CCF International Church

2 Tim 4:1-5
4:1 I charge you therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living and the dead at His appearing and His kingdom: 2 Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching. 3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; 4 and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables. 5 But you be watchful in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.

The apostle Paul charges his like minded son Timothy before God and the Lord Jesus Christ. This demonstrates the ultimate level of accountability of any minister of the gospel or any son …. We are charged before God and the Lord Jesus Christ to preach the Word! Sadly there is a community out there that will only receive that which satisfies and massages its flesh; sermons that would scratch its itch. They have little interest in the truth. Utterances are rejected out of hand because they do not fit the stereotype.
Consider the young man Joseph. He dreamt that he would have oversight over his parents and his brothers. This was received by his family as outrageous, audacious, impossible. Yet it was the truth.
However his father kept the matter in mind. This should be our position. Those things that we do not fully grasp the first time ought to be stored away for further meditation.

Gen 37:10-11
10 So he told it to his father and his brothers; and his father rebuked him and said to him, “What is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall your mother and I and your brothers indeed come to bow down to the earth before you?” 11 And his brothers envied him, but his father kept the matter in mind.

Let us examine another scripture.

Luke 2:49-51
49 And He said to them, “Why did you seek Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?” 50 But they did not understand the statement which He spoke to them.
51 Then He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was subject to them, but His mother kept all these things in her heart.

Here again the parents of Jesus the 12 year old, failed to understand his utterance. But his mother kept the matter in her heart for further meditation.
Jesus was under no obligation to appease the hearers.

This is the demand of the heavens upon the apostles in this present day.