Good Like a Medicine

This is my first posting of the “nuggets” that I will be posting regularly from John Bunyan which I mentioned in my previous post. There are so many that I have already marked and highlighted; they are so good! So I just picked one of the ones I have read first and will post it as the first one. I hope you enjoy these “Bunyan Bits” as much as I am; I am eating them like a beggar with bread!

The conscience has its place in the soul, where it is like a judge to tell the good things from the bad, judging them accordingly (Romans 2:14). The conscience is the same as the law of nature (1 Corinthians 11:14), which is able to teach those who don’t know God’s Word that sin against the law is sin against God.

Now this conscience, a part of human nature itself, can control and scold those who will listen to it — but should we depend only on our conscience, making a god of it? How strange that people would make a God and a Christ out of their consciences, just because the conscience can convict of sin.

You say, If my conscience convinces me of sin against the law, then it will also help me fulfill the law. Friend, your conscience convinces you that you’ve sinned against the law, but follow your conscience, and it will only lead you under the law’s curse, for it is too weak to do anything else. It can never deliver you from the curse of the law, for if forgiveness came by obedience to the law, or by our conscience either, then Christ wouldn’t have needed to die (Galatians 2:21).

–John Bunyan, The Riches of Bunyan (p. 55)