Nice By Sharon Hodde MillerSample

Day Five

Harder Than Flint

Scripture: Ezekiel 3:8–9

Some of us overcorrect our niceness by swinging in the opposite direction: communicating our thoughts in a way that is contrary, judgmental, or just plain mean. Ironically those of us with this struggle—which isn’t nice at all—are just as enslaved to the idol of influence as anyone else. 

God, on the other hand, had a different approach. When he spoke to the prophet Ezekiel about the people of Israel, he described the hardness of their hearts. In Ezekiel 3:8–9, he challenged Ezekiel to be even harder, but God did not tell Ezekiel to harden his heart in response to the rigidity of the Israelites. Instead he told Ezekiel to harden his forehead.

This distinction is the difference between longevity and burnout, between love and despair. Throughout the Bible, hardness of heart primarily describes a person’s orientation toward God. Whenever we harden our hearts, there is a sense in which this is also a hardening of ourselves toward God.

Our foreheads are another matter. We can harden our foreheads while maintaining a heart that is soft toward God and his children, and that is the place out of which we can speak truth well. 

Rather than speak a hard truth that could alienate our family or friends, it’s tempting to focus on the things we agree on. But Ezekiel did not allow this, and more importantly, neither did Christ. Jesus’s message was so offensive that it got him killed. Following him does not require us to seek out or instigate strife for its own sake, but it does mean we will encounter it and that we should not flee. 

Hardening our foreheads to speak the truth in love takes practice. Sometimes the blowback from our words will knock us straight off our feet. Those of us who are used to being nice, being liked all the time, and reaping the benefits of our likability have soft foreheads. Confrontation—even necessary, clear-cut, biblical confrontation—is disorienting and scary. But the more we learn to do it, the more we will learn to do it well. Our foreheads will become increasingly like flint. 

And our hearts? We will find them increasingly pruned to make way for better fruit.

In which areas of your life do you have the greatest amount of influence? What is the difference between the world’s definition of success in that area and God’s definition of success?