God plants his life-tree seeds in every human conscience. If people have “the requirements of the law are written on their hearts,” Someone must have done the writing! Right?
Someone said that the conscience is the part of you that feels bad when the rest of you feels good! It’s not a perfect rule of thumb because it can be skewed or silenced by relentless inattention. But when it’s in functioning order, it points directly to the One who installed it.
An atheist friend with whom I’ve been corresponding asked me, “What makes you think that religious people have a monopoly on compassion?” Part of my response was this:
I attribute benevolent things that non-christians do as evidence that all of us are the offspring of God. He’s the most compassionate being in the world, and when he made us in his image, he included the caring quality. In my view, his image was marred and twisted when we kicked God out of our lives, but there is still a clear vestige of his personality left in us in the form of our conscience…
You might think of it as a compass that God surgically implanted in each of us at birth that tells us if we’re going the right direction or not.
[An excerpt from my book: Reaching Rahab]
barney wiget 