Itching Ears

Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. - 2 Timothy 4:2-4

Just as the Apostle Paul described, the days are upon us. Itching ears, he called it. Don't let anybody ever tell you that pastors who teach pure grace at church are "tickling people's ears." Trust me, religionists don't want to hear pure grace. They are itching to hear something other than the truth. They want somebody to kick the living daylights out of them for what they've done wrong so that they can share in the payment for their sins. Then they want to hear what they can do for God so they can pat themselves on the back for a job well done. "Spank me hard and tell me I'd better behave." This is the stuff religious highs are made of.

Sound doctrine is an offense in the legalistic church world. The purity of the gospel has been polluted with the perversion of a works based Christianity that centers, not on what God has done or is doing, but on what we ought to be doing. Today, in the world of legalistic Christian religion, it's all about us. People have an itch to hear how they can earn their own way along this Christian journey by doing things that will make God proud of them. They don't get that His pride in them has nothing to do with what they do or don't do.

The truth of the gospel is that we are "accepted in the Beloved" and what we do doesn't have a single thing to do with it. Because of what Christ has done on your behalf, you can sit on your butt from now through the millennial reign and God won't accept you any less. Does that harsh tone make you nervous? I hope so. Sometimes I say things as pointedly as I dare in an attempt to jar the religious mindset of the modern church world and cause people to think for themselves about what the Bible says.

Yep, you can sit on your butt and still be accepted by God. You can also crawl on your hands and knees and never walk upright again. You can eat worms for breakfast. You can wear your clothes inside out. You can shave the left half of your head bald and go for an Afro on the other side. The list of stupid things you could do and still be accepted by God is endless. The point is that you're not stupid so you won't live your whole life that way.

Legalism breeds the fear that if we don't put people on the rock pile of religious responsibility, they might just sit down and do nothing. Or worse, they might go out and do bad things. Nothing could be further from the truth. The grace of God "teaches us to deny ungodliness and to live soberly, righteously and justly in this present age," said Paul to Titus.

In the 2 Timothy passage cited at the top of this article, Paul said what to do in the day of itchy ears. Reprove - the word means "to refute, to bring to the light, to expose." Rebuke - meaning "to show honor to the truth by faulting, chiding, censuring severely." Exhort - to summon someone to your side and encourage them in the truth.

There is a place for all three of these approaches in the grace revolution at hand. The Holy Spirit will show you which to use in each instance you encounter. There are a lot of itching ears out there. For God's sake (literally), don't scratch their itch. Give them the truth of the gospel. Jesus became sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. We now have the very nature of Christ and live a godly lifestyle because it is our nature to do so, not because we have to. Our whole life is no more or no less than an expression of His life through us. That's the pure gospel of grace and that's the truth worth fighting for.