2—Your Heartbeat Is the Seat of Conscience

The conscience —we all have one — and we generally understand that it’s the place of knowing right from wrong.

In the first function of your relational heartbeat—influence—you learned that God wants to start the influence cycle of your life—to influence you about your godless views. He wants to show you your error in judgment concerning what is wrong about your behaviors with other people and what is right about them.

You need the Holy Spirit’s influence to show you how you’ve added to brokenness in your relationships, and to bring you into right relational behaviors. Your conscience is the place He is speaking to you. If you haven’t learned the lessons of conscience through the Holy Spirit’s influence there, you can’t learn to be Spirit-led, because the lessons of conscience are the first lessons to becoming Spirit-led.

Your Heart is the Seat of Conscience

The Lord’s influence begins with the Holy Spirit’s pressure on your conscience to show you poor judgment about all the relational activities you thought you’ve been right about, but that don’t follow His standard of Love. He wants to show you what to do to make things right with Him and with your family so you can heal the heartbeat of your family relationships. He wants you to look to Him as your Heavenly Father—the One who can help you come into your true identity in Christ, and receive the parenting you need to mature into Christlike character.

Your Conscience Generates Guilt

Your conscience generates guilt. Do you know of things you are doing that are unloving and wrong? Your conscience is where you “know” these things. It’s where you feel guilty. Are you aware of ways you are relating with your family—of things you should do to improve and deepen your relationships? This awareness comes from your conscience where the Lord is wanting to influence you—guide and direct you.

Do your children know when they’ve taken an unloving action toward others? Are you influencing [guiding and directing] them to pay attention to their conscience? When you do, you are working in your children’s hearts. The more you do this, the more sensitive their conscience becomes to right and wrong.

Your Conscience Experiences Peace and Comfort

The conscience is also the place where you experience peace and comfort from the Holy Spirit when you’ve cleared your conscience by taking the actions of confession, repentance, and receiving forgiveness. It’s common for believers to be completely unfamiliar with this relational process that brings healing to the heartbeat of a relationship.

Unfortunately some people can’t seem to connect to their conscience where God’s voice is speaking to them. They wrestle with all the thoughts, feelings, emotions, ideas, and stuff going on inside of them, and don’t realize that not all of it is coming from themselves.

Philippians 2:12-13 tells us that God is at work in us to cause us to do His will.

It’s easy to overlook conviction about things that no one around you seems to care about, and so you find ways to “drown out” the inner noise. Then you pursue assuaging guilt in a number of ways, choosing to listen to what feels the most comfortable. This activity is carried out at the subconscious level out of habit, but it does damage to you just the same.

The Bible tells us that, “By rejecting and thrusting from them [their conscience] some individuals have made shipwreck of their faith.” ~ Timothy 1:19 TAB

Cutting Yourself off from the Workings of Conscience

When you try to live the Christian life by the ideas and habits you’ve collected along the way instead of by God’s direct, personal, and ever-present influence on your conscience, you cut yourself off from the workings of conscience. When you live out of your head like this, instead of your heart, you are ignoring your conscience, and you’re teaching your children to do the same.

For example, we know our children are supposed to obey us, and so we think of ways to make them comply. The ways we choose oftentimes completely by-pass the heart motivations—both ours and theirs. Our reasoning is just to get them to comply, and any and all methods are on the table to get that result. They just want to avoid getting into trouble, avoid being punished, and avoid the removal of privileges.

Both motivations avoid addressing the heart, and fly in the face of God’s commandment to “love from a pure heart, a good clear conscience, and a sincere unfeigned faith”. Both motivations fail to build the two-way relationship between parent and child with true, loving understanding. Children already have an inner sense about justice—what is right and what is wrong—because their consciences haven’t been compromised for as long as yours has been. They know when they are being treated wrongly, and they will form inner responses to that.

Children Are Born with an Un-Compromised Conscience 

Children are already born with an un-compromised conscience, but they’re also born into their parents sin, and with sin tendencies all their own besides.

However, parents fail to protect their children’s tender hearts from forming wrong responses to being sinned against, or wrong responses to things that happen around them.

Instead, children are given over to their own wisdom for how to self-protect, cope with hurt, and try to “understand” so they can have closure and move on. In leaving our children’s hearts alone to figure out life, they’re often led into subtle compromises to conscience along the way of growing up, and never actually learn to address their experiences with understanding, accuracy, truth-telling, and personal responsibility in love, grace and forgiveness.

The conscience can be educated from a young age, and Christlike character and wisdom formed from a young age. Until you learn how to live out of your heart, you won’t be able to help your children to do so. You will try to influence them in a relationship with God, but with great difficulty. You pass along to them your set of ideas about connecting with God. You teach them to live out of their heads, like you’re doing, instead of help them connect to and cooperate with Him from the inner places of their tender hearts.

This set of ideas are your Standards—what you are serving. Your set of standards is where you will experience a major breakdown in your ability to hear God. Coming up next week—the third function of your relational heartbeat—“Your Heart Is Where Standards Are Formed”

Dear Hearts, Can you see where you are living out of your head instead of your heart in some of your child training practices? Please leave a comment below! I’d love to hear from you!
If you missed the introduction to this series of messages, you can find it here.

[read next: Standards — 3rd Function of Your Heartbeat]