For Children： A Clear Conscience And Receiving God's Gift — Zac Poonen

God’s Creation of Light, the Heavens, and the Earth

So when we heard Santosh earlier, he told us about the conscience. And it's very important for all of you, especially children, right from a young age, to understand the importance of conscience. And so to begin with, I'll show you something from the first page of your Bible.

So you know what the first page of your Bible is? Genesis chapter one, where there was nothing, all that we see today, the sun, moon, stars, sky, there was nothing there. And we read on different, different days, God made different things.

And one of the first things he made was light. It was all dark. And then he made the heavens. And then he made the earth and the seas and the trees. And then on the fourth day, he made the sun and the moon.

And then on the fifth day, he made all the birds and the fish. I mean, he just spoke a word and all the birds and fish, different types of birds and fish all came to being. That's how this world was created.

Humanity’s Distinctive Creation on the Sixth Day

And God could have made, listen to this, he could have made the animals also on that day. He made the fish and the birds, which are also types of animals. And then he could also have made the earth animals like the lions and the dogs and the cats and the pigs also on the same day, but he did not.

He could have kept the sixth day, especially for man and said, I'm gonna keep one day, especially for man and make man on that day. But he didn't do it. And you know, whenever God does something or does not do something, there is always a reason.

So that's one way we, those who study the Bible seriously, whenever you see God doing something and not doing something, don't just read it as something God did or did not do. Try and understand why God did that or why God did not do that.

I asked myself, why did God, when he made the fish and the bird, just with one word, oh, let the fish and the birds come up. Millions of fish and birds, different types came up. He could have said, let the animals also come and the earth would have been filled with every single animal and creature.

Why didn't he do it? Why didn't he keep one special day just for man? Because man is the most important part of his creation. I'll tell you, on the sixth day, there were two parts to the sixth day and the first part he made, you read in Genesis 1, 24 and 25, all the animals on the earth, the creeping things and the insects and everything was created, dogs and pigs and lions and everything was created in the first part of the sixth day.

And then the second part of the sixth day, he made man. And do you know, children, that man, our body is made of the same dust? God made our body from dust. That's why when a man dies and you go and watch that body after a few years, it has become, the whole thing has become dust, everything.

And the reason is, I'll tell you why God made man on the same day as the animals. It says here that God made man from the dust of the earth, Genesis 2, verse 7, and then he did something. I'm talking about conscience now.

He made man, picture this, God has made man hands, eyes, legs, body and everything, but man is dead. And he doesn't just give him breath. It says when God breathed into him, he did something to man that he never did to the other animals.

The animals also, when they were created, they immediately started breathing and likewise to the birds and the fish and all. But when man was made, he was not breathing. And God breathed into him and he not only got breath, like all the other animals, it says in Genesis 2, 7, he became a living soul.

A living soul means he got a conscience. And like you heard Santosh say, the conscience is the thing that tells you when you've done something wrong. Even when you're a little child, if you tell a lie to your mommy or daddy, you know that you told a lie.

What's it that makes you feel that way? That's conscience. Even when you hurt your brother or sister, you know inwardly that you did something wrong. Whenever you do something wrong, you hear that voice and you must listen to that voice because I'll tell you what will happen.

If you don't listen to that voice, one day that conscience will die and that'll be terrible. Because if the conscience dies, you grow up to be a very bad man or bad woman. You'll do all types of wrong things.

You'll get into a lot of trouble. And if you get married, you'll have a very unhappy marriage and all types of problems if you don't carefully listen to conscience, which means if you did tell a lie, go and immediately tell mommy or daddy, I'm sorry, what I said was a lie, please forgive me.

And much better if you listen to the conscience, which says, don't tell that, that's a lie, don't say it. Or when you're tempted to fight back with your brother or sister fighting with you, you say, no, your conscience is not, don't fight with him.

Listen to that. If you keep listening to your conscience, I'll tell you one day you will grow up to be a godly young man or woman, one whom God can use. There are so many Christians whom God cannot use.

And I'll tell you why God cannot use them. They sit in churches, absolutely useless to God. The only thing they do is sing the songs, listen to the message, put some money in the box and go home. What else do they do for God?

Nothing, they don't witness for Christ in their office. They don't witness to Christ with their relatives. They're just useless because from childhood, they neglected their conscience. God doesn't even speak to them.

If you want God to speak to you always, when you have grown up and however old you are and you hear God speak to you, I'll give you one bit of advice. Keep your conscience clear always. And I say that to older people as well.

See, we are so careful to keep, let me, before I get to that, I'll tell you why God made the animals and the man on the same day. It was to teach man. You and the animals are made from the same dust. They've got eyes and nose and legs and hands like you have.

And they've got inside their body, inside the body of those animals, they have the same type of organs that you have inside your body. But there's one big difference, God says to man, to all of you children.

You are different from a dog or a pig or a cat or even a beautiful animal or a fierce animal. You have got a conscience. And what the Lord was saying to man by creating him on the same day is, if you don't listen to your conscience, it is like not having a conscience.

You will descend to the level of an animal. Animals are beings that always look down. Have you ever seen a dog looking up to the sky to God? Never. Pigs, anywhere, you go anywhere in the world, cows, dogs, pigs, they're always looking down, down, down, down.

They're looking for something to eat or something on this earth. That's what happens when a man doesn't listen to his conscience. His mind will always be on something on this earth, something I can get for myself, somebody to fight with.

That's how these dogs are. But God has given a man a conscience which says you're answerable to a God up in the sky. And it's a wonderful thing, you children, if you listen to your conscience from a childhood in every little thing, if you hurt somebody, go and apologize, go and say, I'm sorry, my dear brother, my dear sister, for having fought with you or hit you or whatever it is.

If you do that, you will never descend to the level of animal. I've seen lots and lots of human beings. They're no better than the animals, they're very clever, but their whole mind is set on the things of this earth.

That's a mark of an animal, always looking down, down, down, down, down, down. And even you can sit in NCCF and in your mind, you may be always looking down on the things of earth. How can I get more on this earth?

And how can I be bigger on this earth and more famous on this earth and make more money on this earth? It's all down, down, down, down, down. Whereas these things are meant to serve us, everything God has created.

The Conscience as a Warning Against Moral Numbness

So that's the first thing I wanna say. Another picture of a bad conscience is leprosy. Leprosy is such a terrible disease that like you heard Santhosh say, you don't feel sensation. You prick, if a man's got leprosy in his hand and you poke it with a pin, he doesn't feel it.

In fact, I heard of a person who had leprosy in India. He was sleeping at night and when he woke up, believe it or not, the toes in his leg were missing. Imagine, you wake up in the morning and your toes are missing and blood all over there where he was sleeping.

Poor people, you know, sleeping on the floor. Some rats had come at night and bitten off his toes and he did not feel a thing. That is the result of leprosy. It's a picture of human beings who can do some very wrong things and don't feel any prick in their conscience, even though they've done such a wrong thing to somebody else or cheated in some way or fought with somebody in a bad way and they don't feel a prick.

It's like having a, it's better to have your toes cut off, eaten by a rat. I'll tell you honestly, better to have your toes eaten by a rat than to have a bad conscience. So that's the first thing on leprosy is a terrible thing.

Salvation Requires a Personal Response to Christ

So Jesus has come with salvation. You know that he died for our sins and rose again and he wants to come into our life. But Santosh spoke about responding to God. That means our answer to God. So there's a verse in Ephesians which I want to read to you.

In everything, there is man's part and God's part. If God were to do everything to you without your response, you'd be like a robot. You've probably seen pictures of robots, you know, metal things made to look like a man or plastic things made to look like a man programmed with a computer and you can make that robot, do whatever you program it to do.

Now, God did not make man like that. If God had made Adam like that, like a robot, then Adam would have gone up to the tree which is forbidden in the Garden of Eden and the program would have said, no, you shouldn't look at this.

He would have just turned away, but he was not a robot. He had a choice. God gave him a choice. You can choose whether you want to take it or not. You're going to go by your conscience or not. Adam went against his conscience.

Eve went against her conscience. So God does not do anything for us if we don't respond. That's why the whole, even though Jesus died for the whole world, all the sins of the world, every human being that ever lived in the earth, their sins were placed on Christ on the cross.

Yet, how is it so many people in the world are not saved? Because they have not done their part of receiving what God has offered. So let me show you a verse in Ephesians chapter two. You have your Bible.

Grace Through Faith as Receiving God’s Gift

You can turn there, Ephesians chapter two, verse eight, which says, by grace, you have been saved through faith. So let me picture what this means in a very simple way. Salvation is a very, very expensive thing.

Now here is something which is not as expensive as salvation, it's a cell phone, but it's expensive. I mean, people try to steal it and all. Now here is God offering something to you, salvation. Very expensive.

If somebody were to give you a gift of a cell phone, it'll never become yours until you reach out your hand and say, thank you. Otherwise he has to keep holding it like that. Here, it's free. I'm giving you a gift, it's free.

This is how God offers salvation. Forgiveness for all the sins you have ever committed in your life. Here, take it, take it. It'll never become yours until you say, thank you. So that's what this verse means.

By grace, that's God's hand. You're saved by faith. That's your hand, taking it. Let me say that again. By grace, through faith, you can be saved. What if it is only grace? No salvation. If you only had faith, God's not offering anything.

Then there's nothing for you to take. But God's offering is grace, forgiveness, salvation. By faith, you take it. It's as simple as that. So that's one picture of how we receive salvation. The other picture is marriage.

Union with Christ as a Covenant Commitment

Think of a marriage. All of you children would have seen some marriage somewhere or the other. In a wedding, I mean a wedding, not a marriage. When you go to a wedding, you see a man and a woman standing up there in front, getting married.

And the person who's conducting the marriage asks the man a question. Will you take this woman to be your wife? He said, yes. So think of Jesus and you. He wants to be united with you, just like that man and woman are married and they live with each other for the rest of their life.

Jesus wants to be united with each of us. It's like a wedding. And supposing if you go to a wedding and the man asks the man, will you marry this woman? And he says, yes, very happily. And then he turns around to the woman and says, will you marry this man?

And she says, this is the wedding. Well, let me think about it. And she's standing there and saying, let me think about it. Or turns the other way and scratches her head and say, well, I'm not so sure.

I need to pray about it a little more. And all that is okay before you come to the wedding. But imagine, have you ever come to a wedding like that where a woman says, I'm going to think about it. I'm not so sure.

Or turns her head away. That's exactly what a lot of men are doing. And that's why they never get united with Christ. It's very simple. Jesus is standing there saying, I want to be united with you. I want to change your life.

You know, when a man gets married to a woman, the woman comes and lives with the man for the rest of his life. Everything that the man has belongs to her. Everything that Christ has belongs to me. If I say yes to him.

So this is important. It's not enough that God says yes to you. You have to say yes and you have to keep on saying yes because God's got abundant, many, many things to give to you. So that's what Santos was speaking about, our response to God.

Sin as Poison That Destroys the Conscience

If there's no response, then God is not able to do what he wants to do. Sin is a very serious thing. We have to be very, very careful that the devil does not fool us with sin. See, sin is like poison.

If a person wants to kill someone, somebody who hates someone, an enemy, and he wants to kill someone, what he'll do is he'll give them a glass of milk or something very nice, some juice or something, and put just a few drops of poison in it.

A few drops of poison is enough to kill a person. But this man who gets this cup thinks, oh, this bad chap is giving me a cup of chocolate or some juice and he drinks it and he dies because there's poison in it.

Now, the reason I say that is to tell you that many things that look very attractive in this world, which can be sinful, because the devil's put some poison in it. It looks very nice, but the devil's aim is to make you go there and go away from God.

Even in a little thing like we have examinations in India, in schools, children write examination. It's a great temptation for children to cheat in an examination. To look at somebody else's paper and copy it or to bring some little paper in their pockets and take it out and copy it.

That's cheating. That's take you away from God. It's a little sin. The devil tells you to do it saying, you can pass in the examination, you pass in the examination, but you lose your conscience, you lose your soul.

It's like having your toes bitten off. You got leprosy. So it's not worth it. Remember to keep your conscience clear always. So we heard Jeremy say about making God happy. I'll tell you one way to make God happy is by reading your Bible.

Reading Scripture and Obeying Parents

Even if you can't understand it. Even I, when I gave my life to Christ, I was 19. Even then, when I read the Bible, I didn't understand most of it. But as I read it, read it, read it over a period of years, I began to understand more and more.

So get into the habit of reading the stories in the Bible, the New Testament especially. And that's one way you can make God happy when you read the Bible. You say, you read something there and you say, hey, I want to do that.

For example, it says that Jesus, when he was a little boy, yeah, Jesus came as a little child and as a little boy, we read in Luke chapter two that he obeyed his father and mother, Luke 2, 51, all the time.

He never disobeyed his mother or father in anything. So when you sing in the church, I want to follow Jesus, it starts there to do whatever your mom and dad tell you. That is so very important. That is your response to God.

And what God gives you, you can take. God bless you all.