Nice Guys Finish Last
"How would telling people to be nice to one another get a man crucified? What government would execute Mister Rogers or Captain Kangaroo?"
"Nice guys finish last." That impressive universal truth is usually credited to the late, great baseball manager Leo Durocher. Little did he know that this crafty piece of dugout wisdom would later be applied to everything from the diamond to the dating scene, from ball games to bar scenes. Just ask any of the millions of "nice guys" who find themselves at home alone on Saturday night while women who say they're looking for a really nice guy are on an uptown bar stool chatting it up with the bad boy bachelors.
But nice guys - nice people - don't necessarily need to be naughty in order to be noticed. Read the gospels carefully and you'll notice that Jesus is not following the nice guy paradigm at all. He's constantly in conflict with popular opinion, he's concerned more about God's approval than the crowd's support, he's not a passive wimp who plays the victim role. What attracted people to Jesus wasn't his meek and mild niceness but his fully focused and committed mission and message. Christain author Philip Yancey puts it perfectly, "How would telling people to be nice to one another get a man crucified? What government would execute Mister Rogers or Captain Kangaroo?"
The character of Jesus that we claim for ourselves as Christians calls us beyond the nice-guy-syndrome. We can never settle for being nice people in nice churches with nice things to say. If anything, it's this niceness that has made the church unattractive to many who think we are boring and irrelevant. What's really attractive is people who know who they are and what they're about. People who exhibit passion, not passivity. "Show me your faith without deeds," James writes, "and I will show you my faith by what I do" (2:18).
Christians need to move beyond passivity and tap into the passion of Christ. It was God's passion for us all that brought Christ into the world and the passion of Christ that made demons quake. It is the passionate fire of the Holy Spirit that keeps faith burning in us. So in passion we find our full expression to demonstrate our faith and fully devote ourselves to Christian love.
Nice people finish last. Passionate people, committed people, servant people with conviction and devotion and vision finish first, taking the initiative to show others the way to Christ.
PRAYER: Lord Jesus, make me more than nice. Make me passionate. Enliven me with the blood of your sacrifice and fire me up with the breath of the Spirit. Even if I'm waiting or meditating or pondering let me do those things with passion, too. Resonate my being with a conviction that fully believes your words and fervently works to put them into practice. Amen.
adapted from the September/October 2003 issue of Homiletics magazine