Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley<\/p>\n
All rights reserved<\/p>\n
It is difficult for some\u00a0of us\u00a0to transition from\u00a0the bad conscience that may have originally led us to seek redemption in Christ\u00a0to a dependence on the conviction of the Holy Spirit as\u00a0our new “moral compass.” One of\u00a0the\u00a0drawbacks of a now\u00a0faulty self-condemnatory\u00a0conscience masquerading as the reproving voice of God in a\u00a0believer’s life is that conscience’s power to promote the condemnation of others. It is impossible to internally punish yourself at its prompting without finding yourself almost simultaneously internally punishing people in your life who have their own moral failings. Sometimes that \u201cinternal punishing\u201d goes on to manifest itself in an external verbal censure of individuals who we have no right to judge, at least in the ultimate sense of judgment that is the prerogative of God alone.<\/p>\n
Orthodox Christians usually have at least the intellectual understanding required to know that we have the right to judge wrong actions but not the people who are doing the acting. Very few of us are long in the faith before someone invariably shares with us the extra-biblical yet true statement that we are to \u201chate the sin but love the sinner\u201d (in fact many of us knew this saying long before we came to Christ).This principle seems reasonable, in fact so reasonable that we may assume that it is an easy thing to practice in our daily lives and, for many, it is not difficult to do so. This is not, however, the case with those of us who have mistaken the voice of a punitive conscience for the genuine conviction of the Holy Spirit.<\/p>\n
It is almost impossible, in fact, to harshly judge ourselves without also harshly judging our fellow human beings, whether they be believers or non-believers. Whether it is moral debauchery outside the Church or hypocrisy (unfortunately sometimes accompanied by debauchery) within we who have internalized a self-condemnatory spirit find it so very easy to self-righteously criticize all men.<\/p>\n
It is this reality that I think explains many of the criticisms the world has for Biblical Christianity today. Too many who claim the name of Christ have a practical theology that stems from a fearful need to try to continue to atone for the many sins, perceived or real, \u00a0with which an overly strict conscience has saddled us. We have forgotten, or never truly understood, that \u201cthere is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.\u201d Rather than knowing a loving heavenly Father who corrects us in love for our own eternal good, we only know the voice of the accuser inside us (sometimes aided and abetted, I suspect, by the accuser outside, the Enemy of our souls). We accept the hard judgments of ourselves that accompany the moral accusations and then we unconsciously transfer those judgments to everyone around us.<\/em><\/p>\n Today there are enough Christians who do this to make many people outside the Faith want nothing to do with a belief system that we have distorted through accepting a moral compass driven by fear and efforts at self-atonement rather than by the saving grace of God. It is only in finally learning to accept that grace and repenting of ultimately self-atoning self-condemnation that will free us from both wrongly judging ourselves and, just as importantly, judging everyone else. This is a process that begins with the conscious owning of our previously unconscious slavery to our still fallen human conscience. It continues as we begin to reject the direction of that faulty conscience in favor of the gentle guidance of the Spirit. We are told in Scripture that it is the kindness of God that leads us towards repentance. When we come to know this is true for ourselves, we will be able to realize that it is true for everyone else as well and stop doing more spiritual harm than good.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley All rights reserved It is difficult for some\u00a0of us\u00a0to transition from\u00a0the bad conscience that may have originally led us to seek redemption in Christ\u00a0to a dependence on the conviction of the Holy Spirit as\u00a0our new “moral compass.” One of\u00a0the\u00a0drawbacks of a now\u00a0faulty self-condemnatory\u00a0conscience masquerading as the reproving voice of God… <\/p>\n