6. Conscience. Conscience is a
person’s instinctive inward sense of right and wrong. Peter encourages his
readers that they should take care to have “a good conscience” (1 Pet. 3:16), and Paul said, “I always take pains
to have a clear conscience toward
both God and man” (Acts 24:16). He told the Christians in Rome that one reason
they should be obedient to government was “for the sake of conscience” (Rom.
13:5).
This does not mean that conscience is always a reliable guide, because
some people can have a “weak” conscience (1 Cor. 8:10), and when Paul says that
he wants his hearers to develop a “good conscience” (1 Tim. 1:5), he implies
that others can have a bad conscience or one that is not as reliable.
Nevertheless, conscience must be taken into account when making an ethical
decision. Serious consequences come to those who reject the testimony of their
consciences, for Paul said that Timothy should “wage the good warfare” while
“holding faith and a good conscience.” Then he added, “By rejecting this [that
is, by rejecting their consciences],6 some have made shipwreck of
their faith” (vv. 18–19). Therefore, people reject the testimony of their
consciences at great peril.
7. Heart. While conscience
is an instinctive inward sense of
right and wrong, the “heart” in Scripture is a broader concept, for the heart
is seen as the inward center of a person’s deepest moral and spiritual
inclinations and convictions, especially in relationship to God.
Believers in the new covenant age have God’s laws written on their
hearts in a fuller and deeper sense than in the old covenant. As part of the
superiority of the new covenant over the old, God promises, “I will put my laws on their hearts, and write
them on their minds” (Heb. 10:16; cf. 8:10). In addition, Paul assumes that
Christians in general have become “obedient from the heart” to God’s will (Rom. 6:17). But we should not think that our
hearts are yet perfect, because Paul also says that his goal in ministry is
that Christians would come to practice “love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a
sincere faith” (1 Tim. 1:5; see also 2 Thess. 3:5). Paul also says that God “tests our hearts” (1 Thess. 2:4),
assuming that Christians can have hearts that are more or less pure before God
(see also Prov. 4:23; 1 Cor. 4:5; Eph. 1:18; 6:6; 1 Thess. 3:13; James 3:14;
4:8).
As far as ethical guidance is concerned, sometimes Scripture speaks of
people following their heart desires so as to do what is pleasing to God. Paul
told the Christians in the church at Corinth that, regarding the giving of
money to the Lord’s work, “each one must give as he has decided in his heart” (2 Cor. 9:7). He also said
that God “put into the heart of Titus
the same earnest care I have for you” (8:16; see also Acts 7:23).
Even in the old covenant, David could write of a heart that had been to
some measure transformed by God:
Delight yourself in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
(Ps. 37:4)
This indicates that the deep, heartfelt desires of a person who loves
God and takes delight in him will often be the very desires that God wants that
person to have, the desires that God will be pleased to grant. In this case, a
person’s desires indicate the will of God for that person.
A similar idea of deep inward desires that accord with God’s will is
found in other passages that do not specifically use the word heart (Hebrew, lēb; Greek, kardia) but
carry a similar meaning:
If anyone aspires [Greek, oregeō, “to seek to accomplish, aspire,
strive for”] to the office of overseer, he desires
[Greek, epithumeō, “to have a strong
desire, long for”] a noble task. (1 Tim. 3:1)
With respect to
the remarriage of a woman whose first husband has died, Paul writes:
A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband
dies, she is free to be married to whom
she wishes, only in the Lord. (1 Cor. 7:39)
Here the Greek term for “wishes” is thelō,
“to have a desire for something, wish to have, desire, want.” Paul is saying
that a widow has considerable freedom to marry anyone she wants to marry, as
long as he is a Christian believer (“only in the Lord”). I do not think there
is a convincing reason to refrain from applying this guideline to marriage
decisions generally, even though here it is speaking specifically of widows who
wish to remarry. The principle is that people should be married to someone they
want to be married to.
In my 42 years of teaching theology to undergraduate and graduate
students, I have found this principle to be important when students have come
to me asking for counsel regarding decisions they have to make between job
opportunities, career directions, or sometimes whether to make a commitment to
marry a certain person or not. Again and again, after learning about the
specific situation, I have found it helpful to ask, “What do you most deeply want to do? What is in your heart?”
I find this question helpful because in many situations the Lord has
already put in the person’s heart a deep desire to follow a particular course
of action, and it would be foolish to ignore that desire. I am not saying that
such a desire is always reliable, for James warns his readers (who are for the
most part Christian believers) that they might have “bitter jealousy and
selfish ambition” in their hearts (James 3:14), and some of them need to
“purify [their] hearts” (4:8; see also 1:26; 5:5, 8). But in general, Christian
believers have become “obedient from the heart” to God’s teachings (Rom. 6:17),
and I have found again and again that, for Christians who are walking in
obedience to the Lord, staying in fellowship with him, and maintaining regular
prayer and Bible reading, their heart desires should be a large factor in
discerning God’s will in particular situations. (But let me be clear that a
person’s heart desires are not the only factor to take into account, for the
other sources of information discussed in this entire section must also be
considered.)
8. A Person’s
Human Spirit. A person’s “spirit” (Greek, pneuma)
is the nonmaterial part of a person, the part that survives when the person’s
physical body dies. A person’s human
spirit is not the same as the Holy Spirit who lives within us and who is
himself God, for Paul distinguishes between the Holy Spirit and our human
spirits when he says, “The Spirit
himself bears witness with our spirit
that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:16).
Paul was guided by the uneasiness of his human spirit when he was in
Troas looking for Titus to bring him news from the church at Corinth:
When I came to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ, even though a door
was opened for me in the Lord, my spirit
was not at rest because I did not find my brother Titus there. So I took
leave of them and went on to Macedonia. (2 Cor. 2:12–13)
In another situation, when Paul came to the city of Athens, we read that
“his spirit was provoked within him
as he saw that the city was full of idols” (Acts 17:16). This apparently
indicates that Paul had a subjective sense that invisible, evil spiritual
forces were active in Athens and were behind the outward physical evidences of
idolatry that he saw as he walked through the city. The presence of evil in the
invisible, spiritual realm registered in Paul not so much in his intellect and
reason as in his subjective perception of what his spirit was sensing within
him.
In a similar way, the Gospels sometimes say that Jesus perceived
something “in his spirit” (Mark 2:8)
or that he “was troubled in his spirit”
(John 13:21).
Sometimes a person’s human spirit can give indications of positive
emotions, such as when Mary declared, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior”
(Luke 1:46– 47).
Therefore, in addition to a subjective perception about right and wrong
from our own consciences, and in
addition to the deep inward desires and convictions that we feel in our hearts, it is also appropriate to
consider any sense of invisible spiritual dynamics in a situation that may
register in our human spirits. (Wayne
Grudem, What the Bible Says about How to Know God’s Will [Wheaton, Ill.:
Crossway, 2020], 23-29)
