Better Decisions, Fewer Regrets: The Conscience Question
One of the best gifts that God has given us is our conscience. That part of our lives that allows us to evaluate our thoughts and desires and determine what is right or wrong. However, if we don't allow our conscience to be under the control of the Holy Spirit - we can find ourselves in situations that hurt us and lead us astray.
So, why exactly do we have one? Ultimately, our conscience is designed - when controlled by the Holy Spirit - to help lead us to live life to the fullest. Or, as we like to say in our ministry, to help lead us to become the man that God meant for us to be.
But we don't always allow it to do its job and there's one big reason why.
Paying Attention To The Tension
Everyone has the ability to let their conscience help them evaluate situations they're in and make wise decisions - better decisions that lead to fewer regrets. But we often make one simple mistake - or decision - that leads to unwanted consequences.
In short, we simply don't pay attention to it.
Andy says this about our consciences in his book, Better Decision, Fewer Regrets: "Sometimes...in fact, more times than we would like to admit...an option we're considering creates a little tension inside of us. Something about it is just a bit uncomfortable. Something about it doesn't seem exactly right. It gives us pause. It bothers us. It causes us to hesitate. And oftentimes, we have no idea why...When that happens, you owe it to yourself to pause and pay attention to the tension. Don't ignore it. Don't brush it off. Pause and ask yourself, "What about this bothers me?"
Sometimes, we find ourselves in situations that create a certain feeling inside of us. Something just feels "off" about it. Something inside of us wonders what's wrong. It bothers us. It makes us uncomfortable.
This is the entry point for your conscience to show up and to work with the Holy Spirit to help you make better decisions so that you can live a better, bigger life (the life God meant for you to live!).
Yet....we often don't pay attention to this tension within us, do we?
In fact, if we're being truly honest, it isn't just that we aren't paying attention. Worse yet, we simply ignore or block that voice because we don't like what he has to say.
It's true isn't it?
Paying Off My Mortgage
It reminds me of a story of my own. (**You can listen to me tell more of this on Podcast Episode #20 here.)
Many years ago, my wife and I had decided to rent the home that we first moved into when we got married. We found a piece of property just outside of our hometown and purchased it and went to live with her parents while we rented out our home and until we could build a new home on the land.
Many things went terribly wrong however.
We were completely unprepared to be landlords and had no idea how to manage a home like that. Besides that, we had a very large mortgage payment on it and needed to rent it for what our payment was and we didn't make any money on it. Eventually, we found a renter and all was well.
Until it wasn't.
A long story made short is that the family stopped paying us and we ended up falling behind in our payments. On top of this, we were coming out of a housing crash and recession and our home values had plummeted. Eventually, the bank came calling.
One day, however, I was talking with a loan officer at a bank and they talked about a mortgage relief option that sounded like a God-send for us. The housing crash caused widespread issues for many families and the government stepped in to keep people from losing their homes. The loan officer spoke to me about one such option and I couldn't believe my ears. The program would immediately and instantaneously cut what we owed on our mortgage in HALF and re-structure a new 30-year loan in order to make it feasible for us to keep the house with much lower payments.
I was floored! I couldn't believe our good luck. I was on the road for work at that time and called my wife to let her know the good news. They sent the paperwork to our home and when I got back it would be there and I'd fix our problem.
However, when I got home I immediately went through the paperwork and found a major problem.
Buried in the fine print it said that one of the stipulations was that you had to "be living in the home for the past 6 months" and then there was a little document with a huge "FBI FRAUD WARNING" that talked about going to jail if it was found that you took this loan and didn't meet the stipulations.
My heart sank. That little feeling you get in your gut that Andy described in his book was happening to me. Something was making me pause. Causing discomfort. Making me pay attention to the tension I was feeling.
I called the loan officer and told him the situation. I explained that we were not living at home and were renting the house out currently and I didn't think we could go through with the deal. But instead of saying, "Thanks for being honest", he said, "Look - no one will know. No one is going to follow up on this. If they do - just tell them that you had to go help your sick relative or something. It's no. big. deal!"
Sigh.
That was it. I knew I had to listen to my conscience and the Holy Spirit that were waving the red danger flags and saying, "Don't do it!".
But that was so incredibly hard! If we had simply signed the paperwork it would have erased half of our debt immediately and solved our short-term problems.
Pause and Pay Attention
In that moment, I was so tempted to try to solve my problem my own way. But I paused long enough to pay attention to that still, small voice.
Would it have worked? Could I have signed the paperwork and gotten away with it?
Maybe.
But maybe not.
More importantly, it didn't really matter because that was the wrong way to look at it anyway.
You see, our emotions can overwhelm our ability to make wise decisions. It happens to us all the time. I had an overwhelming "feeling" that wanted so badly to trump my troubles. But wisdom always proves right. Had I paid attention to my feelings and emotions I may be hand-writing this blog post from a jail cell. That was a very real possibility.
Either way, the goal of a Christian man's life is not to avoid trouble - but to live fully. To be a man of HONOR. To be a man that has integrity in his private and public life. The goal is to be a man that has DISCIPLINE and does the hard right thing over the easy wrong thing - every time (no matter how appealing the other options are!).
The goal isn't to see how much you can get away with, but to see if you can be a man of STRENGTH - the kind that is strong mentally and emotionally and is not swayed by feelings or emotions but who has them under the control of God's Spirit inside us.
It isn't easy. Being a man like this is tough.
The easy route is to do what's wrong and to muffle the conscience that God gave you to try to help you live a better life. The hard route, though, is the best route and we ought to thank God that he gives us the gift of a conscience and pay attention to the tension whenever it pops up on us.
Click here to listen to more of this conversation on the Get In The Fight Podcast - Episode #20.
