How To Be Guided By Conscience

 Posted at Reformation Scotland:

Following our conscience is the right thing to do when our conscience is well-informed and characterised by the integrity that comes from being purged by the blood of Christ. We want neither a stupefied or seared conscience on one hand, nor a doubting, over-scrupulous conscience on the other hand. As Samuel Annesley shows in the following updated extract from his sermon on conscience, the sense of sin and the receiving of forgiveness need to be in the right balance. Then we will be equipped to navigate through life in a consistently Christian way.

HOW TO GET A RELIABLE CONSCIENCE

1. Get your conscience awakened from its natural lethargy.
2. Preserve your conscience tender from being seared.
3. Rectify its errors as you would get cure of blindness.
4. Resolve its doubts as you would a claim to your lands.
5. Break from your scruples as you would from thieves on the road.
6. Lay your head in Christ’s bosom to cure your trembling.

HOW TO KEEP A RELIABLE CONSCIENCE

And then for the integrity and quiet of your conscience, observe these proposals, as meticulously as you would a doctor’s prescription in a tedious sickness.

1. Avoid sinning as you would a train of gunpowder.
2. Be as quick in your repentance as in the cure of a pleurisy.
3. Live under the felt presence of the jealous God.
4. Examine your heart, as princes sift out treason.
5. Pray for the grace you need, as starving persons cry for food.
6. Let every action be like an arrow shot at a mark.
7. Think of God as a wise physician.
8. Be as vile in your own esteem as you are in the eyes of the most hypercritical enemy.
9. Live on Christ, as the child in the womb lives on the mother.
10. Love God (as near as possibly you can) as God loves you.

Continue here.