The Epidemic of a Seared Conscience – Dr. Mike Spaulding

Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn’t exist in any declaration I have ever read.[1]

Many Americans have been propagandized to the extent that they now form an entire subclass – the perpetually offended. What are the signs? One of the most glaring signs of this new genre of the walking infantile is the belief, often expressed by aggressive and even violent behavior, that anyone or thing that offends them ought not to be allowed to exist.

People that think this way apparently believe that the universe operates according to their ideology. They have no real justification for believing this way. They can’t point to any standard of moral reasoning, logical analysis, or time-tested system of thought that supports their viewpoint. They further demonstrate their ignorance by believing everyone would be better off believing like they do. Remarkable, they think they are the modern equivalent of the knights of old, riding in to rescue the damsels in distress, in this case culture, civility, and the American way. The truth that these individuals cannot grasp is something much different.

Here is a case in point: Two University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students were recently arrested and charged with assault. What led to their arrests? They were arrested after they physically and violently attacked a pro-life activist who was on the campus with Created Equal, a group that uses dialogue to attempt to persuade people that abortion is the murder of unborn human beings. One of the strategies that Created Equal uses is the prominent display of actual pictures of the dismembered bodies of babies, the result of “choice” as abortion is euphemistically called by those attempting to disguise the barbaric truth of what abortion is and does to the preborn human.

Pictures of babies who have suffered the cruelest fate imaginable are a powerful reminder of the truth of what abortion really is. Pictures leave no room for debate about abortion being “women’s reproductive healthcare” as the brainwashed like to call it. Abortion ends the life of the baby and therefore trying to obfuscate this truth by calling it “reproductive healthcare” is idiocy.

The university students mentioned above were shocked when law enforcement officers arrested them. They could not believe that their noble cause of violently opposing and assaulting pro-life individuals resulted in arrest. One of the students said, “I cannot believe this is happening,” referring to her arrest.

Another example of the same mindset demonstrated by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill child murder supporters is the now infamous behavior of Pennsylvania State Representative Brian Sims. Sims, the self-proclaimed champion of a woman’s right to murder her unborn child, thought he was valiant and courageous for demeaning, belittling, and verbally intimidating an elderly woman outside a baby murder facility.

What was the crime that set Sims over the edge? This grandmother was walking in front of the murder mill while praying silently. For this gross offense Sims took it upon himself to video the woman, demanding her name and address, offering a money reward to anyone who would identify her and where she lived so that he and others that think like he does could go harass her at her home.

In the least Sims demonstrated that he has no business making decisions that affect citizens of the state of Pennsylvania in his capacity as a State Representative. More troubling than that however, is the fact that Sims thought it perfectly normal to call for a mass turnout of like-minded baby murderers to intimidate an individual for having the temerity to be at a place where women murder their children and pray that they would change their minds.

Then there is the recent case of the morally bankrupt young women celebrating the act of murdering babies by dancing through a graveyard of crosses representing aborted babies. This publicity stunt was noteworthy for the callousness with which these young women were exulting child murder. Here is one report of this incident:

Planned Parenthood supporters at the University of Texas at San Antonio protested at a Students for Life symbolic cemetery for the unborn.

The incident occurred on April 9 as Students for Life commemorated aborted babies through a cemetery display, the pro-life nonprofit group revealed in a press release Wednesday. Students for Life set up pink crosses and talked to students about pro-life options as part of a spring Planned Parenthood Truth Tour throughout college campuses.

Young women from the university’s Students United for Planned Parenthood group interrupted the memorial activity. The protesters strode through the assembled crosses, shouted and waved signs, according to video footage.

“Look, there’s mine right there,” one Planned Parenthood supporter shouted in the video, pointing at a cross and pretending an aborted baby lay beneath it. A student shouted across the cemetery that she loves having sex and aborting babies. “My number one kink,” she can be heard saying in the video, as noted by Students For Life.

“I love advocating for abortion! My uterus loves advocating for abortion,” another girl shouted, waving her sign. “When I say Planned, you say Parenthood. When I say aborted, you say fetuses!”

“It’s a fetus graveyard!” another protester said.[2]

What has happened to a great number of men and women in America is that their conscience has become seared. Their mind is in a state of depreciating ability to grasp morality personally and interpersonally. They have become incapable of moral reasoning and logical analysis that lead to guilt or shame related to their thinking and behavior. They are being turned over to the darkness they crave and prostitute themselves to and on behalf of.

Depending on the severity of the behavior, psychologists call this psychopathic or sociopathic behavior. The difference between the two is that a psychopath has no conscience remaining. The psychopath’s conscience is completely seared and devoid of any emotion of shame or guilt associated with their behavior. Ironically, Hollywood glamorizes this behavior, giving tacit approval to the violent and murderous results of psychopathic people.

The sociopath has a small amount of conscience remaining. This person might still feel a twinge of guilt but not enough to stop their evil behavior. Both the psychopath and sociopath are dangerous to others with which they interact and especially those with whom they disagree.  Courtrooms across this nation are filled with cases involving the egregious behavior of people with little to no functioning conscience.

All of the examples above demonstrate varying states of the inability to reason morally. America is well down the path of being wrested from its moral foundations by psychopaths and sociopaths whose faculties have been impaired by evil. What can be done to correct this development? We must first understand what we are dealing with.

J.I. Packer* said concerning conscience that:

An educated, sensitive conscience is God’s monitor.  It alerts us to the moral quality of what we do or plan to do, forbids lawlessness and irresponsibility, and makes us feel guilt, shame, and fear of the future retribution that it tells us we deserve, when we have allowed ourselves to deny its restraints…Satan’s strategy is to corrupt, desensitize, and if possible kill our consciences.  The relativism, materialism, narcissism, secularism, and hedonism of today’s Western world help him mightily toward his goal.  His task is made yet simpler by the way in which the world’s moral weaknesses have been taken into the contemporary church.[3]

Packer identified the real crux of the issue. Conscience is a God-given warning system that has been deliberately turned off today in a large number of Americans. An alarm cannot warn of danger if it is not connected to a power source.

Slowly and over time the innate ability of Americans to determine right from wrong has been strategically and with malice corrupted. The constant drive to remove and even erase Christianity from the public mind and memory has borne the rottenest of fruit culturally speaking.

How can a culture sustain moral uprightness from generation to generation when even the Church, that instrument of God meant to inform and when necessary, correct culture, begins to emulate the culture? When a society becomes seared in conscience, when a critical mass of people begin to think and advocate for evil under the guise of good, and exchange light for darkness, their minds become seared as with a branding iron and the resultant scar tissue renders them incapable of returning to correct thinking and behavior absent a radical surgery.

The Church is meant to be God’s scalpel, guided by His hand to make perfect incisions to remove the cancer of evil, the scar tissue of a seared conscience, and in so doing, restore right thinking and behavior to all individuals. When the Church refuses to do that mass deception is allowed to congeal and that environment creates hostility toward the truth of man’s precarious condition and toward the only solution to his dilemma.

The answer to this predicament is not for the Church to go with the flow, to seek the path of least resistance, to affirm inclusiveness as that term is meant today and throw open the doors to culture. The only answer that will turn America around is a full-on biblical revival that must start in the pulpits of America and sweep through the local bodies of Christ spread out over this nation. That kind of revival cannot be contained and it will spill over into local school boards, city councils, college campuses, businesses, state representatives, and finally our national leadership. When God’s people once again bow their knee to Him alone, then revival will come, minds will be freed from the bondage of the demonic slavery imposed upon them from God-hating miscreants who have secretly snuck into our churches, communities, and governments at every level.

True biblical revival will transform hearts, heal minds, and lead to tangible action by those delivered from their bondage. True biblical revival will come on the heels of true repentance, a faith that demonstrates a changed heart, mind, and life trajectory.

The Scriptures[4] tell us that: There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. John 1:9

This means that only through faith in Christ will people become free from a seared conscience and the inevitable consequence of that state. Christian, rise up and take your place in the army of God, and march forward in victory, for our God has given us this land. Occupy until He returns!


[1] Quote attributed to author Salman Rushdie found here – https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/offense

[2] See https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/02/planned-parenthood-texas-unborn-cemetery/

[3] J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness.

[4] All Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible, The Lockman Foundation, 1995.

*My original post listed Mr. Packer as “The late.” Mr. Packer is very much alive. My apologies to him and readers.

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Battle Scars – Rob Pue

As we endure life in this world, walking by faith and not by sight, walking in the Spirit of God and not in the flesh, seeking to serve the Lord and His Kingdom, doing that which He has commanded us — and entrusted us to do — it can get very lonely sometimes.

   I think of the apostle Paul, whose letters — which he wrote from prison — are filled with sound doctrine and teaching; but also his deepest personal feelings, as he endured great lonliness, being separated from his friends and fellow believers in Christ.

   Look at Second Timothy 1.  He clearly missed his young friend, as he wrote: “I thank God whom I serve, as did my ancestors, with a clear conscience, as I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day.   As I remember your tears, I long to see you, that I may be filled with joy.  I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well.  For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God gave us a spirit not of fear, but of power and love and self-control.

   “Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me His prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God, who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of His own purpose and grace, which He gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, — and which now has been manifested through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, for which I was appointed a preacher and apostle and teacher, which is why I suffer as I do.

   “But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that He is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me.  Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.   By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you.”

   And then Paul added, “You are aware that all who are in Asia abandoned me.”  Yes, Paul was there, writing to Timothy from prison.  He was jailed for preaching the Gospel of our Savior, and he was alone.  No one stood with him.  All had abandoned him.

   Then in Chapter 4, we have this:  “Do your best to come to me soon.   For Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia.  Luke alone is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry…. When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments.   Alexander the coppersmith did me great harm; the Lord will repay him according to his deeds.   Beware of him yourself, for he strongly opposed our message.   At my first defense, no one came to stand by me, but all deserted me. May it not be charged against them!   But the Lord stood by me and strengthened me, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it.”

   In Second Corinthians, Paul describes what Christian ministry is REALLY like.  Starting at verse 24:  “Five times I received, at the hands of the Jews, the forty lashes less one.  Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea;  on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure.  And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.”

   There are many today, who will tell you the Christian life is all joy and happiness.  “Just walk the aisle,” they say, “repeat the ‘sinners prayer,’ and MEAN IT,” they’ll tell you…  And “Jesus has a wonderful plan for your life!”  “Just ask Jesus into your heart and you will go from misery to ‘your best life NOW!”  But friends, this isn’t true.  This is a false Gospel…  The fact of the matter is, the Christian life is NOT an easy one.  It’s NOT all happiness and joy.  If you are TRULY living out your faith and serving Christ, you will find yourself in frequent persecution, you’ll be mocked and ridiculed.  You’ll lose your friends.   You may even find yourself being sued in court; you may lose your business, your home, your freedom, and yes, in some cases, even your family.

   Jesus Himself said in Matthew 10, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have NOT come to bring peace, but a sword.   For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.   And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.”

   You absolutely will NOT fit in with the modern culture if you are following Christ today.  It is at that point you have a choice:  keep your mouth shut and practice your “religion” in secret, in which case you will NOT endure any persecution and you can just “get along” with everyone — or you can be a faithful servant, obey the commands of Jesus and season this world with salt — being a beacon of light in a dark and dying culture.  Yes, you HAVE that choice.  So what will you choose?

   Those who choose the latter often find themselves very lonely and very misunderstood.  Because they walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh, the world cannot understand them.    Spiritual things are spiritually discerned; and those without the Holy Spirit CANNOT understand.  It’s not that they don’t want to… they just don’t have the Holy Spirit inside them, and therefore they CAN’T understand you.

   “Religious” people will not understand you either.  Many times you’ll even be viewed as a “troublemaker” or a “crazy zealot” by those in your own church, if you dare step outside the box and actually DO the work Christ called you to.  You WILL endure hardship and you WILL experience persecution if you’re openly and faithfully and unashamedly living the Christian life.  Those who preach “health, wealth, prosperity, happiness, roses and rainbows” are lying to you.  You should ask yourself what their motivation is… and oftentimes, you’ll find it’s very simple: it’s so that THEY can be well liked and popular among the people… and well PAID.

   How lonely it must have been for Jesus Himself — MANY times — as even His own disciples had a hard time understanding some of His teachings.  Yet He patiently taught them and explained to them the parables the world could not understand.  And though they walked closely with Him for 3 1/2 years during His earthly ministry, on the night of His arrest, they all abandoned Him, when He needed His friends the most.

   Look at Luke 22.  Here, Jesus was on the Mount of Olives, following the Last Supper.  He went there to pray with His disciples.  But His disciples couldn’t stay awake and watch with Him even one hour.  How lonely our Savior must have been as He prayed, “‘Father, if You are willing, take this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done.’  An angel from heaven appeared to Him and strengthened Him.  And being in anguish, He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.”

   Not exactly “health, wealth, prosperity, happiness, roses and rainbows”… is it?  That was NEVER Jesus’ message.  That’s a false Gospel, that creates false converts, who quickly fall away.  As it has been said, “everyone wants to follow Jesus — until they find out where He is going.”  Now, I am NOT saying that the Christian life is miserable.  As a matter of fact, I don’t know how ANYONE can make it through this life without Christ.  There IS a peace.  Though the world around you continues to spin out of control into chaos and evil, as a true believer in Jesus, you DO have peace in your heart.

   As Paul wrote to the Philippians, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God;  and the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”  Friends, we would NOT NEED “peace that passes all understanding” if the Christian life were EASY.  But BECAUSE we know Christ as our Savior, BECAUSE we have His Holy Spirit within us, we can have a peace of mind and heart that the world just cannot ever comprehend.  But it’s still, often, very lonely.

   In the ministry work I do,  I get a great many phone calls, emails and letters from those who are seeking answers, and often seeking my counsel.  Some have grown children who have become wayward and left their faith behind.  Some have unbelieving spouses who are carnal and worldly, rather than spiritual.  Some deal with ridicule from co-workers.  Most all of them have very shallow “friendships,” with only a few at the churches they attend.  They often have NO ONE they can fellowship with, or commune with or talk to about the deep and rich things of God.  They feel so ALONE.

   All of us, who carry the name of Christ and live out our faith — FOR REAL — have endured great emotional and physical hardships.  It often seems we’ve been in one battle after another, and we have the battle scars to prove it.  And it is when we are alone in the battle that things are most difficult and heart-wrenching;  when all have abandoned us, when even those we thought were our friends turn away.  This is also the time when the enemy likes to come and attack; and unless we remain in prayer and communion with GOD, we can easily become discouraged and depressed.

   This is why we are exhorted — in the book of Hebrews — “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.   And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.” 

   How sweet it is to have REAL, GOOD fellowship with like-minded believers.  Not shallow small talk, fake smiles and handshakes during “greet your neighbor time” at your Sunday service… but deep, meaningful fellowship and friendships with the saints of God.  How wonderful to have a support system like that.  It is so refreshing to our souls when we have friends we can be open, honest and transparent with as we share our Christian walk together.  We can “compare notes,” and we can relate to one another as we let our “Battle Scars” show. 

   When I quoted from Hebrews about not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, I’m not just talking about GOING to church.  I’m talking about BEING the church — all in one accord — with fellow saints you KNOW are true believers and true friends that stick closer than a brother. 

   Some of the greatest times in my own spiritual walk have been with friends like this.  Recently, one evening, following a busy day at a Christian conference, I sat with a friend, one on one, and we just talked together.  We shared with one another our experiences in ministry, as well as the heavy burdens we both carry.  Though our ministries — and our battles — are different, and though some of our battle scars run deeper than others, they are all part of the same spiritual warfare we’re both involved in.

   And then, after we talked a long time, we PRAYED a long time, with each other and FOR each other.  I’ve never felt such peace in my heart as I do at times like this.  As disciples of Jesus living in the times we are living in, I UNDERSTAND what the writer of Hebrews meant when he said, — “not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together” —  how it is even MORE important as we see the Day of the Lord approaching. 

   The spiritual warfare continues to wage all around us.  Those of us who are engaged in this warfare NEED one another.  We need real, deep, intimate friendships; fellow believers we know we can TRUST in any and every circumstance.  We need to KNOW they “have our backs” in our times of need.  We need such friends we can talk to and pray with on a deep, intimate level — and not have to worry about gossip being spread.  We need MORE than shallow, vain, repetitious corporate prayer time.  We need more than “small talk” — we need REAL brothers and sisters in Christ.

   It’s like a little glimpse of heaven during these intimate times with our fellow believers.  As Jesus said in Matthew 18, “For where two or three are gathered in My name, there am I among them.”  If you don’t have this in your life, I encourage you to seek it out.  Pray that the Lord open those doors for you and then, even though you may have deep wounds and battle scars, let yourself be vulnerable enough to let them show, and let others know your needs.  Fellowship together, PRAY together…  build an intimate, close bond of friendship.  Because it’s HARD living a faithful and obedient Christian life.  And it’s even harder doing it all alone, with none who understand.  So stand firm to the end, fellow believers… and if you need or want to talk with ME, I’d be honored to be your friend.  God bless you.

   Audio CDs and transcripts of this message are available when you call me at (715) 486-8066 or email Rob@WisconsinChristianNews.com.  Ask for message number 253.


© 2019 Rob Pue, Publisher
WISCONSIN CHRISTIAN NEWS
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