I’ve been listening lately to some exceptional teaching about the way believers lose their confidence before God by listening to a sin conscience. Andrew Wommack teaches how a conscience of sin actually makes believers lose their confidence before God and weakens their faith. They are then subject to the works of darkness. They have been deceived.

Wommack believes most of the church actually still functions in this manner with weakened faith because of a sin conscience. I think I agree with that. I think most failures of faith and therefore our Christian living, can be attributed to this reason. There may be other reasons for what we see in our society today, but I think this may be the biggest reason for the church’s failure to impress and impact the culture, thereby leading to the tsunami of darkness we are seeing our nation come under.

I have been a part of the full gospel Spirit-filled church for 37 years now and have attended various church groups, as well as some denominational groups. I have seen lots of sin and failure, with local pastors falling into sin and being exposed. It is devastating to the advancement of God’s message to the culture. Any amount of performance based legalism taught in the church will produce sin and failure of faith in our lives. Too many succumb to the condemnation of the evil one and cannot arise from it. I have my own experiences with a conscience of sin in my earlier years of learning how to walk in faith.

The truth is, no matter what a believer does, God still loves them, forgives them and works with them. They are not condemned to hell or even to second class status because of something they did. God’s ACCEPTANCE of us is not based on what we DO…..think about that, because most people cannot understand it. The human mind cannot grasp it. See my previous article here. When we sin, it is because we do not really, deeply, grasp what Jesus did for us, how he freed us and gave us His righteousness. We don’t totally understand the position and the condition He has elevated us to.

God’s acceptance of us is simply based on what Jesus DID. If we are born again, God is pleased with us BEFORE we ever do anything for Him. He loved us BEFORE we loved Him. Probably the greatest Old Testament example of this is King David. David sinned greatly by committing adultery with Bathsheba and setting up her husband to be killed in battle to cover Bathsheba’s pregnancy. In my opinion, there is almost nothing that could be worse than all of that! But we don’t see God abandoning David. We see a prophet coming to him to let him know of his sin and we see David and his family experiencing consequences from this situation, but we also see redemption in the fact that another child from Bathsheba became the successor king to David. The point is, God did not abandon David, who wrote a lot of the Book of Psalms, documenting his prayers and relationship with God. In 2 Samuel 12:13, we see David obtaining forgiveness from the God he loved.

“So David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the LORD.” And Nathan said to David, “THE LORD ALSO HAS PUT AWAY YOUR SIN (emphasis mine); you shall not die.However, because by this deed you have given great occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also who is born to you shall surely die.”

This sin conscience weakness in the church will not allow us to confront the works of darkness in our society because we do not have the confidence in God to do so. Instead, we have self doubt. This must change if we are to be successful in confronting the darkness we see taking over our nation. We must have warriors with the confidence to do spiritual battle. Witness the same David as a 17 year old who saw the armies of Israel quaking before the giant Goliath. These men who had been trained for war certainly had no confidence before the tall man Goliath. The 17 year old David who only showed up to bring lunch to his army brothers looked at the situation and said, “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine to defy the armies of the living God?” David then killed that giant and cut off his head with Goliath’s own sword. How was he able to do this? David wasn’t looking at his own weaknesses; he was looking at his God. He was strong in faith. He wasn’t looking at his own youth or inexperience.

Now that is confidence. That’s how it’s done. That’s what the church must do in the spirit. We don’t kill people, but we do deal with the demonic forces that are motivating people. Goliath is representative of the invisible demonic powers that oppose all that is good and decent in this world. Jesus waits for us to make the devil His footstool. The devil has already been defeated by Him. I want to say that louder. THE DEVIL HAS ALREADY BEEN DEFEATED BY JESUS! But we, the church, are to enforce His victory! He has given us everything we need to “make it so.” His sacrifice made us perfect forever! We can be supremely confidant in the abilities our God has given us! Take His word as TRUTH and use it.

Hebrews 10:12-14 “But this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God, from that time waiting till His enemies are made His footstool. For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified.”