I just attended my fortieth high school reunion. It feels a bit surreal to write that. Forty years have passed already? It’s another reminder of my recent reflections: our lives are very brief, briefer than we’d like to think.

I remember graduation day like it was yesterday: all of us a mere seventeen or eighteen years old, and most of us feeling a flush of euphoria as we stood together for a moment at that milestone, on the very brink of adulthood, full of hopes and dreams.

Now most of us are older than our parents were when we graduated high school — in fact, a significant number of us are grandparents — which made our reunion somewhat bizarre to experience. Photos of us from our high school years played on the monitors in the venue as we reconnected with old friends and acquaintances, all of us now with thinning, graying hair and our bodies showing the tolls that gravity, solar radiation, and changing metabolisms have taken as we’re rapidly approaching our culture’s retirement age.

But those aren’t the only tolls we’ve paid. We’ve also experienced, in different ways and to differing extents, the universal reality that Moses spoke of when he wrote,

The years of our life are seventy,     or even by reason of strength eighty;yet their span is but toil and trouble. (Psalm 90:10)

We’ve discovered that life not only passes faster than we expected; it’s also harder than we expected.

“Life not only passes faster than we expected; it’s also harder than we expected.”

I know this all sounds a bit depressing. But our hope has to be real hope if it’s going to sustain us through real life, not the illusory hope of the mirage-like dreams my classmates and I likely had when we graduated. Real hope is only realized when we come to terms with the dismaying reality we all face in this age. Truly facing it is what forges in us “a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12), the kind of heart that Psalm 90 teaches how to cultivate.

Why We Are Dismayed

It’s actually heartening that Moses, one of the godliest people to walk the earth, one who grounded his hope in God and his promises, was dismayed by his experience and observation of life — just like we often are. But in this psalm, he doesn’t take a shortcut to hope. His real hope is grounded in the reality of the human condition. Which is why we first hear him lament the end we all face: death.

Dismayed by the Dread of Death

Moses cuts right to the chase when he says,

You return man to dust     and say, “Return, O children of man!” (Psalm 90:3)

We all dread death. We dread it for myriad reasons, but underneath all others is a primal root reason: death is God’s judgment on sinful humanity, and we intuitively know God’s judgment is dreadful. When Moses prays, “You return man to dust,” we can see he’s in touch with reality because he’s quoting God’s words back to him:

You [shall] return to the ground,     for out of it you were taken;for you are dust,     and to dust you shall return. (Genesis 3:19)

Perhaps you and I will be among those alive when Jesus returns, and we will experience our mortal bodies being “swallowed up by life” (2 Corinthians 5:4). I imagine every saint since Jesus’s resurrection has hoped and prayed for that experience. But there is wisdom to be gained from pondering the significant likelihood that someday soon — bewilderingly soon — God will say to us, “Return, O child of man.”

Dismayed by God’s Anger

Then Moses delves into the core of our dread of the judgment of death:

For we are brought to an end by your anger;     by your wrath we are dismayed.You have set our iniquities before you,     our secret sins in the light of your presence.For all our days pass away under your wrath;     we bring our years to an end like a sigh.The years of our life are seventy,     or even by reason of strength eighty;yet their span is but toil and trouble;     they are soon gone, and we fly away.Who considers the power of your anger,     and your wrath according to the fear of you? (Psalm 90:7–11)

For those of us living on this side of Jesus’s substitutionary work on the cross, these words can sound confusing and disturbing. Didn’t Jesus pay it all for us? And if so, in what way are we still under God’s wrath? Here is where we, as believers, find the ground for real hope.

Hope in Our Dismay

Moses’s description of our dismay over our toil and trouble reminds us of the mysterious experience of living in the already–not yet kingdom of God. For when Jesus died, he did pay the full price for the sins of all saints past, present, and future.

God put forward [Jesus] as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins [of former saints]. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. (Romans 3:25–26)

Jesus’s death “delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thessalonians 1:10), so that when we “appear before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:10) we will not stand condemned (Romans 8:1). Rather, we receive “the free gift [of] eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).

But in this age, until Jesus returns, we still endure the wretched experience of living in a body where sin dwells in our members (Romans 7:23–25). We still suffer the toil and trouble of living in a world subjected to futility, along with the groaning that comes with it (Romans 8:20). And we still suffer the dreadful experience of the death of our bodies. In other words, we still experience the same kind of dismaying sorrows Moses lamented.

“Life not only passes faster than we expected; it’s also harder than we expected.”

But for those who have ears to hear, there is gospel in this profoundly sober part of Moses’s prayer. When he prays, “Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you?” (Psalm 90:11), the answer is that the believing saint does. For those who trust in Jesus, our fallen bodies, our toil and trouble, and our approaching death cause us to consider the reality of God’s judgment and see that they all point to the gospel hope — the same hope Moses had, even if he saw it only in copies and shadows (Hebrews 8:5).

For believing saints, these sorrows cause us to lay up our treasures in heaven (Matthew 6:20), to fight our remaining sin with all our might (Romans 6:12), to sojourn as “strangers and exiles on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13), to share with others the hope we have (1 Peter 3:15), and to ultimately view death, however we may dread experiencing it, as gain (Philippians 1:21).

Teach Us to Number Our Days

On that happy June evening in 1984 when my classmates and I celebrated our high school graduation, not only did we not comprehend how fast our lives would pass; we didn’t comprehend how difficult our lives would be. We know much better now.

But that doesn’t mean we all have cultivated a heart of wisdom. Not all my classmates have a hope grounded in the sobering explanation of why our days are so brief and so full of trouble. Not all have considered the power of God’s anger and his wrath according to the fear of him. O God, have mercy! Open their eyes that they may consider these things and be delivered from the wrath to come!

But for those of us who have put our hope in God, it is good for our souls to continue to consider these things seriously — even, with Moses, to the point of lament. Because feeling the weight of our fleeting days and troubled lives can teach us to number our days and so teach our hearts wisdom. It also can teach us to feel more fully the joy that is set before us (Hebrews 12:2) and to be filled “with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit [we] may abound in hope” (Romans 15:13).

Good Monday morning, and thank you for listening today. We begin the week with a really sharp and robust question from a listener named Arnaldo. Here it is: “Hello, Tony and Pastor John. Thank you for your labors on this podcast! My question is one that I have struggled with for over two decades now. It’s this: How can I live with a good conscience? The apostle Paul often talks about the conscience, and how specifically a ‘good conscience’ is something he always lived with, apparently even before he became a Christian (Acts 23:1; 24:16). We also see that a ‘good conscience’ is a qualification for Christian leaders (1 Timothy 3:9). And having a ‘good conscience’ is an important goal of the Christian life for all believers (1 Timothy 1:5, 19).

“When I read the way Paul uses the word conscience in these contexts, it seems like he’s saying it means to be ‘presently walking in obedience to everything God has revealed to him.’ He does not seem to mean that he’s trusting in Christ’s blood to cover over his indwelling sin. I believe in both the doctrine of indwelling sin and of progressive sanctification (according to texts like Proverbs 4:18 and Romans 7:21–23). God is always revealing to me new areas, and sometimes old areas, where I need to grow in holiness. These are very real sin issues that I can’t simply stop doing, like turning off a light switch. These are ones in which I am engaged in a long-term, ongoing struggle and fight. So I pray daily for forgiveness (according to 1 John 1:8–10 and Matthew 6:12).

“All this means that I literally never have a good conscience — I am always aware of important ways in which I presently need to repent and become more holy. So if a good conscience is a basic Christian issue, and Paul always had one, yet I will always know of sin areas in my life — and if I have to pray daily for forgiveness — how could I, or any Christian for that matter, ever attain to a good conscience?”

Well, Arnaldo has done his homework. He laid out texts in that question, as I hear it, that contain all the pieces. I’ve got a few to add that might take a little turn. Wow, he’s not winging it here in asking that question. If there’s a solution, and I do believe there is, it’s probably found inside those texts that he was just commenting on, but maybe drawing some inferences from them that were not necessarily accurate.

Sin That Dwells Within

I feel the force of the question. Experientially, walking in a good conscience is not easy for me since I share Arnaldo’s deep awareness of my ongoing, indwelling sin. That’s Paul’s term in Romans 7:17, 20, 23. We all have remaining corruption and indwelling sin. The more keenly you are aware of that, the more you will feel embattled at the level of needing a good conscience.

“The whole New Testament does assume that in this life, nobody attains sinless perfection.”

I get it. I mean, I think that’s a serious question. The whole New Testament does assume that in this life, nobody attains sinless perfection. We need to just settle that. That’s one of the premises. Nobody attains sinless perfection in this life.

Jesus said that we would pray, “Forgive us our debts” right after, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11–12). They go together. Every day, say both of those. Paul said, “Not that I have already attained [perfection], but I press on to make it my own” (Philippians 3:12). He referred to the sin that dwells in him and cried out in dismay, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). Jesus pointed to the publican who said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” over against the Pharisee who was thanking God that he had such a clear conscience — and he said that the one who cried out for mercy about his sin went down to his house justified (Luke 18:10–14). It was good for him to own his sinfulness, not to say, “Oh, it doesn’t exist. I’ve got a clear conscience. I don’t have any sin to repent of.” We feel the force.

Now, I think 1 John 1 is not only especially illuminating but gives us a category alongside good conscience that may provide the solution.

Walking in the Light

Here’s my reading of 1 John 1, starting with verses 6 and 7.

If we say we have fellowship with God while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

Now, that is staggeringly amazing. “If we walk in the light . . . the blood of Jesus . . . cleanses us.” Wow. Here’s 1 John 1:8: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Now he’s reeling it back in and saying, “Don’t assume that when I say, ‘Walk in the light,’ I mean sinlessness.” First John 1:9–10 says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”

Now, what’s amazing about this passage is that it says we must be walking in the light for the blood of Jesus to cleanse us from our sins. Then he says that this walking in the light doesn’t mean sinlessness. We are liars if we say it does. Then he explains that when we walk in the light, we see clearly enough — we have light — to know sin, to see sin as what it is and hate it and confess it. Then we enjoy ongoing cleansing and forgiveness.

“A good conscience is virtually the same as walking in the light.”

Here’s what I would draw from this if I use the category of conscience to explain this passage: a good conscience is virtually the same as walking in the light. Christians should be able to say, “I’m walking in the light,” and mean it, and mean by that, “I’m walking in a good conscience.” Which means I don’t think we should equate having a bad conscience with having indwelling sin. Now, that may be the most important thing I say, Tony. Let me say it again. I’m inferring, from what I’ve said from 1 John 1, that having a bad conscience is not the same as having indwelling sin. They’re not the same.

Our Clear Conscience

That’s my basic answer to Arnaldo’s question. He feels that as long as he is aware of the reality of indwelling sin, as in Romans 7, he cannot have a good conscience. Now, if that were true, I don’t think Paul could ever have a good conscience, but he clearly says he does have a good conscience.

“I thank God whom I serve, as did my ancestors, with a clear conscience” (2 Timothy 1:3). He expects the elders of the church to do the same: “They must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience” (1 Timothy 3:9). That’s the goal for all Christians. According to 1 Timothy 1:5, “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.” I don’t think we should equate a good conscience with sinless perfection in this life, nor equate a bad conscience with the presence of indwelling sin or remaining corruption. Rather, a clear or a good conscience is like walking in the light.

If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin [in other words, if we interpret “walking in the light” as “sinless perfection”], we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:7–9)

David’s Example

I think both Paul and John inherited this concept of ongoing, indwelling sin that nevertheless coexists with a good conscience from the Psalms in the Old Testament.

For example, in Psalm 25, David confesses three times that he’s a sinner. “[God] instructs sinners in the way” (verse 8); “Pardon my guilt, for it is great” (verse 11); “Forgive all my sins” (verse 18). The psalm comes to an end in verse 21 like this: “May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for you.”

In David’s mind — now, he’s writing under God’s inspiration, and this is not the only place in the Psalms; there are a lot of psalms that distinguish the righteous and the wicked. The righteous are really righteous: they’re walking in the light; they have a good conscience. In David’s mind, there is an integrity and an uprightness that is aware of indwelling corruption that breaks out at times in sins. It does. And that ongoing reality of indwelling sin does not nullify what David calls his integrity and his uprightness.

I think Paul and John saw that. They were immersed in the Old Testament and used language that way. John used the language of walking in the light though we are imperfect. Paul used the language of walking in a good conscience though we are imperfect. I think for all of them (David, Paul, John), the key that enabled them to think this way is that they all knew God had made a way for all their sins to be passed over — namely, the blood of the Lamb, Jesus Christ. David knew this was coming, and Paul and John knew it had come.

I do think Arnaldo is right to say that justification by faith is not the same as walking in a good conscience, or walking in the light, or having integrity. Those are real character traits, not imputed righteousness. Nevertheless, it’s the covering of all their sins by the blood of Jesus that enables them to look upon their conscience and walking and integrity with thankfulness and confidence that it really will be accepted by God as good, though imperfect.

People of Integrity

Here’s one last implication. People might think, “Well, how does this matter?” Here’s a concrete illustration of how it matters. Suppose a pastor is accused falsely of being unfaithful to his wife. The reason he’s accused is because someone in the congregation hates him and wants him to be dismissed. When he comes before the church or the elders to state the truth, with his children present and his wife looking on, that is not the time for him to say to the church, “Well, yes, I am a sinner like everybody else. I’m no better than adulterers. Everyone has indwelling sin that crops out from time to time. I shouldn’t be put on a pedestal. I’m no better than anyone else.”

No, no, no. That is not the time to say that with your kids listening, and your wife listening, and the whole church wondering. What you need to say at that moment is this: “My conscience is clear. I am a man of integrity. I have walked in the light. I have never touched that woman or any woman sexually besides my wife. This accusation is not true.”

I think that is one of the implications of what Paul is saying when he says to the elders and to the rest of us that we should walk in a good conscience — or as John would say, walk in the light.

Audio Transcript

Today’s question for episode 2001 is a book question from me, Pastor John. We like to talk books on this podcast, and in past episodes we’ve looked at seven ways books have changed your life. That testimonial was APJ 707. We’ve also talked about how 1 percent of book-insights make reading the other 99 percent worth it. That was APJ 1910. Classic point. More recently, we looked at ten of your favorite authors who write to edify the soul. That was APJ 1972.

Now, speaking of your library, I recently paged through your copy of Mortimer Adler’s classic How to Read a Book while working on my APJ book about this podcast, which comes out in February. More on that later, but as I was writing the introduction to my book, I found it instructive to see what sentences you underlined in Adler’s book, what sections you marked up, and how you jotted down notes in the front and back of the book. I noticed that you made something of your own index to your discoveries. Can you walk us through your book-marking strategy? When did you start the practice? Why do you do it? What types of marginalia are you adding to your books? And of course we all want to know: pencil or pen?

The answer is pencil, and there are reasons. I use a mechanical pencil so that it never goes dull, 0.5 millimeters. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book is one of the very few books that I have read twice. Your mentioning it gives me a good opportunity to sound a warning to people who are going to ask me or others this question: the way a person underlined and wrote in a book — whether in the margins, indexes, or whatever — twenty or forty years ago may be very different from what he does today.

That certainly is the case with me. I am amazed when I look back on how many books I read, say, thirty or forty years ago that don’t have any of my own indexing in the front flaps, because today that is the dominant way for me to keep track of insights and enjoyments that I’m getting from the book.

Handmade Indexes

By “indexing” (that’s not a very accurate phrase, and I wish I had a better one), I mean simply jotting down, with a pencil in tiny handwriting, a very short three- to eight-word description or pointer in the front flap of the book. I write about what I have read in the book, along with the page number. Sometimes I have to weave it around what’s already there. In a short book, there may be anywhere from 30 of these up to, say, 150 or more of these little notes in the flap of the book at the front or, if I have to, in the back.

“I don’t just read for pleasure. I read for a pleasure that spills over on other people.”

I think the reason I didn’t do this in the early days — and my memory’s not good, so I may be wrong — might be that I wasn’t thinking primarily of reading for the sake of writing, or reading for the sake of preaching, or reading for the sake of systematic increase of understanding of particular truths, or reading for the sake of discovery and preservation of some striking and compelling way of saying something, all of which is what I’m so keyed into now.

So now, virtually every book I read — and I’m talking print books, not electronic (which I hardly ever do) or audio (which I do all the time). I’m talking about the books I’m going through all the time, the ones sitting on my chairs. I’m always reading something in print. That’s what I do. And all these books — I index them.

Even fiction. People say, “Oh, you’re kidding me. You read a novel with a pencil in your hand?” Yes, I do. I can’t read without a pencil in my hand. I’m not going to spend time reading, even fiction, if there is no life-giving insight or striking expression of reality worth preserving. Seriously, I don’t just read for pleasure. I read for a pleasure that spills over on other people, because that’s the biggest pleasure. “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

I read too slowly, and my life is too short, to read without the hope that what I’m reading will help me to think more clearly, to feel more fully, and to express more compellingly the glories of God in the word and in the world — and all of that is worth preserving in some way. It has been good to discover this about myself.

Reading Like a Teacher

I don’t presume, by the way, to suggest that everyone should be like this, but I realized along the way that my built-in, God-given impulse, my dominant impulse, is not to read, but to write and speak. To say it more generally, my bent is not to take in what others have created, but to be a creator. That’s just my bent. I want to make something new, usually with words, which means that all of my intake increasingly has become fuel for my own creation — for sermons, articles, books, poems, and devotions.

Now, I know this can be dangerous. There’s a big yellow flag here. I warned my students at Bethlehem College & Seminary, “Do not read the Bible in the morning just in order to produce a sermon on Sunday. Christ is glorious and precious and to be trusted in the very last hours of our lives when we can do nothing with his beauty but enjoy it on our way into heaven.” Yes and amen. So, don’t just be a user. Be an enjoyer of what you read. Savor it. Love it. Exult in it.

However, I believe that one of the evidences of the spiritual gift of teaching is that a person can scarcely prevent his mind from taking everything he reads and instinctively, without even trying, asking himself, “How would I say this? How would I say this in my own words? How would I explain this to other people? How would I illustrate it and live it? How does it fit into the framework of my own thought — or does it? Do I need to change my framework?”

This is why I not only index my books, but I keep a little field notebook (that I buy in packs of five from Amazon) beside my chair on my desk. This way, when I get a thought or an idea that stirs me up to think out my own train of thought, I have a place to put it. I have a place to write it down quickly.

There’s something about the mind of a teacher that can’t just hear things or read things and leave them. He’s got to do something with it. So, you can see what a huge impact that’s going to have on how I mark up my books.

Three Things to Index

Now, what goes into those indexes? Here are just a few thoughts.

One: fresh insights into my life or into life in general. My index for a biography of C.S. Lewis, for example, which I just took down from the shelf, has a notation at the front, from page xxiii, where he said, “Without self-forgetfulness, there can be no delight.” That got three asterisks in the margin. It got a notation in the front flap, and I’ve been thinking about it for twenty years. I mean, if that’s true, what an agenda for those of us who are pursuing delight in life. So, fresh insights — we mark them, we note them, we meditate on them, we try to grow into them.

Two: raw facts. If I’m reading a biography, and if I know I’ve got to give a talk about it, or if I want to use it in a devotion, I want to be able to spot birth, conversion, marriage, employment, controversies, death, and impact. That way, when I run my eyes down the front flap, I can get an outline of his life, and quick. I don’t have to go researching all over the place and say, “Now, when did he die? When was he born? When was he converted? When did he get married?”

“Pay attention, be engaged, be an active reader — even if you will never look at these pages again.”

Three: great illustrations, ones that might be useful to giving a striking impression of a viewpoint, even a viewpoint we disagree with. For example, I’m reading a book right now called Biblical Critical Theory. I’m about two hundred pages into it, and on page 196, I wrote a little index in the front about Jean-Paul Sartre on atheism. He said, “Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or without outside himself.” That’s a quote.

Now, I thought, that’s a serious confession from an atheist. It’s out of his mouth, it’s footnoted, and it’s tragic. It’s just tragic, and it will probably make its way into some sermon, article, or book someday. (Though I don’t mean to give the impression, with this idea of indexing, that that’s all I do. I do underline, and I still make comments in the margin, ones like “great” or “baloney.”)

Why Annotate

And yes, I use a pencil, not a pen. Here’s what happened. About thirty years ago, I took a box of used books to Loome Bookstore in Stillwater, Minnesota, to sell them. They would not even look at the books that had marginalia in ink. It was a principle. It was a law. I don’t know all the reasons for it, but that’s one reason.

My main reason is that I am fallible. I make mistakes. I want to go back and erase the word “baloney” because two pages later he explains himself, and I was wrong. It’s not baloney. I don’t want to memorialize my mistake with a pen.

One of the main functions of underlining and marking in the margins is simply to help me pay attention. That’s the big reason for underlining, for me anyway, and for putting notes in the margin: pay attention, be engaged, be an active reader — even if you will never look at these pages again (which is true for most of the pages that I read).

So, I think the main takeaway from this episode, Tony, is this: Know why you read. Know what you are reading right now. Then adapt your markings to fit your purpose.