There’s a verse in the Bible that has scared me since I was thirteen years old—and it still scares me. The verse that scares me is 1 Timothy 1:19-20: “keeping faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and suffered shipwreck in regard to their faith. Among these are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan, so that they will be taught not to blaspheme.” As I said, that verse still scares me. What this verse teaches is that you can be a man or woman of faith, but you need to hold on to your faith while keeping a good conscience. Your conscience is to your faith as a lighthouse is to a ship. If a captain ignores the lighthouse, the ship could run aground. If you’re not keeping a good conscience, you could shipwreck your faith.
My fear of potentially shipwrecking my faith resulted in my striving to make sure that I was keeping a good conscience. So, as I have mentioned in some previous posts, feeling guilty about struggling with porn, over 40 years ago I confessed it to Jean and told her that if I ever intentionally viewed porn again, that I would tell her that day—and I always have told her. Regretfully, I’ve had to confess many times—although, thankfully, it has now been years since I’ve had to do that.
Porn and Prison
Sadly, we’ve all known some Christians who were not keeping a good conscience. One day I found out that what I thought was an upstanding Christian friend of mine had, for years, been molesting one of his daughters. I’ve heard people ask, “How could anyone do that?” and, frankly, I always think that’s a naïve question. The answer is simple. There came a point in his life when he stopped keeping a good conscience. His wife told me that she found porn on his computer, and that means that he didn’t delete that porn after he had viewed it. Not deleting it after he viewed it meant that he wasn’t keeping a good conscience. You can’t “repent” but keep what stumbled you for future reference. Obviously, his sexual fantasies turned towards his daughter and, since he wasn’t keeping a good conscience about porn, he wasn’t keeping a good conscience about lusting after his daughter. I suspect that when he first began fantasizing over sex with his daughter he told himself, “but I’d never do it.” Well, unrestrained sexual fantasy always leads to wanting to do it “for real” and there came a time where he acted out his fantasies. As Solomon said, “Can anyone take fire in his lap And his clothes not be burned?” (Proverbs 6:27). Again, this started with his not keeping a good conscience—he not only shipwrecked his faith, he shipwrecked his family, and he ended up in prison.
Serial Adultery
Not many years ago, the wife of a ministry leader who has an apologetics degree found out that her husband was committing serial adultery. After it all came out and his marriage, ministry, and credibility were destroyed, I spoke with him on the phone and asked him about the first time he committed adultery. He had traveled out of state and had sex with a woman that he had gotten to know from work. Curious, I asked what he felt like as he flew back home. He told me that he was devastated. He told me he felt so bad that he feared God was going to make his plane crash to punish him (my wife thought it was funny that he thought that God might kill all those innocent passengers on his flight to punish him). He was horrified by what he had done, and he said he was surprised when God didn’t punish him. I asked him why he kept committing adultery, and he replied that in time the crushing guilt went away. Once it went away, he decided to have sex with the woman again and he did—and again and again. After a while he no longer felt the crushing guilt. But once he broke off that affair because he was having sex with still another woman, the first woman told his wife.
He had stopped keeping a good conscience. While feeling crushed by guilt, instead of getting down on both knees before his wife and crying his eyes out in confession, which would have saved his marriage (and maybe his ministry), he decided not to confess. His trouble was that he stopped keeping a good conscience and that ruined his life, ended his ministry, destroyed his reputation, and devastated his wife (she’s devastated on many levels—not the least of which is her immense disappointment in someone she regarded as a very spiritual man). I asked him what he thought now about God letting him get away with it and he complained that God should have punished him sooner as now it had cost him so much.
Dinner at My House?
In 1984 I had just become an underwriter for a large insurance company, and we underwriters regularly had to visit our territories and mine was the San Francisco bay area. Well, as I was planning a trip to visit some insurance agencies, a sales representative for a large agency had gotten very friendly with me and a few days before my scheduled trip to her area, she invited me to dinner at her house. I declined but I feared that once I got out there I might be tempted to meet up with her and nothing good would come of that. For two or three days my conscience blared and I cried out to the Lord for help. I needed a way of escape (1 Cor. 10:13). I needed not to fight the temptation when I arrived but to flee it in advance (2 Tim. 2:22). Well, after desperate prayer, it hit me! I had Jean E. come with me! I didn’t speak to that woman and, within a week or two after I returned to the office, I was no longer working with her and we never spoke again.
By the way, if I had sinned with that woman, there’s something I know about me after years of confessing much smaller sins to Jean—I couldn’t have kept it a secret from Jean for even one day (probably not for ten minutes). I would have fallen on my knees in tears, begged her forgiveness, and would have then taken steps with her full knowledge to never, ever do anything like that again. Although wounded, our marriage would have survived and with the grace of God it would have, in time, thrived. Thankfully–thankfully!–I was keeping a good conscience so that never happened.
A Lie Some Tell Themselves
There is a lie that Christians sometimes tell themselves: “If I’m dishonest about little things, I will still be honest about big things.” Just the opposite! Jesus said, “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much” (Luke 16:10). If you are not keeping a good conscience over little things, then you won’t keep a good conscience over big things. If you continue ignoring your conscience then you can end up living a double-life which will, sooner or later, be exposed. My commitment to keeping a good conscience, as many already know, is why my giving up my position at Talbot over doctrinal integrity was a no-brainer. I was not going to be dishonest about signing something that I didn’t believe. I wrote about that here.
There’s Hope
Here’s 1 Timothy 1:19-20 again, “keeping faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and suffered shipwreck in regard to their faith. Among these are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan, so that they will be taught not to blaspheme.” People disagree what exactly handing someone over to Satan means, but most think it means disfellowshipping people in the hope that they will recognize their sinfulness and repent. As Thomas D. Lea and Hayne P. Griffin, Jr. put it in the New American Commentary, “The purpose of handing them over to Satan was not merely punitive but chiefly corrective or formative in purpose. By excluding them from the fellowship of God’s people, Paul hoped that Satan’s affliction of the troublemakers would teach them not to insult the Lord by their words and deeds.” In 1 Corinthians 5 Paul tells the Corinthians to hand over an incestuous man to Satan “so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord” (v. 5). Hopefully when the Christian who has not been keeping a good conscience is under severe duress, that person will repent of his or her sin and so be saved.
So if you’re not keeping a good conscience about something (of course, it might not be about sexual things), today is the day to repent and I urge you to find a wise Christian (maybe a spouse, maybe not) and confess your sin to them and ask for accountability help. It will set you free and protect your witness, and you’ll be ushered into God’s kingdom being told, “Well done my good and faithful servant.”
