It Bothered His Conscience

A man who stole between twenty and thirty dollars from a Sears cash register in the late 1940s paid it back – with interest – on November 28, 2011. The unidentified man hand-delivered an envelope containing a note and a $100 bill to the Sears store in downtown Seattle. The manager, Gary Lorentson, believes the man’s conscience was bothering him. I expect he is right; and I am happy his conscience bothered him enough that he paid back what he had stolen earlier. Undoubtedly the statute of limitations for petty theft had long since run out; but I have never read in the Bible where God has any statute of limitations.

Jiminy Cricket told Pinocchio, “Always let your conscience be your guide.” While Walt Disney isn’t exactly divine authority, that saying brings up a Biblical subject that needs attention and clarification. What is the conscience? What does it do? And should we, indeed, be guided by the conscience?

It is virtually impossible to define what the conscience is without mentioning what it does. The conscience is the mental faculty which judges between right and wrong. When it is functioning properly, it accuses and convicts a person for doing what that person understands to be wrong, while commending a person for doing what that person understands to be right. The man who stole the money from Sears obviously knew it was wrong; otherwise he wouldn’t have paid it back. His conscience evidently was prodding him and making him feel guilty for decades.

John 8:9 tells us that the men who brought the adulterous woman to Jesus were “convicted by their conscience” when He said to them, “Him who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” And in Acts 2:37, the people listening to Peter’s sermon “were pricked in the heart” when they realized that they had killed the very Son of God who had come to save them (that is, their consciences convicted them of sin). Romans 2:15 teaches us that the conscience accuses us when we do what we believe is wrong, but commends us when we do what we understand is right.

So, then, should you “let your conscience be your guide”? In the general sense, yes! That’s why God gave you a conscience in the first place. How foolish you would be to deliberately go against your conscience! The apostle Paul said he served God with a pure conscience (2 Timothy 1:3). He urged Timothy to practice love out of a pure conscience (1 Timothy 1:5).

But wait! Even before Paul became a Christian, when he was a rabid Pharisee persecuting Christians to the point of death, Paul had a good conscience (Acts 23:1). He truly believed that his actions against Christ were what God wanted him to do (Acts 26:9-11). He was letting his conscience be his guide, yet he was sinning against God. Realize, however, that the problem was not with his conscience; the problem was his faulty information base. Paul had grown up believing the traditions of the Pharisees. Jesus rejected those man-made traditions, and Paul sincerely (though erroneously) thought that Jesus was a sinful false prophet deserving of death, and that His followers should be punished as well. Paul’s conscience was working just fine; and when he learned the truth about Jesus, his conscience continued to operate properly. He became as avid a supporter of Jesus and the Gospel as he had previously been an opponent. The change was not in his conscience, but in the information his conscience used to judge between right and wrong.

Unfortunately, the conscience does not always function properly. A person may harden himself and become de-sensitized in his own conscience. Paul refers to this as having the conscience “seared with a hot iron” (1 Timothy 4:2). Just as a severe burn may destroy nerves, making an area insensitive to pain, so the conscience may become de-sensitized to the point that one no longer cares about what is right or wrong. I am glad that the man who stole the money from Sears did not harden himself. His conscience remained sensitive, making him feel guilty until he repaid the money.

Peter teaches us that baptism is “an appeal to God for a good conscience” (1 Peter 3:21, NASB). If our conscience is working properly, we will feel guilty about sin. In baptism, we are asking God to forgive our sins, which He will do by washing us clean in the blood of Christ. Then we need feel guilty no longer; our conscience should then be clear. We wish that the man who returned the money to Sears would also put his trust in Jesus, repent of all his sins (not just of stealing the money), and be immersed into Christ for the remission of sins.

	--Joe Slater (Justin, TX)

Information taken from: http://news.yahoo.com/elderly-man-returns-cash-stolen-sears-40s-031332055.html