CBN.com – "Recovering
nice guy" and author Paul Coughlin wants to challenge Christian
men to think and live out their faith more passionately. In his
new book No More Christian Nice Guy, he points the way
for all men who yearn to live a life of boldness and conviction--like
Jesus. But reader beware, Coughlin does not sugar coat Jesus'
rugged side during the times that he showed anger and contempt
toward authority figures.
Using humorous examples from his own life, powerful and poignant
stories, and vivid examples from contemporary culture, Coughlin
shows how he learned to say no to the "nice guy" syndrome.
After all, Christian nice guys aren't always so nice. In the name
of appearing Christian by being agreeable, they can lie, keep
secrets, manipulate, duck responsibility, and much more. Using
the biblical model of Christ as his example of a real man, Coughlin
shows men how to become both gentle and bold.
The following is an excerpt from his book.
Unchained Son
It's h--- being a Christian Nice Guy until you embrace Christ's
tough, courageous, protective, assertive personality, which invigorates
real male sensibilities. These qualities are found on the more
rugged end of the male spectrum, currently not well represented
in the church, which overemphasizes Christ's gentler side at the
expense of honest and healthy balance.
Here's a story that I hope will help to clarify. I call it the
Parable of Jim.
Jim is a thirty-something teacher to whom people are drawn. But
Jim breaks all kinds of rules. He's confrontational, opinionated,
filled with willpower.
He threatens to fight scoundrels who are making money off of
religion, even grabbing their TV camera, a tool for this sordid
gain, and smashing it to the ground, creating one long commercial
break.
He has called his students dumb and dull, asking how much longer
he'll have to endure their company.
In order to stem his influence, his enemies play word games and
devise interview scenarios in which to embarrass him; he's so
cunning and shrewd that he constantly shows them up instead. No
one has the guts to talk the way he does. Others talk like they
understand God; Jim talks like he knows God. Jim forcefully disrupts
the order of things and disregards convention. Jim's inappropriate.
He calls people bad names that "respectable men" never
say. He verbally confronts one of his most powerful government
officials. When Jim has faced an authority figure who, because
of manufactured charges, could actually invoke the death penalty,
Jim's slow-to-come responses have been obscure, searing, and disrespectful.
Jim doesn't mind his manners around important persons. Jim causes
problems for society's respectable people. No wonder they want
to pull him down.
In one public speech, to illustrate a profound spiritual truth,
Jim has spoken of excrement going into a drain. He's colorful,
but some think his language is too coarse for a spiritual leader,
and the press has a field day: PREACHER OR POTTYMOUTH? YOU
DECIDE.
He has told reporters that his mission isn't to discover or promote
a lifetime of warm and cozy. Au contraire: "I bring
division and conflict! Live as I say you should," he tells
morning news shows over coffee and crumpets, and it may "tear
your families apart!" Then he states the obvious: "Those
who don't find me offensive will be blessed." Who booked
this guy? Regis wonders, glancing at security, hoping they're
keeping a sharp eye. Who in the world does he think he is?
muse countless others.
Jim is sarcastic, sometimes bitingly so; he doesn't apologize.
Jim goes to parties and hangs out with others who do.
At least once he has supplied the wine, for free, during a wedding
where children were likely present. Drinks are on him, even though
he knows he'll be accused of corrupting others and touting sinfulness.
The bureaucrats and government workers with whom he spends time
are the ones everybody else hates. Jim doesn't even shun mentally
imbalanced devotees or politically leprous radicals.
Many murmur and complain that they don't understand him. His
own students sometimes won't ask him questions because they fear
his response.
Most religious leaders enjoy the attention of large crowds, but
Jim's wary: He doesn't trust them, and he doesn't hide his distrust.
He actually confronts empty compliments during public gatherings—not
a seeker-friendly ministry approach. Even though he still takes
students, Jim's been unemployed for at least three years and doesn't
even look for a job. He lives off handouts, owns no property,
doesn't even have his own cardboard box to return to at night.
One choice that led to further attacks was Jim's allowing a prostitute—in
public—to anoint him with rare and expensive oil that could
have been used to feed the poor, support missionaries, or pay
for part of a child's life-saving surgery. While his students
and his opponents boiled with anger over this wasteful
extravagance, Jim would not hear it denounced and had the audacity
to say that whenever God's liberating message is preached, this
one event will be mentioned favorably. The woman wiped Jim's feet
with her own hair, a lure she has used to draw men to her bed,
but he has no care for his reputation. The scandal of it all!
Hear the good folk gossip! Film at eleven!
He warns his students that people will despise them. Some will
even be brought to court by blackmailers with unfair charges.
Jim tells them to pay off the blackmailer before it goes that
far. He instructs one student to sell some clothing in order to
buy a weapon.
Jim, who's loving, kind, and compassionate, is not owned or influenced
by fear and shame. Still, he does all the above and more, which
begs the question: Do you think Jim's a "good Christian man"?
Is he a Nice Guy?
* * *
This is part of the life of Christ as recorded
in the Gospels, but are you surprised by how foreign some of it
looks? If we compare these actions of Jesus to the behavior expected
of the average guy in most churches today—and, if we were
honest—we'd say, absurdly, that Christ is not a "Christian."
We wouldn't pray to him; we'd issue prayer requests for
him.
Something doesn't add up.
I hope you are beginning to see how some men are isolated from
the church not because they are "backsliders" but because
of what they're told they must be in order to find peace and contentment.
There are men to whom following Jesus means abandoning
these common misconceptions about him. I know these men. They
believe they have no choice. They have asked, as I have, if Jesus
is pleased with how we, the church, presently portray him; they
can't honestly say yes.
I constructed "Jim's story" to help us get past our
extreme caricature of the Nice Nazarene. By now some well-read
domesticated bird is staring down at the Parable of Jim, reading
upside down and wondering why it's lining his cage. So be it.
But for those who haven't yet torn up all or part of this book,
realize that this characterization is concentrated toughness,
and just as you don't want to consume a sludge of orange juice
concentrate, neither do you want to run off with this
caricature of Jesus: It's the other extreme, the inverse swing
of the pendulum from our current banal portrayal of Jesus the
Bearded Woman.
A Whole Other Gospel
It's a whole other gospel when your Nice Guy glasses are thrown
in the garbage. Mark records more of Christ's rugged side than
any other account, and with Mark at the wheel, you're in the passenger
seat, white-knuckled, reminding yourself to breathe. There is
no seat belt, and as Mark goes off road, you rejoice to realize
that being nice isn't the point of Christianity.
Here are some of the words and phrases in just the first chapter
of Mark that describe the world in which Jesus warred: shouting,
wilderness, sins, camel hair, locusts, slave, split open, tempted,
Satan, arrested, the time has come!, possessed, evil spirit, destroy,
be quiet!, screamed, convulsed, amazement, high fever, victims,
alone, leprosy, begging, moved with pity, be healed!, examine,
secluded. And, according to the oldest and best manuscripts, Mark's
gospel ends (in 16:8) with a word we all dread: afraid.
None of this is comfortable or pleasant. None of us, when under
the spell of the fake virtue called niceness, says a loud "Amen"
to this roughness. But wait till the hazy ethereal spell is broken:
You'll hunger and thirst for more as the Good News takes on lungs,
meat, and sinew. The gospel includes dirty feet, stinky hair,
fish guts, bugs between its teeth, dirt under its nails—it's
entrenched in life's day-to-day. Smell the adrenaline, feel your
heart pound, taste the locust that lingers on your lips. God is
on the loose. Hunting us down! Warring to liberate us from anything
and everything that seeks to diminish who he made us to be.
Setting the Record Straight
Regardless of how hard we try, Jesus will not be domesticated.
Consult the gospel facts: He is no comfortable Christ, no meek
and mild Messiah.
Let's set the record straight.
Here's our popular Nice Guy misconception: Jesus didn't drink,
swear, get angry, use sarcasm, confront, avoid questions, grow
impatient, or complain. Conversely, the record shows he did all
of the above, and the gospel includes no apology, confession,
or repentance for any of them.
I remember chewing on one sermon that was especially hard to
swallow. The minister said that Jesus didn't ingest wine because
he would never consume something that had fermented or, as he
put it, "putrefied." Really? If that's the case, then
Jesus never ate meat either—butchered meat decomposes, even
more so back then. Or do we think Jesus took bites out of living
creatures?
His first recorded miracle was at a wedding in a Galilean town
called Cana. He made one hundred and eighty gallons of wine for
people who'd already been drinking; John tells us that "he
thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in
him." If he did this today, many would say he could only
be a "real" Christian—he's gotta be tame—if
he made and consumed grape juice. (Somehow we manage to ignore
that such an act wouldn't be a miracle but an embarrassing disappointment.)
We still spin-~doctor to keep him in his Sunday best.
Passive Christian men must discard the belief that Jesus was
perpetually mild and easy to get along with. Nice people don't
call others a brood of vipers fit for hell (Matthew 3:7; 23:33)
and "white-washed tombs" (23:27). Jesus used coarse
language when being critical of authority figures. He was also
irreverent and disrespectful, which are part of the definition
of "profanity." We retain this caricature of Jesus being
endlessly patient, yet he turned to his disciples, seemingly exasperated,
and said, "How long must I be with you until you believe?
How long must I put up with you?" (17:17 nlt). Jesus was
not forever long-suffering (imagine the false agendas
that would enslave him if he were—more on spotting false
agendas later), and he doesn't expect his followers to be either,
as seen in the parable of the fig tree (Luke 13:6–9). The
clear teaching is that it's proper to wait for an unfruitful person
or organization to produce, but that there's a limit to wise patience.
Sometimes patience ceases to be a laudable virtue and becomes
a naïve vice. Christian Nice Guys need to learn this. They
would, if they saw the real Jesus.
* * *
Jesus also told us to be "wise" as serpents—some
English versions render the word phronimos as "cunning"
and others "shrewd" (Matthew 10:16). Shouldn't this
make us cringe? That Christian men are supposed to be cunning
and shrewd instead of nice is more proof that we just don't want
to listen, or are afraid to listen, to Jesus.
Nice people don't use intense language; they're moderate
in all they do and say. They'd never talk (literally or figuratively)
about hacking off body parts that tempt a person to sin. Nice
Guys don't exaggerate to prove a point. Jesus did.
Even if we begrudgingly acknowledge that he used strong words
and exhibited unrefined behavior, we tend to think they must have
been reserved for the corrupt and misguided religious leaders
of his day. Untrue. No one, it seemed, was guaranteed safety from
his ruggedness; for instance, on one occasion, his own disciples
"didn't understand what he meant and were afraid to ask him
about it" (Mark 9:31). Nice Guys don't generate intimidating
fear; Nice Guys generate head-scratching frustration. This insipid
incarnation of our own making, a cultural icon and not the real
thing, wouldn't make those close to Jesus wonder if he had lost
his mind and thus desire to seize him to prevent his doing damage
to himself and others (3:21).
Characterless people don't use sarcasm. Jesus did. (And I thank
God for it.) In fact, refusing to acknowledge that he used what
I call "blessed sarcasm" spins us off into heresy. Christ
shakes us awake for our own good. He loves us enough to shock
us, offend us, scandalize us.
The record of his tough side is there, right there, and has been
for thousands of years; his momma did not raise a sweet little
boy. Sadly, this reality has faded into near invisibility, becoming
a lost testament of sorts, what some might call a common conspiracy.
The real Jesus is taking a backseat to the contemporary cultural
climate, what intellectuals call zeitgeist ("spirit of the
times" or "spirit of the age"). Like car keys on
the kitchen table, the actual Jesus is hiding in plain view—and
so is the freedom of millions, the freedom of Christian Nice Guys
and those who love them.
More information:
Read an
interview with the author.
Visit the author's Web
site.
Purchase No
More Christian Nice Guy.
Excerpted from Chapter 2: Jesus the Bearded Woman found in No
More Christian Nice Guyby Paul Coughlin, Copyright ©
2005, published by Bethany
House Publishers. Used by permission. Unauthorized duplication
prohibited.
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