Spiritual Warfare and Sin: The Cleansed Conscience

Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.—Hebrews 10:22

What a relief to find the writer to the Hebrews encouraging us to "draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience" (Hebrews 10:22).

A sprinkled conscience-surely this is a gracious thing for men and women in the world to know!

One of the most relieving, enriching, wholesome, wondrous things we can know is that sudden sense of the lifting of the burden as the conscience goes free-God giving freedom to that conscience which has been evil, diseased and protesting.

Peter wrote about this and called it "the pledge of a good conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ" (1 Peter 3:21).

This is the kind of conversion I believe in-when your sins are cleansed and forgiven through the blood of the Lamb, you will know it!...

A transaction has taken place within the human spirit. The heart suddenly knows itself clean and the burden lifts from the mind and there is a true sense that heaven is pleased and God is smiling and the sins are gone.

A transaction within the human spirit-that is the kind of forgiveness I believe in! Echoes from Eden, 65-66.

"Lord, I'm overwhelmed this morning with this 'sense that heaven is pleased and God is smiling and the sins are gone.' I fall on my face before You in heartfelt worship. Amen."