THE POWER OF CONVICTION

“Conscience is a castle safe from attack unless God carries on the fight. No power can direct it to stoop but that which heaven and earth must obey.

If the Word finds out something, which escapes the examination of a man's own conscience, does this not prove a Deity is in it? The apostle persuades us to know the power of the preached Word to lay open the heart: "1 Cor. 14:25 (AMP) The secrets of his heart are laid bare; and so, falling on [his] face, he will worship God, declaring that God is among you in very truth.

Conscience is a castle safe from attack unless God carries on the fight. No power can direct it to stop but that which heaven and earth must obey. He who disarms the strong man must be stronger that he is. And He who masters the conscience must be greater than it is. Now the Word is able to shatter this power of the soul which refuses to bow to anyone except God.

As long as Job was untouched by God's hand he enjoyed his prosperity and assumed that his spiritual wealth matched his material worth. But when the law charged him with sin, it stripped his conscience as naked as his outward condition would later become. For the first time he say how empty of all holiness he really was. The Word had such power upon him that it laid him, with his fair skin of pharisaical strictness, trembling over the bottomless pit of his own unrighteousness.

What can move like the arm of the Word? When a prisoner preached to Felix the judge he shuddered under its convicting power. Who but God could make those men who were guilty of shedding the innocent blood of Christ and scorned His doctrine so terrified that they cried out in the middle of Peter's sermon, "1Cor. 14:25 (AMP) The secrets of his heart are laid bare; and so, falling on [his] face, he will worship God, declaring that God is among you in very truth.  Does not this evidence carry as visible a print of a Deity as the moment when Moses split the rock with a small rod in his hand?

Conscience is God's prison in the person's own heart, and no one can release him except the one who put him there." 


Quoted material from, ”The Christian in Complete Armour Daily Readings in Spiritual Warfare” by Gurnall and James S Bell. http://www.moodypublishers.com/pub_productDetail.aspx?id=41823&pid=53617