Nice: Why We Love to Be Liked and How God Calls Us to More by Sharon Hodde Miller

ABOUT THE BOOK

Nice: Why We Love to Be Liked and How God Calls Us to More by Sharon Hodde Miller

God never called us to be nice.

What happens when we replace courage with compromise?
What happens when we replace honesty with likability?
What happens when we replace conviction with clich�s?
What happens when we replace discipleship to Christ with a devotion to nice?

We live in a culture that prizes niceness as one of its highest virtues. Niceness keeps the peace, wins friends, gains influence, and serves our reputations well, but it also takes the teeth out of our witness and the power out of our faith. When we choose to be nice instead of faithful, we bear fruits that are bland, bitter, empty, and rotten to the core.

In this life-changing book, Sharon Hodde Miller explores the seemingly innocent idol that has crept into our faith and quietly corrupted it, producing the bad fruits of cowardice, inauthenticity, shallowness, and more. Then she challenges readers to cultivate a better tree, providing practical steps to reclaim our credibility as followers of Christ, and bear better, richer, more life-giving fruits.

MY THOUGHTS.....

All of my life I've heard that I should be nice but in her new book Sharon Hodde Miller tells readers that "God did not call you to be nice." She supports this statement by focusing on the analogy that Jesus used in Matthew 7 when he stated that "Every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit , nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit." In the first seven chapters of Nice: Why We Love to be Liked and How God Calls Us to More, Miller explains that the fruits of niceness can be fake, rotten, bland, bitter, hard, and processed. What does she suggest that we do? We must cultivate a better tree and the last six chapters are devoted to this concept. We can become better by finding our true purpose, rooting our soul, becoming deeper and better, and flourishing, so that the fruit we produce will be a lasting fruit!

This book is easy to read and easy to comprehend and I like that most of the chapters include the sections Taking Root (selected Bible scripture) and Digging Deeper (questions to help us increase our understanding). There are also several pages of notes with bibliographical references. I have been using it for my personal study but I believe that Nice would also be a valuable resource to use in a Women's Bible Study,

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the author and Baker Publishing but a favorable review was not required. These are my own thoughts.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sharon Hodde Miller is an author and a speaker. Her first book Free of Me: Why Life is Better When It’s Not about You released in 2017, and her second book, Nice: Why We Love to Be Liked and How God Calls Us to More, released in August 2019!

She and her husband Ike lead Bright City Church in Durham, North Carolina and they are the parents of three children. 

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