SERMON BASED SERIES

IN SEARCH OF A CONSCIENCE
{ANDY STANLEY}

 

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INTRODUCTION

You live according to your conscience. It dictates your thinking about what you ought and ought not to do. Likewise, a family has a corporate conscience. An organization has a conscience. A Fortune 500 company has a conscience. But is there such a thing as a national conscience? If so, what governs the national conscience of the United States of America? Popular standards? Or is there something else?

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. What was/is your family motto? What motto would you create for your family today?

  2. How would you define conscience? Give an example of how your conscience has determined your actions (as an individual and as a family).

  3. How have you seen God removed from issues of state and politics? How have you seen God included in issues of state and politics?

  4. Given the references to God in several of America's historical documents, what kind of role should the Christian religion play in the affairs of state?

  5. Why has accountability to God and God-talk fallen out of favor in our culture?

  6. Early in America's history, the national conscience was shaped by a sense of personal accountability to God. If we eliminate God from the national conversation, what else might begin to shape the national conscience? In what ways can that be a positive thing? A negative thing?

MOVING FORWARD

The value we place on the individual and individual rights is a reflection of the value our founders believed God placed on the individual. Yet today, we use those same rights to distance ourselves from God. By eliminating God from the national conversation, every person does what is right in his or her own eyes; and law replaces conscience. What does it say about our nation's relationship with God when we turn to him in times of crisis, yet ignore him the rest of the time.

CHANGING YOUR MIND

Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.
Romans 2:14-15