If there is any biblical phrase which illustrates the modern age, it has to be Paul’s description of “itching ears” in his second letter to Timothy. Our world is infected with the impulsive demand to receive stimuli. All of us are scratching our itching ears.
Warning the Church
Paul warned about this infection. He counselled Timothy to be aware of the effects of itching ears in the churches. Paul wrote:
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.
2 Tim 4:3-4
Our churches all tend to be infected with this listener’s itch. It is easy to curate your own narrow slice of itch-scratching teaching. Teachers are easily accumulated, and you can look no further than Youtube.
3 Remedies for Listener’s Itch
In the church, there are some practical things which Christians can do to resist the listener’s itch. Here are three remedies.
- Listen local first.
- Prioritize what your church, your circle of fellowship, your pastors are telling you. You won’t always agree with each individual point. But when the people closest to you care enough to speak into your life you need to prioritize it.
- The bad alternative is to “listen local later“. The result is that your podcast, or your facebook buddy or your twitter pastor becomes the priority. And you can switch them in and out when you get itchy. But they don’t know you or care for you the way that your local church family does.
- Exercise Endurance in Listening.
- If you need to take notes. Take them. If it helps you just to listen, do it. But whatever you’re doing, you should be trying to exercise endurance in listening.
- As pastors, we don’t want to make a virtue out of being verbose. But there is also the need to encourage each other as church members to endure in listening to sound teaching. Remember, your flesh doesn’t want to hear it. So if you come into church with a sort of vague neutrality, your flesh will resist good teaching at every point. You’ll fuss about your coat, or your phone or your watch— and the classic— goto the bathroom in the middle of the sermon to break it up a bit. (But please if you’ve gotta go— go!)
- Our world inundates us with attention-demanding media constantly. If you don’t ask for a spiritual appetite, you won’t have any taste for listening to sound teaching. Endurance requires exercise.
- Don’t Scratch Your Itches
- I got a lot of mosquito bites this summer. Just like a little kid. And you know what you aren’t supposed to do with a mosquito bite? Scratch it. What did I do? Scratched em. And once you do, you can’t stop until their bleeding.
- We have to be very careful about our itches, our preferences, our opinions. If we get fixated on them, they will draw us away making us distracted from the gospel, from sound teaching, and from soundness in the faith.
- We see this in the world. Our society is fixated on making everyone and everything interchangeable. Men women boys girls. Society keeps scratching the itch until it’s bleeding.
- Church members can do this too. But thankfully we have other people to speak into our lives: pastors, teachers, fellow church members, friends. And they can slap some apple cider vinegar on our itches and remind us to leave them alone.
- And if we listen, we will gradually be healed. If we don’t we’ll give in to the listener’s itch and wander off into falsehood and myth.
Ask yourself what is the itch that you are wanting to be scratched? And ask God to heal you by his hygienic, health-giving word— his sound teaching according to the gospel.
