Wouldn’t it be great if we could live life free from all pain? Understandably, no sane person enjoys pain, and that certainly includes me! It is estimated that one in ten adults suffers from some kind of chronic pain. It is no surprise, then, that pain relief is big business. On any given day about 14 billion doses of pain-relief medication are consumed in our world.

We may think that being totally pain-free would wonderful, but actually that would be a disaster–as I discovered in a BBC article by David Cox titled “The Curse of the People Who Never Feel Pain,” dated April 27, 2017.

The article explains that there is a rare disease called Congenital Insensitivity to Pain (or CIP) that actually prevents a person from feeling any pain. “People assume that feeling no pain is this incredible thing and it almost makes you superhuman,” Betz

[who has CIP] says. “For people with CIP it’s the exact opposite. We would love to know what pain means and what it feels like to be in pain. Without it, your life is full of challenges.”

Dr. Ingo Kurth with the Institute of Human Genetics in Aachen, Germany, explains: “We fear pain, but in developmental terms from being a child to being a young adult, pain is incredibly important to the process of learning how to modulate your physical activity without doing damage to your bodies, and in determining how much risk you take.”

Mr. Cox’s article also quotes Geoff Woods who researches pain at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research: “Of the CIP patients I’ve worked with in the UK, so many of the males have killed themselves by their late 20s by doing ridiculously dangerous things, not restrained by pain. Or they have such damaged joints that they are wheelchair-bound and end up committing suicide because they have no quality of life.”

We don’t usually think of it this way, but physical pain is not the only kind of pain intended to keep us healthy. In a similar way, God has also equipped us with a conscience that can cause pain, too. Like it or not, that kind of pain can be good for us as well.

When we feel bad about something we have done, said, or thought that we know is wrong—that is our conscience at work. There are several ways we can respond to our conscience.

We can try to silence our conscience by blaming our bad behavior on something else, like a difficult childhood, peer pressure, poor health, or we can label our actions as some kind of “disease.” After all, who wants to admit their guilt?

There is a better way, though! A clean conscience becomes possible when we own up to our faults and refuse to shift the blame on to someone or something else. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

Trying to do better in the future is a good idea, but it doesn’t solve the guilt of our failures in the past.

Faith in Christ is the only solution to a guilty conscience. Let me show you why. The problem is that we aren’t capable of being good enough to please a holy God. He requires that we have no sin just as when He created us. Even the best person can’t say they have NO sin.

Since we couldn’t make ourselves good enough for God, He became a man (Jesus) and paid the price for our sins for us (by dying on a cross). He offers to give us the perfect, righteousness life that Jesus lived to replace our unrighteousness. “…the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, [in order to] cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God” (Hebrews 9:14). Paul tells us that the solution to our guilty consciences is to be “found in [Christ], not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith” (Philippians 3:9).

I am excited to report that Jesus can set us free from a guilty conscience by making us perfectly clean! “Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us” (Romans 8:33–34).

When we “… draw near [to Christ] with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith” then we are “sprinkled clean from an evil conscience …” (Hebrews 10:22).

What a wonderful gift—to be set free from a guilty conscience!