Pastor John,
I continue to learn from the message that you preached to us 6 weeks ago. A facet of that message is that there is a place, so high above this world’s ability to choose between what is good and what is evil, that while walking in it, we will never offend His children by choosing a side, any side, we will only provoke them to rise above it. That place is the way of Holiness. It is the place that we call “walking in the Spirit”.
Jesus keeps teaching me about that place. It keeps growing. What He has just taught me, I did not know that I did not know. You have told us this and explained it, in so many ways, for decades and the Bible is filled with it… and I thought that I understood it, but I did not. This is mine now, it is a part of me, if I will remain in the spiritual place where I learned it. My flesh is scared to confess what it really means, but I know it’s Jesus. I know that you know this well, but if you will allow me, here it us:
To make a bad decision or to “do something wrong”, is not necessarily to sin. You can make a bad decision and be perfectly pleasing to God. Sin is not a tangible list of actions that can be read and performed from a list, it is the act of going against one’s own conscience. Sin is altogether a matter of the heart. If you are filled with God’s Spirit and have a clear conscience about doing something, then to do so is not sin, even if it is a bad idea. In such a case, in love, we can depend on God to faithfully correct us and show us a better way.
But if you, as a Spirit filled child of God, go against your own conscience, regardless of the act, you are sinning. Sin is a matter of the heart; “to the pure, all things are pure.” From the lesson the Lord has taught me, I will add this..
If it goes against our conscience, nothing is clean.
Nothing in and of itself is evil and there may be a holy purpose for everything under the sun, at one time or another.
Do not judge by what you see, that is not righteous judgment.
Do not judge another person based on your liberty in the Lord.
Your liberty in the Lord reaches to the boundaries of your conscience.
Keep a clear conscience and God will guide you safely home.
Jerry
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Hi Jerry,
That’s pretty much it, and to live that way is to abide “in the liberty with which Christ has made us free.”
The ultimate standard for right conduct is not, of course, the human conscience. Rather, it is the Spirit of God. However, once we receive the Spirit, and even before then, beginning the moment when the Spirit first convicts us of sin, the Spirit itself becomes our conscience. So, there we are, back to the (sanctified) conscience again!
As you rightly said, mistakes are not necessarily sin. Ignorance is not necessarily sin, either. Even spiritual weakness is not necessarily sin (see Rev. 3:8). Without understanding this, we will certainly, at some point, condemn someone whom God does not condemn (including ourselves) and will likely do spiritual damage to an otherwise innocent person, perhaps to a brother or sister in Christ who is just weak in faith. And that IS sin (Mt. 18:6), as Paul warned the saints in Corinth, “But when you sin so against the brethren, and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ” (1Cor. 8:12).
May God grant us the faith, love, and wisdom to stand before Him “faultless in the presence of His glory with exceeding joy,” and to help others to do the same.
Pastor John