Liberating the Spirit
Many of us often say, “Let your conscience be your guide.” There are limits to that philosophy. It is possible to deaden the conscience. Remember the old “Dennis the Menace” comic strip or TV show. In one episode, Dennis is found sitting on the kitchen counter with his hand in the cookie jar with a few of his friends saying, “My Dad always says to listen to my conscience. And as I looked at the cookie jar my conscience said, ‘Go for it.’” I understand what Dennis the Menace means, especially when I am following the rules of morality and not listening to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit must be freed to do its work in us but in order to do that it must be liberated. We free the Spirit within when we move from relying upon our conscience to an awareness of God’s presence and power expressed through our consciousness.
In the Bible Jesus is confronted with following the Laws of Moses concerning the stoning of a woman caught in adultery or practicing the spirit of love and forgiveness. The rule of law said, stone her! Unconditional Love or agape love said, forgive her. Conscience says kill this woman. Consciousness says save her. She has broken commandments. She has to be killed. It is the Law. According to societal demands one of our greatest generals who presided over the War in Iraq and later became our CIA director, General David Petraeus violated the rules of marriage. He had to resign. He was put to shame. If we commit a crime, we must do the time. That is the rule of Law that governs our society. But as Christians we follow a higher law that comes from the liberated Spirit of Christ. That law says love one another and always be willing to restore, reconcile and forgive. If we claim to be Christians and are not willing to follow this higher law of love we are imprisoned in morality and are servants to our laws, traditions and history. We become slaves to our conscience, not our consciousness and we miss the message of Christ.
I want to follow Christ and be freed from morality and conscience and live by the spirit of God. There are two ways to make that possible. First, by not relying on our conscience only to guide us but listening to the Spirit of God that’s available to us in our consciousness. What is conscience? Conscience is our sense of right and wrong. Note the word “sense.” Conscience pretends to know what is right. Consciousness is an awareness of what is right and doing it automatically. Conscience is borrowed from our parents, extended family, husband, wife or significant others in our life, like our teachers and friends. We do the right thing because we have been told it is the right thing to do. But like Dennis the Menace, we can justify doing almost anything when it seems right at the moment. Acting on principles is of the society. It’s okay, but does not arise in our being. When we are aware and filled with Christ’s Spirit, we act rightly because we know the right thing to do. When our eyes are open there is light, we don’t try to go through the wall, we go through the door. When there is no light we grope in the dark and rely on others for sight. Reliance on others is conscience. Relying on God in Jesus Christ is relying on the Spirit of the living God.
The second way of liberating the Spirit through our consciousness is by relying on our re-birth in Christ (spirituality) and not on morality (Human rules of conduct). Spirituality can deteriorate into morality. When there is no light within or if the light dims or dies, tradition kicks in, history, denominationalism, morality takes over. This is what happened to the scribes and Pharisees who brought Jesus a woman supposedly caught in adultery. They were acting on morality. They had long received the laws of Moses. They knew what the law said and they wanted to trap Jesus in His teaching of love and forgiveness with this event. But one thing they did not count on, Jesus turning the tables on them with a simple statement, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” And this statement leads us to an understanding of the scripture, “And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience.” How many times have we been convicted by our conscience yet return to old sins? The scribes and Pharisees left convicted by their conscience but slaves to morality. The message is through the liberation of our spirit we receive the blessings of forgiveness given to the woman caught in adultery. The message was lost on the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus freed the woman’s spirit. The Pharisees felt guilty but were not ready to change. Liberation of the spirit is transformation. When the spirit is freed we wake up and move from morality and conscience to total dependence on the Spirit of the living God in Jesus Christ. Our spirit is free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty.
