Are Your Ears Itching

Meditation

For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.

(2 Timothy 4:3)

This is happening everywhere you look. People all over the world sit in churches listening to preachers who never mention the name of Jesus Christ, let alone a warning about sin or hell. Those preachers create for their flocks, a doctrine not found in the Bible. One thing being taught in many of today’s churches is called, “Name It and Claim It.” The teaching says, if you have enough faith, you speak your desire and claim it from the Lord, then Christ will grant your wish. It turns Jesus into some kind of genie in a bottle, granting our wishes whenever we ask. Of course, if we don’t get what we want, our lack of faith is to blame. We can usually remedy the situation with a larger donation to the church.

Most people don’t want to hear their lifestyles are going to lead them to hell. If they believe in anything at all, they think everyone goes to heaven when they die, so long as they’re a good person. They’re taught if they do enough good deeds, they will be much happier, healthier, and wealthier while they’re on the earth. They will not put up with a preacher who tells them about the consequences of sin. They only want to be told about a “Santa Claus” kind of Heavenly Father, who only blesses and never disciplines. They find preachers who teach these things and never help them discover who God really is.

They believe there are many paths to God, so they search for some “holy person” somewhere who will preach that false doctrine. Many of those churches have gotten very large. Not because the gospel of Jesus Christ is being preached there, but because it is NOT. They go from one conference to another to bolster their belief in the ‘prosperity gospel.’ If you are attending a church that seldom even mentions the name of Jesus, run from there. If your church does not preach from the Bible, probably means they don’t believe it’s true. If they don’t warn you about the consequences of sin, you should find one that does. If you can’t remember the last time you were convicted by a preacher’s sermon, then your heart has either been hardened or you are in the wrong church! 

Prayer Time

Lord God you are the author of everything that’s good and true in our world today. However, our world is also full of the lies and half-truths concerning what you expect from our pulpits and how we live our everyday lives. The sound doctrine you’ve been careful to present to us through the scriptures, is being ignored, if not purposely attacked by many false teachers in the modern-day church. Lord these false teachers are skilled in perverting the truth of your Word to suit their own agendas. We ask that you intervene in their plots to fleece their flocks, not only of their monies, but also their possible spiritual inheritance. Help them to see they are being lied to. Put someone in possession of sound doctrine in their path, that they may hear the truth. Give them the courage to walk away from those false teachers and take as many others with them as they can. Remind us all, we are responsible to remove ourselves from the influence of a false teacher. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen!