Note: This week's daily encouragement messages (as well as the previous two messages from last week) are from a study prepared for our Crossroads Adult Bible Fellowship class (Sunday School) yesterday based on teaching from 2 Timothy 4:1-8.

Message summary: Itching ears are extremely perilous to our spiritual life and health.

Listen to our message on your audio player.

"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. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths" (2 Timothy 4:3,4).

It's interesting how the Bible uses timeless, cross cultural illustrations. Regardless of when or where people live people around the globe have had or do have itching ears, literally speaking. In fact an internet search reveals it's not at all unusual. Bluntly speaking, now and then my ears itch, Not the outside parts where I can scratch but rather inside my ear canal.

Medical experts say you should never put anything in your ear smaller than your elbow but try as I might I've never managed to get my elbow anywhere close enough to scratch my inner ear!  So I will confess to periodically using a Q-tip although the packaging warns against it, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one on planet earth who uses Q-tips this way.*  

Over 40 years ago the late creative songwriter Keith Green, whose message through songs has timeless meaning, penned the thought-provoking words to "Satan's Boast", a song written as if it were by the devil himself. One line from the song goes like this: "I put some truth in every lie, to tickle itching ears". These words ring Scripturally true and are so easily observed in our age. Merely consider the many lies we're exposed to and the efforts to "tickle" itching ears.

Today let us examine this type of itching ears that affects many, the only reference to "itching ears" in the Bible.  It's always been around to some degree but in my lifetime I've seen it greatly increase. It's not a medical condition of the ears but rather a spiritual condition of the heart that our daily text is referring to.

Paul begins this section of Scripture with a solemn charge often used at ordination and commissioning services: "In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of His appearing and His kingdom, I give you this charge: Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction" (2 Timothy 4:1,2).

The faithful minister of the Gospel will heed this command realizing, "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).

Itching ears are extremely perilous to our spiritual life and health. Let us, "Apply our heart to instruction and our ears to words of knowledge" (Proverbs 23:12).

Be encouraged today, Hebrews 3:13

Stephen & Brooksyne Weber