I'd been sitting, pacing, praying, and crying for almost five hours. It was the fall of 1974, and I'd holed up in the quiet of my grandparents' home overlooking Puget Sound to do some serious business with God. Recently, I'd read a book that encouraged me to clean up my heart and life from the sins of my past. This was not my conversion day, but a time of honesty and obedience following my commitment to Christ years earlier.

The book I was reading, Revival Lectures by Charles Finney, gave clear instructions on how I could free myself from past wrongs. Who wouldn't want that? Its message was straightforward and challenging: I needed to list all my past sins, make things right with God and others, and then keep my conscience clear for the rest of my life (Proverbs 28:13).

At twenty-one, I'd committed enough youthful sins to keep me busy for a while.Plopping down my athletic six-foot frame at the kitchen table, I listed on paper every sin I remembered committing. It's a good thing I couldn't recall them all because that probably would have killed me. After five hours of soul-searching, my stack of scribbled papers contained hundreds of notations of wrongs I'd done to God and others in my short life.

The list included my foul mouth in junior high, a struggle with lust and pornography as a teenager, and some rebellious years toward my parents. Then there were the sins of anger, jealousy, envy, and pride that hurt others in relationships I used for selfish advantage. Most of all, though raised in church, I'd shut God out of the center of my attitudes and values. I'd lived for self and its empty pleasures.

All of these sins had numbed me for years. They'd produced confusion, insecurity, purposelessness, and a lack of power. In friendships, I was guarded--keeping things on a shallow plane to keep from getting hurt. Sexual lust was a constant temptation and gnawing daydream.

A final time I asked the Lord to show me areas of my darkened conscience that needed to be confessed, made right, and restored. This time the words came clearly to my heart, "There is nothing more." With tears streaming down my cheeks, I went into the living room. There I prayed, worshipped, and burned in the fireplace the record of wrongs that had crippled my life for years.

From that day forth, I determined to live my life with a clear conscience before God and men. I knew I wasn't suddenly perfect now. Obviously, there would be more sins to confess, more understanding to gain, and deeper workings of the Holy Spirit throughout my lifetime.

For the first time I knew the freedom and power of a clean conscience. Though Jesus had forgiven my sins when I accepted him as my Savior years before, I'd never allowed him to break the power of sin through the awakening of my conscience. At the end of this day, I thanked God for cleansing my conscience and asked him to help me keep it sensitive from then on.

The Apostle Paul also had a profound awakening of conscience as a young man. Though zealously religious, he rejected the claims of Jesus and persecuted Christians while rejecting the claims of Jesus.  While on the road to Damascus, God invaded Paul's comfort zone and awakened his heart and mind. These were Jesus' words to him:

"Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It's hard for you to kick against the goads" (Acts 26:14).

A goad was a sharp, pointed stick that Hebrew farmers used to keep their oxen plowing in a straight line. Whenever an ox veered off his path while plowing the soil, this painful little instrument jabbed into its side reminding it to get back in line. Each time it wandered off, it would get another jab.

Paul was doing the same thing with his conscience. Instead of allowing it to guide him in the right way, he'd allowed it to be a painful goad that smarted every time he did wrong. Jesus' loving advice to him was to stop stabbing himself and enter into a life of freedom and peace.

Paul abruptly changed his life, put his trust in Jesus, and became a great spiritual leader. Toward the end of his life, he could boldly say,  "I always do my best to have a clear conscience in the sight of God and people" (Acts 24:16).

Our conscience can be a friendly guide along life's pathway, or it can be a very painful goad. The choice is ours. That's God's original design.

The conscience is a part of the human personality. Closely related to the will and emotions, it is the ability of the mind to confirm and enforce right and wrong behavior. Romans 2:15 describes the human conscience this way: "in their hearts they know right from wrong. God's laws are written within them; their own conscience accuses them, or sometimes excuses them" (Living Bible).

Conscience is a God-given sense of right and  wrong written in every heart. It's being able to know what's true, coupled with right feeling toward obedience and wrong feeling toward disobedience. This ability to confirm and enforce right and wrong behavior is a precious gift from God. Without it, we would drift along in a world of confusing options. A mind without a conscience would be like a body without nerves. If you smashed your finger with a hammer and felt no pain, you might continue hitting it, not knowing the severe damage you were doing.

The conscience does that and more. It not only pains you when you choose to go against it, but it tells you the right thing to do before you do the smashing. It guides before you choose and registers approval or disapproval after the action. That's pretty amazing!

But the human conscience can also be extremely perverted or darkened. It can be "bent" to acknowledge the wrong things or deadened to hear nothing at all. It's a moldable part of our spiritual life that must be kept clean, sensitive, and anchored to God's Word.

Noah Webster, the author of the original 1828 Webster's Dictionary, agreed with the long held historical definition of conscience as the "judgment of right and wrong, or the faculty, power or principle within us, which decides on the lawfulness or unlawfulness of our own actions and affections and instantly approves or condemns them. Conscience is called by some writers the moral sense." Chuck Colson, the famous convert of Watergate and now president of Prison Fellowship says it this way:

"So, where does conscience come from? It's something God gives us at birth, but it has to be cultivated."

This divinely-planted sense of right and wrong is easily warped or perverted. But when our conscience is open to God's truth, it acts like a "judge" inside us. When we do right, according to God's standards and principles, our conscience "smiles" upon our action. We feel approval and encouragement. But when we do wrong, our conscience "frowns" upon our wrong choice and we feel guilty, confused, dirty, or wrong.

In some ways, your conscience is like a stereo speaker. If the speaker is well built, with wires properly connected to the sound system, the sound that is produced will be clear and understandable. But if you abuse the speaker or the wires get frayed, then the sound will be fuzzy, faint, or fail to get through at all.

When this happens, the sound system is not at fault. Its pitch and clarity have not changed. The problem is the speaker not receiving the clear signal. Years ago our kids had a small boom box that illustrated this point. When they first received it,  its sound was powerful and clear. Sometimes they'd turn it up so loud in their room that the whole upstairs would shake! After being dropped a few times, dragged around, and the volume turned up too high, its sound became muffled and distorted.

The same is true of our consciences. If we do not protect and cherish our God-given conscience, then the truth about what's right and wrong becomes fuzzy, barely discernible, or completely silent. God's beam of truth hasn't changed. His signal is still as clear as it has always been. But our speaker--the human conscience--has been abused in a way that does not allow it to function properly.

It's crucial to listen to your conscience. The more you disobey it, the harder it is to hear. If you disobey it often enough, it won't direct you in the right way, but will become clouded by deception. But if you let your God-given conscience guide you--according to God's Word and His Spirit--it will not let you down. Freedom and success will be yours.

We live in a world of incredible dangers and moral pitfalls. It is vitally important for you and I to cultivate a renewed and clear conscience if we are to make an impact.

• The world map is changing due to nationalistic infighting, and the emergence of developing countries, the rise of militant Islam, and the moral decline of our own civilization.
• The economies of the West teeter on the edge of recession and depression. They are also linked together in a global expansion of trade and opportunity.
• Families are torn apart by a highly mobile society, single parent homes, working moms and dads which is causing major child neglect, and a crumbling social fabric.
• Faith in the God of the Bible has been replaced by a myriad of gods, philosophies, and religious expressions. Atheism reigns in our public institutions.

If a spiritual awakening of conscience was needed in past years, then it is desperately needed today. If our ancestors could visit America today, they would be appalled at the present social landscape.

America today is morally worse off than at any time in our history. Divorce, child abuse, substance abuse, homicides, violent crime, family breakdown, immorality, Internet porn, abortion, infanticide, the rise of Big Government, and numerous other societal ills have all reached epic proportions. We have experienced an unprecedented decay of conscience that has brought us to a point of danger and despair.

We desperately need God to awaken our corporate and individual consciences. Our hearts need to change and the blinders must be taken off our eyes. New life begins when God opens our eyes and awakens our consciences to His unaltered truth. His standards have never changed. We are the ones who have floated off into fantasy and error. That awakening begins with you and me.

Will you allow your heart to be made sensitive to God? Are you willing to have your conscience awakened by the blazing clarity of his Word and commands? God wants you to live a clean and victorious life in the midst of an ever darkening world. If you will follow his lead, the following promise applies to you:

"Arise! Shine! Your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has dawned. Darkness now covers the earth, and thick darkness covers the nations. But the Lord dawns, and his glory appears over you. Nations will come to your light, and kings will come to the brightness of your dawn" (Isaiah 60:1-3).

Your conscience is the key. With its renewal, God can turn on the lights.