Tickling People’s Ears Is No Laughing Matter

How do you feel when someone pays you a compliment? If it’s genuine, it probably makes you feel good. Maybe really good. We like hearing nice things said about us, especially if we know they’re sincere. But sometimes, even if we sense it’s just flattery, it can still massage our egos. We might call it having our ears tickled – telling us what we’d like to hear.

 

In most instances there’s nothing wrong with that, although Proverbs 27:21 does offer these words of caution: “The crucible for silver and the furnace for gold, but man is tested by the praise he receives.” Perhaps another way of saying this is that it’s not just what we hear people say about us, but also how we respond. If their words go to our heads and we start thinking too highly of ourselves, we’re entering dangerous territory.

 

But there’s another, perhaps more insidious form of “ear tickling” that’s going on today, especially in the realm broadly defined as evangelicalism. Many denominations, individual congregations, and even some seminaries are “repackaging” biblical teachings and doctrines so they’re not regarded offensive. Because in our politically correct world, lots of folks don’t like being confronted with truth, especially (to borrow the term) inconvenient truth. They strongly prefer the ear-tickling approach.

 

Words like “sin,” “hell,” “judgment,” and “condemnation” are being banished from many pulpits. Pastors don’t want people sitting in the pews – their “audiences” – to feel guilty or bad or, dare we say it, offended. It’s like they’re trying to “rebrand” Jesus, making Him and His teachings more palatable for 21^st century consciousness. Even though the Scriptures describe Jesus Christ as “‘A stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.’ They stumble because they disobey the word” (1 Peter 2:8).

 

Rather than teaching how Christ and the Word of God should shape culture, some apparently have concluded the culture should shape perspectives on Jesus and the Bible. Questions of morality, ethics, spirituality, even life and death, are being answered according to the prevailing whims of the media, entertainment, education, politics, and other elements of popular “thinking.”

 

Thank the Lord, there remain churches where pastors speak biblical truth boldly, unapologetically, and as compassionately as possible, without watering down the gospel message. I’m a member of one of those. But with many congregations and denominations bleeding members like spiritual hemophiliacs, they’ve decided a more “tolerant” Jesus will stem the flow.

 

This is hardly a new phenomenon. Writing to his protégé Timothy, the apostle Paul declared, “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires” (2 Timothy 4:3). Another translation expresses it this way: “to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”

 

Ear tickling wasn’t conceived in the 20^th or 21^st centuries, however. It was happening many centuries before Paul arrived on the scene. In the Old Testament prophetic book we read, “They say to the seers, ‘Stop seeing visions!’ and to the prophets, ‘Do not prophesy to us the truth! Speak to us pleasant words; prophesy illusions’” (Isaiah 30:10). 

 

Reminds me of the fellow in the country church who approached the new minister and informed him, “Preacher, we don’t mind your preachin’. But now you’ve gone and started meddlin’!”

 

I get it. I lived much of my early adult life trying to keep God at an arm’s length, inviting Him closer only when I felt I needed His help. The straight-forward precepts of the Scriptures can cramp our style in how we’d like to live. As an old friend said so well, “If sin wasn’t any fun, we wouldn’t want to do it.”

 

Unfortunately for those who want a kind of compromising Christ, the Scriptures are adamant that redefining the Lord isn’t an option available to them. As Hebrews 13:8 reminds us, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” The God of the Old Testament and the God revealed through Jesus in the New Testament isn’t to be remolded into our image.

We find this ominous warning in Jude 1:17-18 which rings all too familiar today: “…remember what the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ foretold. They said to you, ‘In the last times there will be scoffers who will follow their own ungodly desires.’ These are the men who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit.”

 

Writing to Timothy, Paul exhorted him not to bend to the pressures of culture and other influences: “Hold on to the pattern of sound teaching you have heard from me, with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus…. You therefore, my child, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And the things that you have heard me say among many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be qualified to teach others as well” (2 Timothy 1:13, 2:1-2). 

What about those of us who see no need for “reimagining” Jesus and His Word, who believe more people need to hear God’s truth, as the Bible clearly presents it, and less ear-tickling talk? We’re not likely to change the mindsets of the “marketers” within the Church. But we can do as Paul admonished believers in ancient Corinth: “Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58).