Only Christ can cleanse our conscience

Sermon Transcript

What do you do when you have a guilty conscience? You may have arrived with a guilty conscience this morning. Maybe the way you spoke to your children last night was way out of line. Maybe you yelled in anger at or seethed with bitter unforgiveness toward your spouse all weekend or on the car ride here. Maybe last night you blew it big time or committed the same old sin that you swore you wouldn’t. Perhaps this week you stole from work by wasting your time on useless entertainment and your conscience is nagging you. You’re here looking around and you see people closing their eyes and lifting their hands in worship, but you can barely open your mouth to sing a word because of your guilty conscience. What do you do with that? Or perhaps your guilty conscience is a little longer standing than that. I spoke with a member of our church just this week who is my age, but still has a guilty conscience over the pain he caused when he was a kid and bullied another child. He has lost all contact with the person and going back to the person at this point would probably prove unfruitful anyways. What does he do with that guilt? What do you do when a situation is unresolved and your guilty conscience keeps you from feeling like you can draw near to God? What do you do when you’ve done something in the near or distant past, and the mere memory of it fills you with shame because you have a guilty conscience? Is there something better than hoping that time will cause the memory to fade and the guilt to subside? Maybe for you a guilty conscience is a little bit of a new experience. Perhaps you’re doing things that God has always called sinful, but it never really bothered your conscience before now, but the Holy Spirit is moving in your life and something is changing in you. You feel guilty. What do you do with that?

Because a guilty conscience is deeply unpleasant, and because a clean conscience is so gloriously wonderful, we all do something to assuage our guilty consciences. We deny our guilty conscience, numb our guilty conscience, or we try to outperform our guilty conscience. I’ll tell you what I often foolishly do to try and cleanse my guilty conscience: I take it to other people and ask them to assure me that I’m ok or that I have nothing to feel guilty or worry about. I’ve tried this approach a hundred times and I’ve found that I need just one more person to assure me, then I’ll feel ok. These approaches can temporarily relieve our guilty consciences, but they can’t actually cleanse them because we are in fact guilty of sinning against God – no amount of defending, numbing, or working will make that untrue.

What can do more than temporarily relieve our guilty consciences? What can actually cleanse our conscience so that we can live again even when things are unresolved?! Hebrews 9:14 – …how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. Who will heal our guilt? The answer is the big idea of our passage: Only Christ can cleanse our conscience. Only Christ can cleanse our conscience. This big idea raises big questions. Our passage answers three of them. 1. What can’t cleanse our conscience? (9:1-10) 2. How does Christ cleanse our conscience? (9:11-14a) 3. Why does Christ cleanse our conscience (9:14b).

WHAT CAN’T CLEANSE OUR CONSCIENCE?

Before we can learn how Christ cleanses our conscience, we need to see what can’t cleanse our conscience so that we won’t return to those dry wells again and again. According to the author of Hebrews, what can’t cleanse our conscience is going back in time to the old or first covenant that God made with his people before the coming of Christ. We can’t go back to the tent of meeting and the animal sacrifices offered by priests to cleanse our guilty consciences. Now, you may be thinking, “well, that’s great because I wasn’t tempted to do that. I don’t care for animal sacrifices and I’m about as kosher as a ham and cheese sandwich.” Not so fast. Let’s first consider why the original recipients of the letter to the Hebrews were tempted to go back to the old covenant to try to cleanse their consciences. Then we’ll be in a good position to consider what can’t cleanse our consciences.

The original recipients of this letter struggled with guilty consciences. They struggled with assurance that their sins really were forgiven, that they really were ok with God, and that they really could draw near to Him through Christ. They had guilty consciences and weak assurance. Maybe you can relate. To remedy their guilty consciences, they were tempted to deconstruct their faith in Jesus and go back to old covenant priests and sacrifices.

Why that? In part it’s probably because many of them were converts to faith in Christ from Judaism and were receiving some social pressure to deconstruct. But there is more to it than that. The old covenant that God made with his people through Moses until the coming of Christ was very physical and visual. That provided God’s people with a lot of assurance. They could see the priests, sacrifices, and all the other elements in the tent of meeting described in Hebrews 9:1-5. What does all this have to do with a guilty conscience? Well, the Hebrews were tempted to turn back to Judaism because they thought, “the old covenant rituals provided physical assurance that an animal died in our place, its visible blood cleanses our conscience, and makes us ok with God. I can’t see Jesus, but I can see the old rituals.”

There is just one major problem: The old covenant never could cleanse the conscience. The old covenant was never meant to be permanent, it was preparatory for something better. The old covenant tent of meeting with its holy place only for priests and its most holy place only for the high priest was meant to indicate that the old covenant never granted access to God or perfected guilty consciences. It was preparatory for something better. Hebrews 9:8-10 – By this the Holy Spirit indicates that the way into the holy places is not yet opened as long as the first section is still standing [9] (which is symbolic for the present age). According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshiper, [10] but deal only with food and drink and various washings, regulations for the body imposed until the time of reformation. The tent, priests, and sacrifices made God’s old covenant people ceremonially and externally clean so that God could dwell with them and it prepared God’s old covenant people for the coming Messiah, Jesus Christ, who would establish a new and better covenant. Therefore, to deconstruct their faith in Jesus and go back to the old covenant now that Christ has come would be eternally disastrous. The old covenant can’t cleanse the conscience.

Now, let’s return to our original question: What do you do when you have a guilty conscience? What tents, sacrifices, and priests are you tempted to turn to in order to assuage your guilty conscience? Well, the author of Hebrews helps us answer that question and understand our hearts by using two words in Hebrews 9:14 – dead works. Dead works can’t cleanse our conscience. A dead work is anything that we do in order to try and get that guilty feeling to go away. We can turn perfectly good things into dead works. Take for example counseling or therapy. That can be a very good thing. To be vulnerable with you, I saw my counselor from CCEF this week. However, if you go to your counselor or therapist in order to get them to assure you that you’re not actually guilty so that the terrible feeling temporarily goes away, that has become a dead work. A therapist can’t cleanse your conscience. Similarly, serving your brothers and sisters in the church is a great thing. However, if you’re serving other people in order to make amends for the bad things you’ve done so that you don’t feel so badly anymore, that has become a dead work. Serving others can’t cleanse your conscience. What dead works are you engaging to ease your conscience. Turn from it! There is nothing we can do to ease our guilty consciences because we are in fact guilty of sinning against the holy God. Stop engaging in dead works. You don’t need an eased conscience, you need a cleansed one. Second question:

HOW DOES CHRIST CLEANSE OUR CONSCIENCE?

A guilty conscience makes you feel like you need to keep your distance from God. That’s why, if you have a guilty conscience, you found it so difficult to sing this morning or why it can be so difficult to pray when you feel guilty. There is a reason for that: sin separates. Sin separates us from God’s comforting presence. Sinners can’t enter the holy place of God, but Christ cleanses our conscience by entering God’s presence for us. Hebrews 9:11-12a – But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) [12] he entered once for all into the holy places… The Lord Jesus Christ is the greater and final priest who died on the cross, rose from the grave, and ascended to enter not into a man-made tent on our behalf, but into the heavenly, ultimate, and transcendent presence of God. And if you trust in this great and final priest who alone qualifies you for God’s presence, then you never have to keep your distance again no matter what you’ve done. You never have to keep your distance from God’s presence because Jesus Christ is both the great high priest and your final sacrifice. Hebrews 9:12-14a – he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. [13] For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, [14] how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works… The old covenant high priest would slaughter an animal without physical blemish, and then bring its blood into the most holy place, and sprinkle the blood in the tent of meeting to provide external, ceremonial cleansing for God’s people. By contrast, the Lord Jesus Christ is without moral blemish, he shed his blood for our sins on the cross, and rose to bring himself as the final blood sacrifice into God’s heavenly presence. His blood doesn’t cleanse a tent, it washes clean our conscience. Christ our sacrifice took our guilt so that we have none. That’s how Christ cleanses your conscience. Don’t deny your guilt. Don’t numb your guilt. Don’t outperform your guilt. Don’t listen to voices that tell you, “you’re not guilty.” Using dead works to calm your conscience is like trying to wipe a red stain out of a white shirt. Have you ever tried? Eventually you give up and admit you need a new shirt. Christ alone can cover you with his perfect righteousness, forgive you for your guilt, and give you a clean conscience through his finished work on the cross and his resurrection. That’s how Christ cleanses your conscience. Ok, last question:

WHY DOES CHRIST CLEANSE OUR CONSCIENCE?

We are cleansed to serve the real God. Hebrews 9:14 – how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. One of the terrible things about a guilty conscience is that it kills your passion to serve the true, real, living God. Trying to serve God with a guilty conscience is like trying to run a race with ankle weights on. The extra weight drags you down. But Christ has cleansed your guilty conscience, not by denying your guilt, but by dying for it. You’re free from the burden of guilt and you can now serve Christ unencumbered. When your conscience is guilty, serving God is a burden. But when you come to Christ everyday to experience the truth that he has cleansed your conscience from dead works, then serving God is done in joyful, privileged gratitude for all the grace you’ve received. You’ve been set free to serve. So lay aside your guilty conscience at the feet of Christ, come to him and let his blood wash you clean, and go and serve without anything guilt weighing you down. Worship God, love one another, and take the gospel of grace to the world because you’ve been cleansed from a guilty conscience to serve the living God.

REPENT & BELIEVE IN CHRIST

Come to Christ for a permanently clean conscience.