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PROGRAM D-8427
Do you know what an overly active conscience is? It’s like a nagging person who badgers you and accuses you all the time. It’s that inner voice that runs you into the ground with thoughts like, You can’t possibly think you deserve that promotion, can you? You never do enough. Think of all you haven’t done that you should have done. Think of how much better she is than you are. You know how you failed the last time you tried to do that. And on and on it goes.
It defeats you before you get out of bed in the mornings. No matter how much you do or how hard you try, it never is enough to still the nagging voice inside of you. An overly active conscience gives you a much-inflated sense of duty. But no matter what you do, you can never get rid of the nagger inside, at least not for very long.
Is this overly active conscience from God? I don’t think so. God deals with those who have been born again into his family as a father with a child. He convicts us about failures in our lives when we need it, but he doesn’t do it in a condemning way. It is not his will for his children to live under the cloud of an overly active conscience.
When you are in bondage to this kind of conscience, it makes you very susceptible to unrealistic expectations. These expectations can come from any number of sources—from within yourself, from your parents—whether alive or not—from friends, bosses, co-workers, or from other authority figures in your life. There may be people in your life who continually remind you that you don’t measure up to what they expect of you.
Or if you have a distorted understanding of God and see him as a taskmaster whose demands you can never meet, this has a very strong effect on your conscience, putting you under a cloud of continual guilt. It’s so very important that you know God as a loving father who only wants the best for you, not as a someone waiting for you to fail and then punish you.
When your conscience is in overdrive, acceptance is always seen as conditional and you feel that you must continually prove your worthiness to others. It is not how God wants his children to live. But there is hope, so please don’t despair.