Blog - LIVING STONES FELLOWSHIP

The Importance of a Clean Conscience

1/9/2017

I've been preaching through 1 John at CNCF on Tuesday nights this year. We're about halfway through! 1 John can be a difficult book to understand. To do so requires that you be spiritually minded, but I am so earthly minded. One of the Apostle John's refrains is the importance of having a clean conscience before God. What does that mean? It means seeking to obey God in everything all the time. It means never silencing or ignoring your conscience when it tells you no. And it means keeping short accounts with God by frequently and fully confessing your sins to Him—without reservation. A clean conscience helps sustain the Christian's real, ongoing, practical peace with God.

The opposite of a clean conscience is a defiled conscience which corrupts your ability to be a useful Christian. Here's one commentator on the importance of a clean conscience:

Why is it that we see so many joyless, cheerless, one might almost say useless Christians? Why so many living and walking in such a way as to give the notion of godliness being all gloomy doubt, painful discipline, self-absorbing anxiety, listless musing? Awake! Arise! Shake off the chains that bind you. Go forth and in open day, under the open sky, to meet your God and Father, with your heart open to him, as his heart is open to you. Stand fast in the liberty with which Christ makes you free. Be upright. Be honest, frank, and fearless. Be yourselves; out and out yourselves. Dare to avow yourselves what you are, to God, to your own hearts, to all men. Be of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; yourselves true; receiving all truth, declaring all truth; everywhere, and always. Be honest, thoroughly honest, in the closet, in the family, in the market-place, in the parlour. Be transparently honest to your God and Father in heaven. Do but consent to treat him as he treats you. His whole heart, he himself wholly, is yours; all his love; all his fulness. Let your whole heart be his. Be you yourselves his; with no reserve; be altogether, now and for ever, his. (Robert S. Candlish, A Commentary on 1 John [1870; Banner of Truth, 1993], 328)

Is it your desire to keep a clean conscience before God? Do you have a daily peace with God which gives you confidence and makes you a truth-full light to those around you? Don't let a deadened conscience make you useless to God's kingdom.

Prayer Resources

3/4/2016

Last night at our weekly CNCF Bible Study, we took a break from focusing as much on the content of our prayers, and we looked at some practical resources we can use as tools to discipline ourselves in the spiritual discipline of prayer.

Books

I've found that few things stir in me a desire to pray than reading good books by faithful men of the past and present. Aside from Scripture, here are some good ones:

Prayer Is work

1/13/2016

This semester we'll be dwelling on the theology of prayer, as well as giving ourselves to its practice. But here's the thing. Prayer isn't easy. Rarely is it a glorious and effortless spiritual experience. Here's what E. M. Bounds has to say:

Prayer is spiritual work; and human nature does not like taxing, spiritual work. Human nature wants to sail to heaven under a favoring breeze, a full, smooth sea. Prayer is humbling work. It abases intellect and pride, crucifies vainglory, and signs our spiritual bankruptcy, and all these are hard for flesh and blood to bear. It is easier…

“Teach Us to Pray . . .”

1/1/2016

Prayer to the One True God is one of the clearest things that sets apart the people of God from the rest of the world. And yet if you ask any self-professing Christian, most will indicate that prayer is one of the greatest areas of weakness in their exercise of faith. We all have many rebellious excuses for not getting around to this duty: busy schedules, cold hearts, other responsibilities.…But without prayer we suffer. And we must ask ourselves, If we lack a desire to seek blessings from our Father in heaven through prayer, are we really His sons?

Jeremiah Burroughs vs. Self-Esteem

10/19/2015

Last week I received an email request to help promote an event on campus which was described as "basically a guy who does spoken word to the glory of God."

I was intrigued, though wary. The email had a link to some videos, so I headed on over to YouTube, and this is what I saw:

Ryle, Too, on Spiritual Awareness

10/12/2015

I just wrote this post on the importance of knowing your own sinful misery in order to have a vital prayer life. John Bunyan was my springboard, but tonight I'm reading J. C. Ryle. Though writing 200 years later than Bunyan, Ryle drives home the same theme of understanding your spiritual depravity, particularly in the context of giving ourselves to spiritual disciplines. Read this:

Prayer & Worldliness

10/12/2015

I've been reading a book simply called Prayer (originally published 1662/1692; Banner of Truth, 2012), by John Bunyan, the puritan pastor who also wrote The Pilgrim's Progress. It's been very helpful for ordering my heart and my thoughts toward God. Bunyan goes to great lengths to humble his readers with the awareness of their own sin and weakness. He brings you low under the weight of your guilt and depravity, and for good reason. Here's his explanation of why:

Here is the life of prayer, when in or with the [Holy] Spirit, a man being made sensible of sin, and how to come to the Lord for mercy, he comes, I say, in the strength of the Spirit, and cries "Father" [Romans 8:15]. That one word spoken in faith is better than a thousand prayers, as men call them, written and read in a formal, cold, luke-warm way.

O how far short are the people of being sensible of this, who count it enough to teach themselves and children to say the Lord's prayer, the [Apostles'] creed, with other sayings; when, as God knows, they are senseless of themselves, their misery, or what it is to be brought to God through Christ! Ah, poor soul! study your misery, and cry to God to show you your confused blindness and ignorance, before you be too ready in calling God your Father, or teaching your children so to say. And know that to say God is your Father, in a way of prayer or conference, without any experiment [experience] of the work of grace on your souls, it is to say you are Jews and are not, and so do lie [Revelation 3:9]. You say, "Our Father"; God says, "You blaspheme!" (28)

Do you feel as though your prayers are often "formal," "cold," and "lukewarm"?

If Bunyan's right, it's probably because you are not sensible of the depth of your own sin and misery. In other words, your prayer life is likely cold and dead because you don't see the extent of your need to go to God. Sure, you might run to Him when you have a crisis to be rescued from: illness, stress about school, heavy traffic, or some other uncomfortable situation. But these things will only bring you to God periodically and selfishly. The question is, Are you aware of your constant, complete dependence on God because of your sinful misery? Do you feel a perpetual need to call upon God to sustain you in the midst of your battle with your sinful flesh? Do you live in the mercy of Jesus Christ? And if not, why not? Because you are not sensible of your sin.

Lately, I've been seeing a glaring reason we have little to no sense of our sinful misery. And that is that we are worldly.

Now, I suspect that's a vague and mysterious word to our ears. Worldly. But it's really quite simple. Worldly = World-like. Like the world.

But what does it mean for us to be like the world? Here's an idea…

Poisonous Humility

9/21/2015

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—Divine Reason.…The new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn.…There is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it's practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostration of the ascetic.…The old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which makes him stop working altogether.…We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. (G. K. Chesterton, "The Suicide of Thought," Orthodoxy, 1908)

CNCF Bible Studies Start Tomorrow!

8/24/2015

Tomorrow (Tuesday) we begin our CNCF fall Bible study series entitled Who Is Jesus? On Tuesday at 7 PM we'll be in Foster-Harper in the Formal Lounge. On Thursday at 7 PM we'll be in the Wright Formal Lounge. There will be some time of interactive preaching and teaching, and then we'll break into groups for further discussion, prayer, and to get to know each other better.

In Jesus' day, there were a lot of opinions about who Jesus was. Some thought He was John the Baptist reincarnated, or Elijah, or some other dead prophet. But then He asked His own disciples, "Who do you say that I am?"

If Jesus asked you that same question…

“Starved for the Glory of God”

8/12/2015

We are all starved for the glory of God, not self. No one goes to the Grand Canyon to increase self-esteem. Why do we go? Because there is greater healing for the soul in beholding splendor than there is in beholding self. Indeed, what could be more ludicrous in a vast and glorious universe like this than a human being, on the speck called earth, standing in front of a mirror trying to find significance in his own self-image? It is a great sadness that this is the gospel of the modern world.

But it is not the Christian Gospel…

—John Piper, Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ