Conviction or Compliance

“Belief is knowing what you believe. Conviction is knowing why you believe it” Josh McDowell.

Every individual is convinced about one thing or the other, this could be family practices, religious beliefs, societal norms, institutional and or professional ideologies.

A child consciously or unconsciously develops convictions sometimes by merely observing his or her parents until a superior argument overrides such opinions or beliefs.

A pupil/student in school sometimes accepts his or her teachers’ explanation or description of a subject as the final verdict until proven otherwise by other scholars locally or globally.

An employee with little or no exposure to other climes or how things work elsewhere holds on religiously sometimes to self-destructive philosophies about the work environment and so on and so forth.

Ravi Zacharias posited – “conviction is not merely an opinion. It is something rooted so deeply in the conscience that to change a conviction would be to change the very essence of who you are.”

The question is what is your conviction and how did you come about it?

Compliance is simply adhering to an established way of doing things sometimes all in a bid to align with the postulation that only those that play by the rules become rulers.

Are you convinced about that thing, or you are merely complying to “feel among”?

It can be argued that many children in the house are only “playing by the rules” to avert mummy and/or daddy’s sanctions/punishment, alas once this child gains “freedom” either by going to school where the parents have limited control over his or her life or completely relocating from people who previously influenced their decisions, associations, and inclinations, they sometimes change into an entirely different individual.?Were they convinced or just complying???

As a student in school, is your academic conviction about a topic of interest solely based on your immediate constituency, sometimes limited explanations provided by the teachers/lecturers or it can be accepted to be true elsewhere just like testing a hypothesis, sometimes formulating models and conducting several tests to give your postulations empirical validation under different conditions so that at the end of the intellectual exercise it can become a globally accepted and applicable theory or model.

As a believer, please what is the source of your conviction? Or you are merely “tagging along” – our pastor said, my leader said, are there scriptural passages that support what you believe? Remember we cannot believe the creature more than the Creator of all things, the Holy Writ admonishes –?study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman who needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth,

As I draw a curtain about conviction or compliance this morning, is there any relationship between these two important subjects??YES

Sometimes our convictions might influence what we tend to comply with but at other times people are just complying without being convinced whether their actions, inactions, and reactions are right or wrong.

Martin Luther King Jr. succinctly captures the closing remark when he said – “I would rather be a man of conviction than a man of conformity”.

May God help us all (Amen).