Our Conscience & the Decisions We Make

🎶…And always let your conscience be your guide…🎶 ~ Jiminy Cricket’s famous advice.

That’s the one line of the movie Pinocchio that sticks out the most to me. And one that I disagree with wholeheartedly.

The conscience must be taught. It will guide by whatever it is being fed. It can be trained to be good or bad. Or, maybe a little of both. But it needs to have instruction in order to lead.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in listening to your gut. There’s a book everyone should read called, The Gift of Fear, written by Gavin De Becker. My gut isn’t guiding me but it will definitely warn me of danger.

Little Pinoc needed guidance as he was just all over the place. Of course…he was made of wood. Duh! Jiminy was assigned the job of his conscience. But Pinocchio listened to and believed whoever approached him, and he was easily persuaded into doing all the wrong things.

Pinoc went from no conscience of his own to having a good one after he suffered from many wrong decisions. He was taught the hard way. He didn’t listen to the conscience that was appointed to him. Probably because it wasn’t his to begin with.

According to the Bible, once we become Christians, the Holy Spirit becomes our helper. But we must do our part by feeding our conscience with the right food, otherwise, our conscience will lead us away from the Holy Spirit and ultimately, God. But we have been given that choice. That is called free-will. The decision to follow God or not.

When it comes to matters of salvation we do not have the privilege of living by what we think is right without conferring with God’s word to see if we are crossing any lines. And there are lines. The Holy Spirit will speak to us through our conscience if we are followers of Christ.

Proverbs 3:5
Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.

There are many decisions we can make on our own that are not matters of salvation. This is not necessarily called free-will though. Free-will is simply the choice to follow God or not.

Using the concept of free-will to back a decision that a Christian wants to make has a defiant tone to me. Right or wrong, that’s how I look at it.

I use the term matter of salvation loosely. I am referring to such things that God insists will prevent one from entering heaven. Being a Christian does not give us a free ticket to express free-will to do what we want, when we want, and still remain in good standing with God. A Christian can fall. A Christian can still lose his soul with an unrepentant heart.

I wrote a similar post about Jiminy and his famous line a couple of years ago, but this post explored a little more into free-will.

I decided this was a good time to revisit this topic. Writing is therapeutic and helps me to sort out the jumbled mess in my mind. So I needed this for myself. If it happens to benefit someone else too, I consider that a blessing. ♥️

Andi