of the heroes of the faith from the past. Paul was one man who had gone through a convoluted past, when acting on authority, he often arrested the Christians, persecuted them and murdered some of them. During this troubled era when he sought to destroy the Church, Paul was fully convinced all along that he was serving God with a pure conscience.
Yet, Paul was so wrong in his assumption of what he thought to be offering service to God until Jesus confronted him in his madness, on the road to Damascus. Suddenly, all those assumptions and presumptions of service to God paled into irrelevance before the convicting power of the Spirit of God. Paul became a new man with a renewed conscience of what’s right or wrong. The conversion of Paul meant a completely new life that put to death the old life with a checkered history that believed that killing others without any justifiable cause in the name of God was the right thing to do.
Food for thought: It’s the heart of man that influences decisions on what’s considered right or wrong. Do you have Jesus in your heart?
Declaration: The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? Jeremiah 17:9
Wednesday, August 10, 2022
©Author: Rev Fred Aboe
