Itching Ears

In his second epistle to Timothy, we read the apostle Paul’s charge to his protégé, who had taken on the daunting task of pastoring the huge church in Ephesus:

“I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfil your ministry.” (2 Tim 4:1-5 ESV)

The apostle Paul was warning Timothy of the acute problem of heresy in the last days. where there would be false teachers who would no longer stand under the Scriptures and sound doctrine and teaching. Instead, they would preach a message that would suit the culture - they would have “itching ears.” The Reformer John Calvin helps to explain this unusual expression:

“When he (Paul) wishes to assign a cause for so great an evil, he makes use of an elegant metaphor, by which he means, that the world will have ears so refined, and so excessively desirous of novelty, that it will collect for itself various instructors, and will be incessantly carried away by new inventions.” [1]

There will come a time, says Paul, that the listener’s ear will be tuned in to a form of oratory and message that suits the culture and the worldly generation that is tuned into it. The great Victorian Baptist minister Charles Spurgeon once famously said that a time would come when instead of shepherds feeding the sheep the church will have clowns entertaining the goats. The problem with the Gospel is that it is not going to attract and keep worldly people with unrepentant hearts since the truth of the Gospel is guaranteed to challenge and offend people who very likely won’t return to church ever again. I can remember one notable occasion when I was a youth, I had invited one of my school friends who wasn’t a Christian to attend a church service with me. The minister in the church was preaching a strong word about the immorality of Eli’s sons from 1 Samuel, the message was clear and the call to repentance resounding. But instead of being convicted, my friend, who was living an immoral life, was so angered by the message that he expressed a desire to physically assault the preacher! A strong and faithful biblical message can lead to outrage and anger, but that does not mean that we should soften the message to remove the offence of the Gospel.

Every Church leader has two choices: they can preach the Gospel faithfully and rely on the Holy Spirit to bring people into the church and see true regeneration and revival, or they can preach a soft inoffensive message to keep a church full of unregenerate people entertained with little more than Christian Karaoke and a “Ted talk”. Now just think for a moment about some of the famous old ministers whose ministries we still commend today, the likes of George Whitefield, Charles Simeon, Jonathan Edwards, J.C. Ryle, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, A.W. Tozer, Leonard Ravenhill and Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones (just to name a few) and why they still have so much influence today, even though they are long dead. It is because these men remained committed and faithful to sound doctrine throughout their whole life and ministry, despite their human frailties, there was a passionate conviction and commitment to the shepherding of souls as they taught the Word of God faithfully and called sinners to repent and believe. Their ministries stand the test of time because they were rooted in the Word of God and not in the culture of their day, they spoke very strongly against it and we are still talking about them and being enriched by their writings and books to this day. Church history shows us then, that it is the faithful ministers who stand against the culture rather than appeal to it are the ones whose ministries will be remembered and commended.

This is the heart of the problem today, too many ministers take the soft, easy option and fail to see that the attractional church model is a false premise since it ultimately seeks to attract people to false worship and a false message. If you tell someone that God wants to make their life better and more enjoyable and remove all the guilt and shame from them without calling them to true repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, you are calling the person to worship an idol and not God. You have changed the nature of Christ by your false teaching, and you are calling people to follow a God who is not pure, perfect, and holy and you have replaced Him with a God who just wants them to have an enjoyable earthly life.

Jared C. Wilson shares a powerful story to make an important distinction between true holiness and being a motivational speaker where a young Englishman training for the ministry is said to have complained to his instructing pastor, ‘I’m not the sort of man who could set the Thames on fire,’ to which his elder replied, ‘Young man, I’m not concerned about your setting the Thames on fire. What I want to know is this: if I grabbed you by the scruff of your neck and dropped you into that river, would it sizzle?’ In other words, the fire of your holiness — your passion for God — is far more important than the fire of your oratory or leadership skills. [2]

The call of the pastor is not to make Christianity appealing or to become gifted in a slick, entertaining oratory that keeps people entertained. The pressure now for the Church is to run alongside the culture wanting to be accepted by the culture rather than God, it wants to ask the culture “are we doing this right?” Are we appealing enough? Are we relevant?” But let me ask an important question: since when was the Gospel ever about being relevant? Where in Scripture is the command to be appealing and relevant? We are not called to appeal to the culture and try to attract people to attend Church but rather, we are called to proclaim the Gospel clearly and directly, as the apostle Paul did whilst standing before the Areopagus in Athens:

“The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17:30–31 ESV)

Our call is not merely to bring people to Church, it is to bring them to Christ in repentance and faith. To humbly surrender their lives to Christ and be in-dwelt by the Holy Spirit, whilst being transformed into the likeness of Christ. “Churchianity” has led to many a soul facing a lost eternity and it is time to face up to the shocking reality that far too many people attending Church are not born again and are living under the illusion that they are justified by their religious observances when they are still under condemnation and in great need of salvation.

Footnotes:

[1] John Calvin, “Commentary on 1&2 Timothy” (Baker Book House, 1979) p255-256

[2] Jared C. Wilson “Gospel-Driven Ministry” (Zondervan, 2021) p47