Seeking Truth in Today's Troubled World

2 Timothy 4:3–4

“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.”

There is a certain tragedy in this passage—not merely because people reject truth, but because they prefer illusion. The human soul, disordered by pride and ever prone to wander, finds a strange comfort in the echo of its own desires. Rather than bow before a truth that exposes and purifies, many would rather bend truth into something more palatable—something soft, permissive, and flattering.

This appetite for myths is not innocent fantasy, but rebellion cloaked in piety. The myth in question is not a story meant to lift the heart heavenward, but a falsehood shaped by self-will. When the soul seeks teachers not to be instructed but to be indulged, it is not education that is desired—it is validation. Doctrine, when true, is rarely convenient. It calls for repentance, surrender, and a recognition that we are not the masters of ourselves. That truth offends the self-centered heart, and so the ear turns elsewhere.

Yet here lies the grace: the very truth that is so often refused is the truth that saves. The doctrine they reject—the message of sin, judgment, and divine mercy—is not an oppressive weight, but a doorway to freedom. Jesus Christ did not come to reinforce our illusions but to destroy them. He did not suffer the cross to leave us comforted in our sins, but to rescue us from them. The truth He speaks wounds before it heals; it reveals our need before it meets it with grace.

In the end, the contrast is stark: myths seduce, but do not save. They may offer momentary ease, but they cannot bear the weight of eternity. Only the truth—the hard, radiant, redeeming truth of Christ crucified and risen—can do that. And so, even when the world gathers around teachers who speak only what is desired, the gospel remains, unbending and beautiful, offering not what we want, but what we need: the sacrifice that reconciles, and the redemption that restores.

In Christ’s Service,

~JFH