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Skip Heitzig: You need to know what the word doctrine actually means. It means good teaching, wholesome, solid instruction. How ridiculous does it sound when you say, "I don't want to make this about good, wholesome, solid teaching"? Really, you don't? Because I do. That's what doctrine is.

I've told you before that many people treat the scripture like they treat the owner's manual in their vehicle. They know it's there. They're not going to go home and read it. But when something breaks in the car, they will open it and feverishly look through it to find how they can fix the problem. A lot of people neglect the manual of truth in favor for their own personal truth.

Doctrine is important. In Acts chapter two, remember what was on the church's priority list? They gave themselves steadfastly to the apostles' doctrine, number one. First Timothy chapter four, "Until I come, give attention to reading, exhortation, and doctrine." To Titus, very similar: "Teach what is in accord with sound doctrine."

I'll never forget reading these words from one of my favorite authors, James Boyce, years ago. He said, "We do not have a strong church today, nor do we have many strong Christians, and this can be traced back to an acute lack of sound spiritual knowledge." There are certain things you need to know. You need to know the truth.

On four different occasions, Jesus said to his detractors, religious people, "Have you not read?" He was referring to their Bible. "Don't you read the very book you claim is your source for authority? Have you not read?" I wonder, if Jesus were here and asked us that question, "Have you not read?" how would we honestly answer that? Some of us would have to say, "Actually, no, I haven't."

11% of Americans read the Bible. 4% of Americans have a biblical worldview. Do you realize what that means? It means 96% of Americans would basically agree with the idea: speak your truth. It gets worse because that's just Americans in general, and I know you could say, "Yeah, but we're Christian Americans. We're very different."

According to George Barna, two in five evangelicals say it doesn't matter what religious faith you follow. If I were to get five people, and I won't point to them in a row somewhere in church, if I took five of them, two of them would say it doesn't matter what you believe in. He continues, one-third of evangelicals say we all pray to the same God and faith in Jesus Christ is not necessary.

We should know the truth. Second, we should guard the truth. Verse three tells you why: "For the time will come," and I wonder if it hasn't come already. "For the time will come when they will not endure good, wholesome, solid, sound teaching, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers. They will turn their ears away from the truth and be turned aside to fables."

I'd like to read that to you in a paraphrase version called The Message by Eugene Peterson. He translates it this way: "There will be times, the times will come when people will have no stomach for solid teaching, but will fill up on spiritual junk food, catchy opinions that tickle their fancy."

I wonder how many of you realize there's a crisis of truth today. When I say a crisis of truth, what I mean is most people are cynical when it comes to truth and believe truth cannot be known, like Pontius Pilate even 2,000 years ago, who in the presence of Jesus said, "What is truth?" That's the prevailing thought today. The prevailing thinking today is that no one can legitimately claim to have a corner on the market when it comes to truth.

They insist there is no absolute truth. Have you ever had somebody say that to you? "There is no absolute truth." Whenever you hear somebody say there is no absolute truth, they just made a self-contradictory statement because they just stated an absolute. But I digress.

Most people think truth is personal, individual, and variable. It is subjective from within, not objective from without. Why is that? How did we get to that point? I want to give you now a brief thumbnail sketch, a little brief historical journey through the weird world of philosophy. If you want to be confused, I’ve discovered that human philosophers for thousands of years have tried to explain truth decidedly unsuccessfully.

The ancients, and I go way back, just simply assumed the validity of truth and human knowledge. Around 500 BC, these three guys popped up: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They started dealing with the problem of how do we discover what is true, and they set forth several explanations of how truth is conveyed to the mind. I'm not going to go through their streams of thought; I'll just lump them all together.

Since then, for the next couple thousand years, philosophers presupposed that knowledge was conveyed through nature, that truth is related to reality, and it centers around the way the world actually is. In the 1600s, and I'm only selecting a few major philosophical streams, this guy came, René Descartes. He was a French philosopher, and he wrestled with the question: how do we get knowledge?

Descartes was a rationalist; that is, truth is known by reason. He began with a few fundamental truths. He believed that all people are born with a few imbued fundamental truths, and then using logical deductions, he built a more sophisticated structure of knowledge. René Descartes was the father of epistemology. I know you’re thinking, "Really? You got to say epistemology in church? Shouldn't you be telling us a scripture verse or something?"

Let me tell you what it is. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, and in academic circles, it's the fare of the day. It is how we know what we know, how you have a justifiable belief in anything. René Descartes was the one who said, "I think, therefore I am." I knew you knew who he was. He established his own existence and built up from there to prove other facts. That was rationalism.

A little bit after him, John Locke showed up. He was sort of a contemporary, born a little bit after Descartes. He read René Descartes's work and he disagreed with him. What he said is that the mind is really a blank slate. There are no imbued facts that we are born with. We are informed only by experience. He developed not rationalism but what is called empiricism: that we get knowledge purely through the senses, not because of reason.

John Locke said, and I quote, "There is no knowledge innate to the mind. All of our ideas come from one of two sources: experience or natural faculties." Then in the 1700s, a German philosopher showed up by the name of Immanuel Kant. His parents said, "You should do philosophy." He said, "I Kant." I can't resist. I've got to keep your attention in this kind of stuff.

This is what he said. He said the views of both Descartes and Locke are wrong and must be discarded. Neither logic nor experience are sufficient; you need both. Neither rationalism nor empiricism can account for knowledge. It is rather a combination of both of those. That was good until he dies.

When he dies, and other people are born, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Hegel shows up. Another German philosopher. Listen to his name: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He said Immanuel Kant's view is inadequate. You're starting to figure out how we're getting to where we have today.

He said truth is fluid. Reality is not a constant. Truth evolves as societies change. His philosophy is what opened the door for people like Friedrich Nietzsche with his existentialism, Karl Marx and his theory of class division, et cetera. All these elaborate philosophies and epistemologies were set forth only to be debunked and then deconstructed by the next guy.

Guest (Male): This is Connect with Skip Heitzig. When you give to this ministry, you help reach thousands of people every day with God's life-changing truth, encouraging them to know him and grow in his word. To thank you for your support this month, we'll send you Reload Love: Transforming Bullets to Beauty and Battlegrounds to Playgrounds, a powerful book by Skip's wife, Lenya Heitzig.

It's a gripping, hope-filled story of how God transformed weapons of war into tools of joy and how playgrounds rose from battlegrounds because one person chose compassion over despair. Your gift today helps bring the life-changing message of hope in Jesus to people around the world through Connect with Skip. Request your copy when you give $50 or more at connectwithskip.com/offer or by calling 800-922-1888. Now, here's more from Pastor Skip.

Skip Heitzig: These philosophies have not stopped. They continue in every generation. What you need to be aware of, and the reason I'm doing this, is there has been in our societies, our culture, a seismic shift. You felt it. You knew it, but you didn't know why. I want to show you why. I'll tell you about the seismic shift.

The shift has been from modernism to what is called postmodernism. They are vastly different. Modernism, postmodernism, and now there's even something called metamodernism. Modernism basically believes that truth does exist and can be verified scientifically. In other words, two plus two equals four, boys are boys, girls are girls. Modernism.

Postmodernism since the 1980s is vastly different. It dismisses anything as being certain or absolute. In postmodernism, nothing is certain, and a thoughtful person will never speak about anything with much conviction at all. Because if he speaks about anything with conviction and certitude, it is seen as arrogant, naive, and ignorant.

Everyone is entitled to his own truth. There are absolutely no absolutes. Welcome to postmodernism. Lately, there's this thing called metamodernism. I'm not going to get into lengthy detail; I'll just put it this way. Metamodernism is more postmodern than even postmodernism. It's all about ambiguity. It's all about deconstruction and reconstruction of commonly held ideas.

Here are some characteristics. It's the rejection of truth in plain propositional terms. You know about propositional truth. Propositional truth is clear, logical; it must be affirmed or denied. Postmodernism and metamodernism cannot endure that. They can't endure that kind of clarity. It must be about the individual, not about what we all know to be true, but about the individual.

Get this: uncertainty is the new truth. Isn't that wonderful? Uncertainty is the new truth. Skepticism and doubt reign supreme. Right and wrong don't exist. What matters most is how you feel. What is it that creates all this? We're told in verse three: "The time will come when they will not endure good, sound, solid teaching, doctrine, but according to their own desires," what they feel inside, "because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers and will turn their ears away from the truth."

Itching ears refers to itching for novelty. It describes people who seek out opinions and teachings that support their own decisions and lifestyle. The person who curates his own social media will not listen to any voices except the voice that agrees and affirms him. Back to our text. They will not endure sound doctrine but heap up for themselves teachers.

They have itching ears. The Message says spiritual junk food, catchy opinions that tickle their fancy. The reason I took you through that brief thumbnail sketch of philosophy, I know it can seem tedious to some of us, but you can't guard the truth unless you understand what you are guarding it from and how we came to believe what society now believes.

We should know the truth, we should guard the truth. There's a third instruction here: we, as believers, should speak the truth. Verse two: "Preach the word." If the phrase "the truth" is controversial, then preaching is also very controversial. "Don't preach at me!" Preach the word. Speak the truth, speak the word.

Go down to verse five; let me take you there. After saying this is what's going to happen, people are going to turn away from the truth, "But you, Timothy, but you be watchful in all things, endure afflictions," because they're going to come, "do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry." In contrast to those who neglect the truth, Timothy, you hold to the truth. Timothy, you be shaped by the truth. Timothy, you speak the truth, feed on the truth, feed others the truth.

I want to sort of reinforce this a little bit, so let me take you down a few verses. Look at verse six. Paul says, "I am already being poured out as a drink offering." That's an Old Testament way of saying I'm about to kick the bucket. "The time of my departure is at hand. I'm about to die. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day, and not only me, but also to all who have loved his appearing."

Paul uses himself finally as an example of somebody who held to the truth, was faithful to the truth, fulfilled and finished his task. This is our calling. Our calling is to know the truth, guard the truth, live the truth, speak the truth. Paul knew when he wrote this, as he's about to die, he knew what Timothy is facing.

Timothy is surrounded by all sorts of very smart, sophisticated Greek, Greco-Roman orators and philosophers who were twisting truth. He knew also that because they were twisting truth, many people in Timothy's congregation would be turning away from the truth. He gives the antidote. Don't be ashamed, preach the word. Don't shrink back, speak the truth.

That's the antidote. The antidote to atheistic modernism, the antidote to postmodernism and metamodernism is as simple as: preach the word. D.L. Moody, a fine preacher, said the best way to show that a stick is crooked is not to argue about it or spend time denouncing it, but to lay a straight stick alongside of it. Here's the straight stick. People give you their shtick, put the straight stick next to it: the Bible.

This needs to be said because some of you are still thinking, "If I speak the truth, people are going to hear that and they're going to get offended by it. It's going to hurt their feelings. They're going to turn off to me." This is what I want you to know. Love and truth are not enemies. In fact, did you know that one of the most loving things you could ever do is to tell people the truth?

Do it in a nice way. The Bible says we should speak the truth in love. No matter how nicely you go about telling people the truth and laying down the straight stick, understand that at some level, not everybody's going to listen with bated breath. Some are going to be offended greatly, call you narrow-minded, bigoted, belligerent, et cetera.

I think of it this way: it is better to tell the truth and be thought hateful than to whisper lies and be thought loving and compassionate. It's not loving and compassionate to lie to people. It's more loving to tell them the truth. The idea of your truth versus the truth is the core idea of philosophical absurdism. It implies there is no objective reality, there is no shared truth, and it thereby makes life meaningless.

How can you have meaningful dialogue? How can you have any kind of conversation or agreement unless you have an agreement on basic facts of reality? How are you going to teach math or science or history unless you have a common ground on what truth is? Truth doesn't require a possessive pronoun in front of it: my truth, your truth, our truth, their truth. If it has a possessive pronoun in front of it, chances are it's not truth.

If you're going to use that terminology, would you just please become more honest about it and simply say, "Here's my opinion. Here's my thought on that"? Finally, my brethren, to quote Paul: Christianity rests upon truth. What I mean by truth is not an abstract concept of truth. I'm talking about objective truth. Certain things happened at a certain place in history, notably the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Moreover, the one we follow and believe in who died for us made himself a very unique truth claim when he said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." He also gave a promise when he said, "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." If you want to be free, if you want to experience freedom, I wouldn't suggest you take a philosophy course. You will become confused. It's okay to study it, but you need bearings if you're going to study it. You need to be moored if you're going to study it.

If you want freedom, you come to Christ because truth, we discover, is a person. "I am the truth." Millions of people throughout history who have called upon his name in every culture and every generation with different languages and different backgrounds have all had the same experience of a changed life and discovered he's truth. He gives a source of truth: his word.

Guest (Male): We’re so glad you joined us today on Connect with Skip Heitzig. Before you go, remember that as our thanks for your gift today, we'll send you Lenya Heitzig's book, Reload Love: a gripping, hope-filled story of God transforming battlegrounds into playgrounds. When you give, you help keep this Bible teaching ministry on the air, connecting more people with the truth of God's word and the hope found in Jesus. Give today at connectwithskip.com/offer or call 800-922-1888 and request your copy of Reload Love: Transforming Bullets to Beauty and Battlegrounds to Playgrounds when you do. See you next time.