“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one [the only God]! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and with all your soul and with all your strength [your entire being]. These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be [written] on your heart and mind.
The Bible command I overlook most often is: “In every circumstance, be ye nice”. This command isn’t actually written in the Bible but it’s become the 11th commandment. It nudged “Thou shalt not make graven images” right off the list. To my shame, I regularly forget the commandment to be eternally nice.. Thankfully, there are people everywhere who remind me. “You’re not being very Christ-like.” “Jesus wouldn’t say that.” So helpful! After years of reading scripture, I still don’t know exactly what Jesus would say…But there’s always someone nearby who does.
They tell me what’s going on in the mind of Christ. They tell me how Christians should talk and act. Miraculously…many of them aren’t even Christians! It’s true! A lot of the experts on Jesus think all religion is poppy-cock. They don’t want to live by the rules of Christianity themselves but they criticize me for not being Christ-like. They tell me my faith is just an outdated superstition that should be abandoned then accuse me of hypocrisy when I don’t live according to that outdated superstition.
Supposedly, the godless heathen know how to behave without religion. They don’t need an ancient book to tell them right and wrong. Their instincts tell them what to do. And their instincts tell them what I should do too.
I should be nice.
Like them.
I should not judge someone else’s beliefs, unless those beliefs are oppressive religious beliefs, like Christianity. Then I should rise up and remind the narrow-minded religious zealots to be nice!
Because that’s what Jesus would do.
2 Responses
Niceness seems to be arbitrary, because it’s what makes a particular person feel a certain way. Niceness is what I’d call a ‘Man-pleaser’ to quote the Petra song. Nice is behaving in a certain way so people will find you acceptable. Jesus wasn’t about being nice, otherwise he wouldn’t have turned over all of those tables in the temple. To please God, you’ve got to stop trying to please everyone else.
The Latin root of the word ‘nice’ means a word similar to ‘foolish’.
We are called to be kind.
It isn’t kind to ‘nicely’ sing people to sleep as they drift into destruction either here or eternally.
‘Nice’? No thank you.
If I am screwing up, be kind to me, but stuff the ‘nice’.