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Podcast: Mind Your Own Conscience and Love Your Neighbor (Andy Naselli and J. D. Crowley)

October 11, 2021 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Should We Always Obey Our Conscience?

In today's episode, J. D. Crowley and Andy Naselli discuss the conscience—whether we should always obey our conscience, what to do when our conscience disagrees with another Christian’s conscience, and how the conscience relates to objective right and wrong.

Conscience

Conscience

Andrew David Naselli, J. D. Crowley

This book walks readers through relevant Scripture passages on the topic of concience—a largely neglected topic in the church today—to offer guiding principles and practical advice for aligning our consciences with God’s will.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:45 - Common Misconceptions about the Conscience

Matt Tully
J. D. and Andy, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast. The conscience is one of those topics that comes up fairly frequently in our conversations. It’s not an unfamiliar concept. And yet, my guess is that there are probably lots of different ways that people understand the conscience, different ways that we talk about it—some of them, perhaps, somewhat mutually exclusive or not always very compatible. You two have both spent a lot of time thinking about this topic of the conscience, thinking about it practically and also thinking about it through the lens of the Bible. To start our conversation, what are some of the most common misconceptions, in your opinion, about the conscience that you’ve encountered? J. D., let’s start with you.

J. D. Crowley
We really hit all these misconceptions head-on right at the beginning of our book when we, in a positive way, laid out truths or principles from Scripture and from wisdom about conscience. I’ll go over some of those and you can see how they confront the misconceptions that come up. The first principle is that conscience is a priceless gift from God. What would we do without it? Andy often compares it to living without the capacity to feel pain. That would just kill us if we couldn’t feel pain. Also, we need to care for this gift. Like every gift from God, we have to take care of it. That pushes back against this idea that we can neglect our conscience and just sort of let it do what it wants to do. We also believe that conscience is a human capacity—it reflects the moral character of God. So, it’s a gift from God and it reflects God in our heart. It’s also really good at warning us about things that are actually right and wrong, black and white. It doesn’t do grey areas very well. Another important principle is that no two Christians have the same rules in their conscience. Obviously, since we have the same God and the same Scripture and the same Holy Spirit, there is a lot of overlap, but there are a lot of differences on the edges. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have chapters like Romans 14. Then, this next principle should bring us all to our knees and make us humble before God and before others, and that is that nobody’s conscience perfectly matches God’s will. That brings us to that MYOC principle: we have to mind our own conscience. Your conscience is for you. The other guy’s conscience is for him. Then, we come to a really serious principle, and that is that you can damage this gift from God, either by telling it to be quiet when you think it’s warning you correctly, or just over packing it with tons of rules that kind of break it and don’t make it work right. But there are two principles that are greater than all of them, and we really emphasize these two principles throughout the book, and that is simply obey your conscience. It’s going to bring you blessing. It’s not perfect, but it’s not hopelessly flawed either. In fact, I just got a hand-written letter from a young mother who had been telling her conscience to be quiet about her growing alcohol dependence. She read Conscience, she realized the danger she was in, she took action, and she began to experience the blessings of God in her life. It’s a great story. So, obey your conscience. Then, there’s one final principle—the one ring that rules them all—and that is that God is Lord of your conscience. If he wants you to adjust it, you must adjust it—calibrate it—under his lordship. That was Peter’s situation when God showed him all those animals that Jews weren’t supposed to eat and God said, “Kill and eat.” So, what’s he going to do? Well, he has to obey God over his conscience. So, the three biggies are God is the Lord of your conscience, so be willing to calibrate it; obey your conscience; get along with people who have different conscience rules on the edges of their conscience than you do. In fact, what I just shared is our book in two minutes, and the rest of the book is simply Andy and J. D. kind of unpacking all of these amazing principles from God’s word.

Matt Tully
Thanks so much, J. D.. I think there are a number of those things that you mentioned that I want to dig into a little bit further as we keep talking today. Before we do that, Andy, is there anything you would add about other common misconceptions or myths or misunderstandings related to the conscience that you often encounter with other Christians?

Andy Naselli
Probably the most common misconception in our culture is that caricature cartoon where you have an angel and a demon on your shoulder, and they have conversations with you and it’s like they’re debating with your mind and you’re debating with them. That resonates with a lot of people because we do have internal debates about right and wrong. Should I do this? No, you shouldn’t do that. I don’t think that’s how the Bible quite depicts it, but there’s a reason that resonates and that’s what we try to develop in the book.

Matt Tully
We often have this experience of what seems to be an internal struggle between two sides, perhaps, and maybe we would label the good side “the conscience.” Is that internal struggle not related to the conscience, or is that just a misunderstanding of how it’s functioning?

Andy Naselli
The reason I would say it doesn’t quite match up with Scripture is sometimes our conscience functions in an evil way. It’s possible to have an evil conscience. You shouldn’t assume that just because there’s a voice in your head telling you it’s okay to do something, that that’s the voice of God. We have to recognize our conscience can be evil, it can be broken, it can be misleading. Part of Christian maturity is recognizing that and then taking steps to help our conscience mature and to be more aligned with what’s right and what’s true.

07:33 - What Does Scripture Say about the Conscience?

Matt Tully
Andy, let’s jump in to what Scripture does positively say about the conscience and how it speaks to this issue. Where do we see Scripture talk about the conscience?

Andy Naselli
The word conscience occurs only in the New Testament. There’s not a Greek word for conscience. The closest corollary would be if we used the Hebrew word for heart. “David’s heart smote him” (1 Sam. 24:5)—that’s from the King James Version. But, in general, it’s a word that occurs about thirty times in the New Testament, most of it in Paul’s writings. The most concentrated section is 1 Corinthians 8–10. When J. D. and I tried to frame this term, what we did is just carefully look at every time the Bible uses the word, or the concept, and then try to develop a definition from that. It’s like we would do with any word. Take the word barbell for example. What is a barbell?

Matt Tully
You say that because there are barbells standing up against the wall behind you right now.

Andy Naselli
That’s right. I just looked around for a word. If you didn’t know what a barbell was, but you had fifty sentences with the word barbell in it, you could probably figure it out. You just look at the verbs that go with it. What do you do with a barbell? You lift it, you drop it, you buy it, you store it, you don’t bend it (if you do, it’s unusual), maybe you clean it. Then, what are the adjectives—the words that describe it? So, you figure out what this thing can be, what it does, what people did with it, and then you develop a definition. It’s the same thing with conscience. When you look at how Scripture talks about it, you see, positively, it can be fundamentally two different things. It can be good—in the sense of blameless or clear. And then it can be cleansed—it was dirty and then someone cleansed it. A good conscience and a cleansed conscience. Negatively, it can be weak or wounded or defiled or encouraged or emboldened to sin, or evil, or seared (as with a hot iron)—those are six descriptions of, negatively, what the conscience is. You may ask, That’s what it is, or what it can be, but what does it do? There are three actions in the New Testament of what the conscience does. It can bear witness; it can testify or confirm. Second, it can judge. It can try to determine another person’s freedom. It’s really good at judging. Then, a third is that it can lead you to act in a certain way. That’s what Romans 2 and 13 teach. Your conscience can lead you to submit to the authorities, for example. Or, in 1 Corinthians 10, it can lead you to not bother asking where your meat came from. So, you pull it together and ask, How do we define this word? Our best attempt is something like this: the conscience is your consciousness—your sense, your awareness—of what you believe is right and wrong. We say it that way because the conscience produces different results for people based on different moral standards. Simply because your conscience is leading you to think or do a certain thing doesn’t mean that’s what God thinks. Just recognizing that is critical.

Matt Tully
You’re putting some distance between what is objectively right and wrong and your awareness, or your understanding, of what that would be, and that’s where the conscience comes in.

Andy Naselli
Right. Your conscience functions like a guide, monitor, witness, or judge. Sometimes it’s condemning you when it shouldn’t. Other times, it’s not condemning you when it should. For example, it’s very common in our culture for people with a supposed clear conscience to take anti-biblical views on sexuality, abortion, or you name the issue. In their minds, it’s a civil rights issue. They think, This is what we need to do for the sake of conscience! But what’s driving that, I think, is a conscience that’s not aligned with Scripture.

Matt Tully
I think sometimes Christians can maybe assume that behind people who would make those kinds of decisions, or hold those kinds of positions, there is some kind of guilty conscience down deep inside that they know is there, and yet they’re just kind of suppressing it. And yet, it sounds like you’re saying that there could be situations where their conscience isn’t functioning properly, so they might not feel that level of conviction or a moral transgression. J. D., have you seen that at play in your own conversations with unbelievers and believers?

J. D. Crowley
Sure. We’re not all aware of what’s right and wrong, for one thing. Unbelievers have a conscience. It’s surprisingly similar to the conscience of pretty much everyone else in the world on the big issues. But as Andy said, there are things missing from their conscience, just like there are things missing from our conscience. It’s not that much different. When we share the gospel and when we talk to our neighbors, we can’t just assume that they have the same standards of right and wrong as we do as Christians. It matters because if we preach against sin in a cross-cultural context—and we might get to this later—we may preach against a sin that’s not even actually considered a sin in their culture. So, we miss having that confirmation of their conscience inside of them saying, Yes, what this person is saying is correct. It’s a difficult situation.

(13:55}(Calibrating the Conscience)

Matt Tully
You raised that cross-cultural dynamic that comes into play—just culture in general and background and the way someone was raised. That’s all going to feed into these conversations about our conscience. I want to get into that, but maybe before we go there, Andy, you used the word a few minutes ago about the importance of calibrating our conscience, bringing it into line with Scriptural truth. I think that’s a kind of category that maybe would be somewhat new to a lot of Christians. We kind of think that conscience is just there. It probably is a good thing from God and we might accept that, but the thought of needing to calibrate it one way or another might be a little bit odd. Why do you use that word calibrate in particular?

Andy Naselli
The metaphor is regarding what you do with an instrument that’s not functioning according to its standard properly. So, I’m looking at my computer right now. It says it’s 9:17am. This is a Macbook and I’m kind of taking Apple’s word for it that that’s what time it is. But it’s possible that it's off by like ten or twenty seconds. I don’t know. This morning I stepped on a scale. I won’t tell you what it said, but I was assuming the scale was accurate. The scale could be off. So, calibrating just means making whatever tool you’re using function correctly according to a standard. The place where we got this is actually from the book of Acts. J. D. is the one who pointed this out to me first. Would you be willing to share that story, J. D., from Acts?

J. D. Crowley
Which one? There are so many stories in Acts.

Andy Naselli
The one where Peter and the vision.

J. D. Crowley
Oh, sure. So here was Peter praying up on the to of the roof, and he didn’t know it, but in a few minutes there would be a knock at his door and there would be three or four Gentiles there, wanting to come in and meet him. God sent him the tablecloth down with animals that he could not eat, in good conscience, as a good Jewish man. And he was a good Jewish man. And then came the horrible commandment from God: “Kill and eat.” His conscience just felt a sense of revulsion, so he basically said no the first time. It happened again a second time and a third time. Soon after that was a knock on the door, and by God’s grace—and Peter’s my hero in this—by God’s grace Peter connected the coming of those Gentiles downstairs and the strange vision that he just had and the commandments from God. He calibrated his conscience in a matter of ten minutes. For the first time in his life, he let Gentiles into his house. It was a great miracle. Of course, many years later, he forgot some of these principles and they had that problem with Paul when he didn’t want to eat with the Gentiles in Antioch, out of pressure form people from Jerusalem. But here, he obeyed God and opened the door to the Gentiles.

Matt Tully
That’s such an interesting Bible story. I think it’s often easy to view that change in conscience as a theological kind of realization that Peter had. God kind of revealed this theological truth to him, and then there was this intellectual kind of decision: Okay, that changes things. But it seems like you’re getting at that maybe there was more to it than just a pure intellectual realization. There was something maybe a little bit more significant happening there. Does that resonate with you?

Andy Naselli
I would say it’s much more than an intellectual change there. Imagine that you grow up your entire life with the Jewish laws. Eating these non-kosher foods would be revolting and disgusting. It would be like someone from America eating his neighbor's dog. I know in Cambodia that’s a different thing, but to us in America, you don’t do that! That’s what this really would have felt like to someone like Peter. So, this isn’t just an intellectual thing. This is emotional. This is going against everything about his whole background and upbringing. What I think is interesting is this is unusual in how quickly Peter calibrates for something so significant. For most of us, we don’t have these grand visions directly from God about how we need to change our particular view about an issue. For most of us, it takes time. So, I think pastorally, we shouldn’t rush this. We should give people time to calibrate their consciences with the truth of God’s word, the truth outside God’s word, and in community with God’s people.

Matt Tully
Maybe this is an unfair question to ask, but it seems like the example of Peter is a conscience that was, in light of the coming of Jesus and the new covenant, it was too sensitive to something that it didn’t need to be sensitive about. Then, on the other hand, I think we’re probably more familiar today in our culture with the idea of a conscience being seared, and maybe it’s not sensitive enough to something that we should be feeling bad about. What do you think is the bigger problem as you look at the evangelical church in America, and maybe even around the world? Is there one of those tendencies that seems dominant over the other one, or is it a mix of both of those dynamics?

J. D. Crowley
Andy and I listened to a lot of sermons and read a lot of things in our research for this book, and after most of the sermons I went away with a feeling that the person who preached that felt like the greatest danger to the American church is legalism. So, that would be the side that Peter was on where his conscience had all these things in it—his conscience was doing double, triple duty. But, when you look at how Scripture handles the concept of conscience, Paul makes it very clear in Romans 14 that there’s a cliff on the right—that’s legalism—and there’s a cliff on the left—that’s antinomianism. And that’s what you mentioned—a seared conscience, or not listening to your conscience. Scripture gives dire warnings for both of those. It pronounces anathema on the legalism side, and it says people who live certain kinds of lives cannot inherit the kingdom of God. So yeah, you’re touching something very important there.

20:45 - Conscience Issue vs. Moral Issue

Matt Tully
Another prominent area where the conscience comes to the fore, and is often invoked in conversations, is when we come to disputable matters, or disagreements, with other Christians. Andy, how should we think about the conscience in relation to the different opinions and standards that Christians often have related to a whole host of issues? For many of them, for the individual Christian, it feels like a moral black and white issue. Actually, maybe as a first question, how do we distinguish between a conscience issue and a clear moral issue?

Andy Naselli
What I found helpful is to start with a text like Romans 14 and work out from there, rather than starting with the idea of triage and trying to show that. So, let me just start there, and then work out. In Romans 14, Paul mentions three matters of dispute—three disputable matters, three matters of conscience (people call them different things). The three issues are food, holy days, and wine. In Romans 14, the strong—which I would say are theologically correct, so they are mostly Gentile Christians in the context of Paul’s letter to the Romans. They eat all kinds of food, they don’t make distinctions among days, and they drink wine. This isn’t like the modern-day issue of alcohol that this is talking about. This is talking with reference to the Jewish laws. Then, the weak—the theologically incorrect but not heretical group (mostly Jewish Christians)—would eat only vegetables, they valued some days more than others, and they abstained from wine. As Paul works through that issue with these folks in Rome, he argues not primarily, Y’all need to change your views and all hold this view. Instead, he focuses on how you can love each other while still holding your views. So, when you hear him talk that way, that sounds so much different than 1 Corinthians 15 where it’s saying Here’s the gospel. This is the only right way to think about it. Here, in Romans 14, there is a more theologically correct way to think about these issues, but he’s more concerned with how to love each other in your differences. So, when we read the Bible, we try to put all of this together, and that’s where the idea of triage comes from. Some true things are more important than others. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul calls the gospel of “first importance,” which implies there are other truths that are not of first importance. So, in this triage model, first importance are the things that all Christians must affirm and not deny. They are the essentials, the most significant, the things that we’re most unified around. And then there are other truths that aren’t that important, but still important. And there are different ways to carve this up. Gavin Ortlund just wrote a book for Crossway where he has four (or so) levels. Al Mohler has written an article where he has three levels. It’s not critical that we make a clear position on how to divide that up, but what is important is to recognize levels of importance. You could say there’s a secondary level of things like what’s your view on God’s sovereignty in salvation or church polity or the role of men and women in the church and in the home, etc. I’d say those are pretty important, but not first level. And then there are other issues that are still important, but they’re not as important as that second level I just mentioned. I think that the type of issues Paul’s talking about in 1 Corinthians 14 would be like that—like a tertiary level of, It’s important, but not nearly as important as these other things. Over the last five years or so as people have read our book, I’ve been a little discouraged with how some people have used it to basically trivialize anything that’s not a first level issue. Like, Oh, that’s not of first importance, so it doesn’t matter! All truth matters. It’s just that some matters more than others.

Matt Tully
How does what you just said a couple of minutes ago about the way that Paul in Romans 14 does seem to focus more on calling the believers on the two different sides of the issue to love one another well? He doesn’t seem to be as focused on this idea of calibrating the conscience, of saying, Hey, you weak brothers who feel your conscience condemn you for certain things that aren’t actually correct, you should grow in that. You should be strengthened in that. Why would you say he emphasized the love more?

Andy Naselli
I don’t think Paul’s neutral about whether a believer should be weak or strong in conscience. The very terms strong and weak suggest that a strong conscience is more desirable than a weak one on a particular issue. But Paul’s point in Romans 14 is that a person who is strong in faith—a person with a strong conscience—does not necessarily please God more than the weak in faith. His burden in that passage is not to eliminate such differences, but to glorify God by loving others who differ. I would summarize Romans 14:1–15:13 in four headings. For Romans 14:1–12, I think the main idea is “welcome one another.” In Romans 14:13–23, he’s exhorting strong Christians not to cause your brother or sister to stumble. In Romans 15:1–6, he’s saying, Strong Christians, build up your brother or sister. And then in Romans 15:7–13, he’s saying, Welcome one another to the glory of God, to glorify God. I think that is the overall force of these exhortations about quarreling over disputable matters.

26:53 - The Conscience and Cross-Cultural Situations

Matt Tully
J. D., one of the trickiest things in this whole conversation is how often we struggle to clearly identify when an issue is a disputable matter (to use that term that’s already been thrown out)—a tertiary issue that we can disagree on, to some extent, that isn’t of first importance. In particular, you’ve seen this in your cross-cultural work. You’re a missionary in Cambodia. How have you seen these different cultural backgrounds and contexts impact the way that people view certain ethical questions or moral issues?

J. D. Crowley
Conscience issues and conscience problems are—in fact, Andy and I think that a very high percentage of conflicts in a local church in America come from people not understanding their own conscience and how it works and not understanding what Romans 14 says, how they should relate to people who have different rules on the edges of their conscience. Don’t forget that at the core of the conscience of Christians, I would guess there is probably 95% agreement on the big issues. It’s just on the edges. The fact is, sometimes we don’t speak quite accurately. We say, Well, that’s just a conscience issue. But actually, any issue that’s in our conscience—including the big things like don’t steal, believe God—they’re in our conscience as well. In fact, those are the matters that should be in our conscience because conscience tends to want to adjudicate either guilty or not guilty, right or wrong. It doesn’t do grey areas very well. If we have these problems in our church, imagine how those problems are complicated when we cross into another culture. Twenty-seven years ago I came to Cambodia, and I was quite ignorant about conscience and how it worked—my conscience and the conscience of the people that I was working with here. I think one of the most revealing stories—and it’s a little bit embarrassing for me—is when I planted a mango tree in my yard in Cambodia about fifteen years ago. In the fourth year when it’s supposed to have some fruit, it had fruit and I was so excited. Three green mangoes were there, and I couldn’t wait to eat them. But I never ate them because a local friend of mine who was doing some concrete work for me, he picked them and ate them. Worse yet, when I talked to him about it (and I wasn’t really hard on him; just a little bit hard on him) he seemed completely without remorse. He just smiled a big smile and said, Yeah, I ate them. Obviously, it looks like he has a seared conscience, but there was actually a less sinister explanation. He didn’t feel pangs of conscience because in his culture, what he did wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t theft. In fact, in most majority world cultures it isn’t theft. In fact, in the Old Testament biblical culture it wasn’t theft either. Remember in Deuteronomy and also Luke 6 when Jesus and his disciples were going through a field of grain. Get this: the real sin in that situation was my stinginess for not being willing to very gladly share my mangoes with my friend. In the majority-world, the most important thing about food is that you have to share it. So, I had to adjust my conscience in two areas. One, I had to calibrate my inner moral compass by adding the category of, Don’t be stingy toward neighbors when it comes to food. I doubt that that’s even on the radar of the conscience of most people in America. Secondly, I had to adjust my conscience concerning theft. In Cambodia, if you’re taking a shortcut through somebody's orchard, it’s okay to pick one or two fruits. You can’t harvest and take it to the market and sell it, but you can take a couple. My conscience said, Thou shalt not steal, and I believed that this was a theft of my mangoes. I saw the wrong that didn’t even show up on his conscience, and he saw the wrong that didn’t even show up on my conscience. So, that’s the way it is in these cross-cultural situations. What if I had said, This is a great opportunity to share the gospel because I’m going to use this theft here to really help him see that he’s a sinner who needs Jesus? What if I had said, This is why you need Jesus, because of stealing. His conscience would not confirm my message at all. The fact is, you want people’s conscience to say, Yes! What this person is saying is true. But it would not have done that had I had that attitude toward him.

Matt Tully
Would you both say that there’s a certain sense in which our consciences then are culturally conditional, where our conscience settings might be tied to where we’re actually living and ministering and the people that we are around. J. D., what would you say to that?

J. D. Crowley
Absolutely. God gave us a conscience, and as we grow up in our families, churches, and whatever situation we grow up in, rules get added to that conscience, some of which ought to be there and some of which ought not be there. So, this is why calibration is such an important thing for a Christian because we want to make sure, as much as possible, that our conscience reflects the will of God. We pray to that end. We say, God, may my conscience reflect your holy will, and may I listen to my conscience. Where it doesn’t reflect your holy will, may I adjust it to match your will.

Andy Naselli
J. D., I don’t know if you remember this, but when I first heard you speak on the conscience, it was at a conference in 2011 or 2012, and you told a story about customs and walking and stepping over people’s legs. Tell that story. That really helps me understand this.

J. D. Crowley
Going back to the mango story, if I do adjust my conscience here in Cambodia, when I go back to the States I have to have another set of guidelines in the States. So, it’s even culturally adjusted in that way. I had lived here so long that I had changed my conscience concerning certain matters of manners, just good manners. Over here, you never step over someone’s legs or any body part of another. It’s like spitting in a person’s face. When I went back to the States, I would be at a potluck or something and I would want to get up and get some more food, and somebody had his legs on the coffee table. I just stood there because anybody with any sense of polite manners would move his legs back so that I could pass by. But, of course, he had no idea why I was standing there, and I had forgotten why he wasn’t pulling his legs back so that I could move to the food table. It felt like a conscience thing. I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t step over his legs. Why does my conscience even care about matters of manners? And should it even care? I came to the conclusion, and Andy has to, that probably no. Our conscience is not supposed to do double, triple, quadruple duty. We’ve seen that conscience nowadays even warns us about hygiene and things like that. Well, should it? Andy and I think that the conscience should, as much as possible, be reserved for matters of true right and wrong. If we can calibrate our conscience to that end, we’ll be blessed.

Matt Tully
It’s easy for us to, in an American context, to hear a story like that about stepping over someone’s legs, and we feel a distance from that. We don’t resonate with that, so it kind of feels easy to say, Oh yeah, that’s clearly a conscience issue—a disputable issue—that we can leave aside. I think if we were to come closer to home, there are probably other issues in an American context that there might be stronger personal feelings about. One example of that would be drinking alcohol. There’s a certain history in American Christianity with certain denominations and groups that would feel very strongly that drinking alcohol is unwise at best and sinful at worst. Andy, can you speak to that? What would you say to someone who is listening right now and would say, I see what Scripture teaches on the issue of alcohol. I see that it doesn’t clearly condemn drinking alcohol, and yet I feel this conscience pang. I feel like I can’t bring myself to do that. Should they be okay with that and be comfortable with that, or is that something that they would want to grow in?

Andy Naselli
I would like to start just by making it clear that the situation in Romans 14 is not parallel to modern debates about whether we may drink alcoholic beverages. The Roman Christians whom Paul was addressing were divided specifically about whether to continue observing Jewish traditions about drinking. The Mosaic law allows God’s people to drink wine, but sometimes Jews who lived in pagan cultures refused to drink wine to avoid ritual contamination. Think of Daniel 1 where they’re in captivity under Nebuchadnezzar. I think it’s important to just make it clear that when people talk about the weaker brothers and sisters and causing someone to stumble because someone might have a weakness for alcohol, that’s not the way that Romans 14 is talking about the weaknesses of theological weakness. Now, are there any principles that apply to how we then address this? Of course! If I have a brother or sister who has had a history of drunkenness and is now completely avoiding alcohol because they know they’re weak there, I’m not going to drink in front of them and I’m not going to encourage them to drink. That’s just common sense. Basically, I would argue that Christians have freedom here, but they need to love each other in how they exercise that freedom.

Matt Tully
Speak to the Christian who feels this conscience issue, not because of a history of alcohol abuse, but just because they were raised in a church where everyone believed it was wrong to drink alcohol. How should they think about that conviction that they feel deeply in their heart?

Andy Naselli
I’d point them to the chancellor of my school and the pastor emeritus of my church, John Piper. He’s a teetotaler by conviction. When he came to our church in 1980 I think, he saw in our church covenant that members covenant together not to drink alcohol. To be a member you had to agree to that. As a teetotaler, he recognized that that’s going beyond what the Bible says, even though he has his long list of reasons why it would be unwise. But he recognized that’s going beyond the Bible. So he led the church, over a period of years, to remove that from the church covenant. I think that’s exactly right. He can have a conviction why he thinks it’s unwise, while recognizing Christians can disagree on that. If someone has a conscience that is niggling at them and they say, I just couldn’t do that, I would tell them you don’t have to drink to be a faithful Christian. Just don’t drink. Follow your conscience here. I would not, in any way, see that as a pressing issue to try to get someone to change their mind on that. There are so many more important things. Be careful that you don’t judge others who do drink without being drunk. That might be the issue they need to work on. But I wouldn’t feel pressure to change their minds on what they think about that so that they then partake.

40:27 - Mind Your Own Conscience

Matt Tully
That gets back to that acronym that you threw out earlier, J. D., the MYOC: mind your own conscience. Unpack that a little bit more. Does that essentially mean we shouldn’t be talking about, we should avoid discussing these disputable issues as much as possible?

J. D. Crowley
Actually, Andy and I believe that it’s absolutely okay to discuss all these things. Some of them are interesting, most of them are matters of great importance—even though they are third level matters, they’re very important. Talk about them with people. But the principle in Romans 14 is accept people not in order to convince them of your argument, or your side, and try to get them to live their life according to your own conscience. It’s just amazing to me what Paul says to the vegetarians in Rome who didn’t have enough confidence in their heart and conscience to eat meat. He basically said to them, You can be vegetarians the rest of your life. He wasn’t going to try to convince them not to be. But he said, Just don’t judge those who eat meat. And he said something similar to the vegetarians: Go ahead. Use this freedom that you have. Just don’t look down on and despise those who have this restriction.

Andy Naselli
Here’s how this looks in my household. I have four daughters—thirteen, ten, nine, and four. They have lots of friends at our church who have different family rules on various issues. They’re starting to ask questions regularly—Why is that family allowed to do this and we aren’t? That sort of thing. The way that we try to explain it is we have different family rules—different family standards. Your job as a child is to obey Ephesians 6:1: “Obey your parents in the Lord.” When you get to be part of your own household and shepherd your own children, you can change those rules. We’re trying to guide you and help you mature as people who love Jesus, and we have some rules that are in addition to Scripture. Like, we would like you to wash your hands before you eat dinner. When you come into the home, we would like you to take off your shoes. After you wake up in the morning, we would like you to make your bed. Stuff like that. They might have friends where their families don’t require those same things. Why don’t they have to do it if we have to do it? If we can over and over teach these distinctions between what God requires of all people and what God requires of you in this circumstance, I think that could help our children understand the difference in how conscience works.

Matt Tully
Andy, on that point, it seems like some of those rules that you laid out for your family are practical rules or ideas to help the household run efficiently and effectively. It seems like it might get a little bit trickier when it comes to standards or rules or practices that are intended to be a direct application of a biblical principle. For example, we want to remain pure in our thoughts and our actions, so that might lead a family to set up a rule about what kinds of movies that their kids, or themselves, would watch. Those can sometimes feel a little bit more personal. They can feel a little bit more black and white in our minds because they feel directly connected to a scriptural principle—a moral principle in the Bible. So, as a last question for both of you, do you ever feel that temptation towards trying to impress your conscience convictions about something like that on other Christians? How do you stop yourself from doing that and remember that these are convictions that you’re called to, but not necessarily other people. J. D., would you mind starting?

J. D. Crowley
Well, we’re back to MYOC: mind your own conscience. Other people have their conscience. You have yours. When a person realizes that his own conscience standards, rules, and commandments don’t match God’s perfect will completely, then we begin to humble ourselves before others. We don’t try to insist that other people have the same rules that we do. So, that’s one answer. Andy?

Andy Naselli
This is really practical in our household right now. It’s questions about how short can our shorts be and how tight can our shirts be and what movies can I watch. We just try to tell our kids: Here’s what mom and dad think is best for us. If you have friends who love Jesus and their family sets different standards, don’t judge them. They’re going to stand before God; we’re going to stand before God. It’s really hard for my girls. They still ask questions about it regularly. That’s why this is something that we have to talk about a lot, because it’s not the type of thing where you learn the lesson once and you got it for life. So, we have to explain to our kids that we’re trying our best to apply what God has said. Maybe we’re stricter than necessary; maybe we’re looser than we need to be. We’re just trying to do our best, and your job is to follow your parents at this point. When you’re a parent, you can make your call there. That’s how we try to wrestle with it.

Matt Tully
Andy and J. D., thank you so much for taking some time today to talk with us about this important topic. As we think about the conscience and think about these kinds of decisions that we have to make and the way that we feel about certain things, it starts to apply to a whole host of issues that we face in our lives every single day. We appreciate your wisdom on this issue.

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