Walking With Christ

2 Timothy 4:3-4
(3)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, (4)and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

There are quite a few warnings in the bible against false teachings and those who teach them. I’ve said this a few times in recent messages. I think it’s just where I’m at right now. The search for truth and not just my version of it leaves me questioning a lot of things that many people might consider “settled”. Perhaps I’m being rebellious. Perhaps I’m just endlessly curious about our creator and His creation.

Any teach who gives messages to tickle the ear while avoiding opportunities to touch the soul are only interested in personal enrichment. It’s a controversial stance and one that many quickly get defensive over. If you find yourself getting defensive when I say this and you are thinking about your sources for living water, I would suggest that this sounds like someone getting angry that their friends staged an intervention.

Think about it. A prosperity teacher will tell us those things that will make us feel good, or at least better, about ourselves and our situation. This lulls us into a dream state where we can’t see the very real dangers all around us. These dangerous teachers are not willing to push people away by telling them inconvenient truths to save their lives and ultimately souls. These bitter pills of truth can be delivered in graceful ways that don’t accuse the person but simply show how some behaviors and thought patterns are sinful and cause deep separation from God. It’s never the goal to point the finger at a person. Conviction is the job of the Holy Spirit.

The real danger of such teachers is that they are emotional drug pushers. They tell us the things we want to hear to trigger those feel good responses that people crave. Those feel good chemicals in the brain, mainly dopamine, are highly addictive. This makes the exchange of listening to such teachers essentially a drug deal. They know that you are addicted and will do anything to get your fix. You will even drain your bank account to support their life style without any thought to how the money or time you donate is actually spent.

Please don’t take this as an attack on any specific preacher or teacher. There are a lot of really great teachers. The problem that I see if that, as pointed out in 2 Timothy, false or shallow teachings are sharply on the rise. People are quickly beginning to reject those teachers who want to tell the whole truth, the whole story, because they prefer the comfortable lie over the painful truth.