Conscience functions as an inner faculty that decides moral rightness or wrongness by responding to the standards absorbed through education and cultural environment. It operates as knowledge along with the cognitive self, approving or disapproving conduct according to what has been learned rather than any innate set of values installed at birth. Because human nature tends to degenerate when left to itself, conscience readily adjusts, often subconsciously, to whatever moral and ethical climate surrounds it. In an environment sliding downward, it permits actions once regarded as unacceptable, allowing the mind to rationalize and eventually accept lower standards without deliberate resistance. This adaptability appears when false doctrine enters a congregation. As people accept teachings that deviate from apostolic truth, their moral education shifts, their conscience follows the new direction, and ethical restraints weaken. The same process operated in the apostle Paul before conversion, enabling him to persecute Christians with a clear conscience rooted in incomplete education. Similar patterns occurred among those who later justified killing fellow believers as service to God. In each case the conscience remained sincere yet approved conduct contrary to God's way because the underlying standards were faulty. Left unchecked, the adjustment continues through progressive stages: initial horror yields to regret, then rationalization, justification, acceptance, and finally indifference. The result is a defiled or seared conscience no longer able to restrain wrong moral judgments. Conscious effort is therefore required to continue in the doctrine already received, allowing the conscience to be retrained upward by God's revelation. When the heart accepts divine truth, the conscience aligns with it, faith acts, and love is produced. Without such deliberate resistance, conscience follows the prevailing culture downward, confirming that it must be continually evaluated and educated by God's standards rather than trusted as an infallible guide.

A conscience is not instilled by God at birth but arises from the human spirit's natural awareness of a higher power, shaped instead by education, life experiences, and moral standards acquired over time. It functions as man's moral intuition, passing judgment on his state in response to divine revelation, and serves free moral agency by approving or disapproving attitudes, actions, and self-assessments. Because it operates only according to what it knows, a conscience can permit evil deeds—including those viewed as service to God—when moral standards remain unknown or distorted, as illustrated by those who persecute while believing they worship God. A conscience adjusts according to the direction in which it is exercised. Continued sin dulls its initial feelings of horror and remorse until the person becomes enslaved to what once provoked shame. Even a Christian's conscience can become defiled, contaminated, or hardened through neglect, drifting, or repeated wrongdoing, leading to an evil heart of unbelief and eventual inability to repent. Under the Old Covenant this hardening proved common because the people lacked the spirit enabling full understanding, rendering the covenant unable to address the weakness of the flesh. The New Covenant remedies this by placing God's laws in the mind and writing them on the heart, replacing a stony, resistant conscience with one that is soft, sensitive, pliable, and God-centered. Conversion is the process of this change, an educational renewal of the mind in which the individual puts off the old man and puts on the new through deliberate conduct. As righteousness is practiced, the conscience grows increasingly tender toward right and wrong from God's perspective; as sin is indulged, it grows inured and self-centered. Within the church this adjustment carries communal implications. Members possess differing intensities of conscience because of varied backgrounds, lengths of conversion, and gifts. Liberty must therefore be exercised with care for others, lest lawful actions offend the weak or produce division. Love covers such offenses, and the community takes precedence over individual preference because God rules over all. Ultimately, the direction in which the conscience is exercised determines whether a person moves toward the image of God or away from Him.

The gradual adjusting of conscience is presented as a specific manifestation of spiritual sclerosis, the hardening process warned against throughout the book of Hebrews. This adjustment occurs when sin's deceitfulness does its work: sin promises a better outcome than obedience to God, and because divine judgment is rarely as immediate or dramatic as it was with Sodom and Gomorrah, Nadab and Abihu, or Ananias and Sapphira, the absence of visible consequences introduces doubt about whether God truly cares about a given matter. When someone appears to sin without repercussion, the temptation arises to conclude that the offense is not serious, that understanding of God's standard was mistaken, and that standards should therefore be loosened. This reasoning itself is identified as the beginning of a hardened heart, because it substitutes the behavior of surrounding people for the fixed standard of God's word as a guide for life. Over time, sin becomes normalized and one becomes insensitive to what God actually thinks, a condition illustrated by Judah's loss of the ability to blush over abominations, in contrast to the faithful in Ezekiel 9 who sighed and cried over the same abominations and were marked for protection. A concrete test of this adjustment is offered through the example of national leadership. Immorality and character failures that once provoked widespread shock and outrage in a president can, over time and through shifting political allegiance, no longer produce the same reaction when displayed by a different leader with whom one identifies politically. This shift reveals factionalism and party spirit, a work of the flesh, functioning as respect of persons rather than respect for God and His standards. The pointed conclusion is that everyone has adjusted to some degree to the immorality surrounding them; the more useful questions become how much adjustment has occurred, in which areas, and what one is willing to do to reverse it. This adjusting of conscience is also described as contagious, unlike physical sclerosis, because attitudes and worldviews are absorbed from one's environment, including media, influencers, and even others within the church, inclining a person to lower sensitivity to God's standards—precisely the lawlessness Christ warned would cause love to grow cold in the Olivet Prophecy. The remedy offered is daily exhortation among believers, so that the congregation itself becomes an environment reinforcing God's standards rather than the world's, along with regular submission to God's word, which discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart and reveals where alignment with God has slipped. Only by willingly accepting correction from that word, rather than defending an adjusted conscience, can the hardening be reversed and the relationship with God—identified as the ongoing salvation process—be kept as the central priority above the pressures and pull of surrounding circumstances.