What You Need to Hear: Are You Ready for God’s Truth?

Kevin DeYoung asked his congregation a question in a sermon on June 15, 2025, and it’s the kind that keeps working on you long after the benediction. “Are you willing to receive the Lord’s message … not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear?” It isn’t asking whether you attend church, own a Bible, or can nod along when a familiar verse gets quoted. It’s asking whether you’ll actually let God’s word have the last word – even when it says something you didn’t walk in looking for.

The Sermon We’d Rather Preach to Ourselves

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Most of us don’t wake up hoping to be corrected. We want the passage that soothes, the sermon that affirms the choices we’ve already made, the devotional that leaves us feeling capable instead of exposed. Paul saw this coming a long time before podcasts and curated playlists made it easy to only hear what we like.

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. [2 Timothy 4:3-4]

Itching ears. It’s not that people stop listening – they just get selective about who they’ll listen to. They go shopping for teachers who’ll scratch the itch instead of naming it. I’ve caught myself doing exactly that with a passage I didn’t want to sit under. I skimmed past it, told myself I’d come back to it later, and didn’t. That’s the itch.

A Sword, Not a Security Blanket

Scripture was never handed to us as a security blanket. It’s closer to a surgeon’s instrument – precise, sometimes painful, and aimed at something underneath the surface we couldn’t reach on our own.

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. [Hebrews 4:12]

Notice what that sword divides. Not us from our enemies – us from our own excuses. It gets between what we say we believe and what we actually do, between the version of ourselves we present on Sunday and the one that shows up Tuesday afternoon when nobody’s watching. That’s uncomfortable work. It’s also the only kind of work that actually changes anything.

What Willingness Actually Looks Like

So what does it mean, practically, to be “willing”? It doesn’t mean enjoying correction. Nobody enjoys it. It means not running from it the moment it shows up. David gives us the posture in a single, exposed prayer.

Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting! [Psalm 139:23-24]

That’s a dangerous prayer to pray honestly. David isn’t asking God to confirm what he already suspects about himself. He’s asking God to go looking – in the closets he hasn’t opened, the habits he’s stopped noticing, the grievance he’s decided is justified. Willingness looks like praying that prayer and meaning it, then actually staying in the room when the answer comes back.

I’ll be honest – I don’t always stay in the room. Sometimes a sermon lands a little too close, and my first instinct isn’t repentance, it’s a mental list of reasons the point doesn’t quite apply to my situation. Maybe you know that instinct too. It’s not unbelief, exactly. It’s self-protection wearing a theological disguise.

The Test Isn’t One-Time

DeYoung’s question wasn’t a one-time altar call. It’s a standing question, one you answer fresh every time you open your Bible, sit under teaching, or get corrected by a friend brave enough to say the hard thing. Some weeks the answer is yes without much of a fight. Other weeks it takes longer, and that’s fine – God isn’t in a hurry with us, but He also isn’t going to stop bringing the word near just because we’d rather He didn’t.

What you want to hear will change with your mood, your circumstances, whatever news cycle you’re in this week. What you need to hear doesn’t shift like that. It’s steadier than we are, which is exactly why it can be trusted with the parts of us we’d rather keep hidden. The question isn’t whether God will speak. He already has. The question is whether we’re willing to listen.