Jesus said: “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed! Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” (Luke 12:49-53 NIV).
When you are nice in order to protect yourself, lookout, because you might just be putting yourself before God. Sometimes you, like the prophet Ezekiel, have to speak up, and that might mean ticking people off. It’s so much easer to just be nice and avoid the conflict altogether. But when sin is involved, being nice and not saying anything that would offend is contributing to that sin, even joining it. (God Guy Bible with notes by Michael DiMarco, page 944).
Certainly one of the greatest challenges to attaining righteousness on this earth is to give up the childish notion that love equates with niceness. We must come–even if reluctantly–to realize that love’s deep-river kindness has nothing in common with society’s trivial ploys of shallow niceness. I think the current political contest in America illustrates the justified cynicism that political correctness and saccharine “niceness” have engendered. As much as I disagree with Donald Trump and cannot ever foresee voting for him, I do tip my hat to his righteous skewering of the dangerous pantomimed hypocrisy of plastic niceness.
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