Is Your Conscience Captive to the Scriptures? | The Dilemma of Loyalty

Loyalty is important. In every area of life, we have relationships that call upon us to be loyal, to pay respect, perhaps even to serve if duty calls. How can we know when loyalty to one should overrule another? More specifically, how do we know when our loyalty and obedience are due to a person or an institution and when that loyalty should cease? Such questions are academic, one might think, as long as all aspects of our world are operating relatively harmoniously but, when authority structures begin to call us in differing directions who or what gets our loyalty and obedience becomes a serious, often life and death, decision. At such times it is the job of the conscience to clarify to whom and to what it is duty-bound to obey. Before we find ourselves at such a cross-road we must make our conscience captive to the Scriptures.