Healthy Doctrine

For the time will come when men 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

It is not that men will not put up with doctrine. In fact, men love doctrine, and the more complicated it is, the better they like it for it gives them an opportunity to glory in their ability to understand it. What men cannot endure is sound doctrine. The word translated “sound” is the source of our English word “hygiene,” and means to be well or in good health.

Men cannot endure healthy doctrine for it reveals how unhealthy they are. Like an X-ray machine, the gospel (which is the sound doctrine that Paul refers to) pierces the religious shroud with which men hide the truth of what they are and peers directly into the heart. As it is written, “The Word of God …discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart.” (Hebrews 4.12) Healthy doctrine reveals that the heart is unhealthy, that the “heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. (Jeremiah 17.17) Who wants to hear that they are beyond cure? Men prefer a program of spiritual diets and exercises by which they can improve their own condition. They despise a message that says they are beyond their own help and that nothing less than a “heart transplant” can remedy their case. But God says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 36.26)

Healthy doctrine is to be the content of every preacher’s ministry. It is not his calling to assuage the emotional distresses of rebels, nor is it his ministry to attempt an improvement in the character of men. Every man who claims to be a preacher is to set forth healthy doctrine; sound, whole, and full of the vitality of the Lord Jesus. If men will not endure it, then he must still preach it. Even if their itching ears make them seek out preachers who will scratch their ears with clever theories and subtle heresies, still he must preach the simple, plain, healthy doctrine of Christ. Such doctrine, while repulsive to itchy-eared people, is health to the bones of God’s elect. They love sound doctrine, and are healed, nourished and nurtured by it.