Christianity Today September 18, 2026 8 min signal 2026-09-18

Niceness is not a biblical command

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Christianity Today

September 18, 2026

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Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

The most unsettling sentence in the Bible about human speech is spoken in a fight. In Matthew 12, the Pharisees have already gone out and “conspired against” Jesus, “how to destroy him” (v. 14, ESV throughout). They have watched him heal a blind and mute man, and concluded, in public, that he is running on demonic power. And it is precisely here, with the knife already being sharpened, that Jesus says this:

You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned. (vv. 34–37)

This teaching arrives during the most hostile public exchange in the Gospels to that point, at the moment when Jesus’ life is at stake. The English is gentler than the Greek: The word careless here directly translates to “workless,” or “unemployed.” Matthew uses the same term a few chapters later for the laborers standing around in the marketplace with nothing to do (20:3, 6). Jesus, therefore, is warning about words that clock in and accomplish nothing—even words that arrive, take a swing, and produce no fruit except the small pleasure of landing.

Most of us routinely encounter careless words that sometimes pass the test of accuracy but also reveal something important about the heart behind them. You don’t need me to tell you about the political arenas where they often show up. The mouth tells, and the tongue is the readout: “Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit” (12:33). But that statement creates another question: If Jesus can call people vipers and then tell us that our words reveal our hearts, what makes his sharp sentence different from ours?

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Hard words and a hard heart are not the same thing, nor can gentleness or severity alone tell us whether our speech is faithful. What matters is whether love governs what we say and what we hope our words do. Love will not crush someone barely standing, but neither will it try to be nice and go soft on the person doing the crushing. Niceness, after all, is not a biblical command.

A few words before Jesus calls the Pharisees a brood of vipers, he warns about idle speech. Whatever standard Jesus is establishing about careless words cannot be a standard the previous verse violates. Jesus does not police tone. Neither does the Lord through Isaiah when he compares Judah’s worship to trampling in his courts (Isa. 1:12). Nor does Paul when he wishes the circumcision party would go all the way with the knife (Gal. 5:12). Or Amos when he calls the wealthy women of Samaria “cows of Bashan” (Amos 4:1). Our generation did not invent the sharp sentence, and Scripture is not embarrassed by it.

So God does not require Christians to soften what is true in order to keep the peace. He does not require us to look away from corruption, to describe cruelty as though it were a policy preference, or to pretend that every position is equally defensible because another Christian holds it. There are hours when the loving thing is the hard thing said plainly and when the failure of nerve is itself a moral failure.

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Consider what Matthew has already told us about the way Jesus wins. Earlier in the same chapter, Matthew reaches for Isaiah 42 to explain Jesus:

He will not quarrel or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets; a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench, until he brings justice to victory. (Matt. 12:19–20)

Keep in mind that the Pharisees are not the bruised reeds described here. They are closer to the ones doing the bruising. Jesus later says they “tie up heavy burdens and lay them on people’s shoulders” and “shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces” (23:4, 13). He spends his severity defending the weak and humble from the strong and proud, even when the weak are sinful. We often spend much of ours defending ourselves from people we find insufferable or trying to humiliate those with whom we disagree.

Our society—and many Christians—have learned to run speech through three questions: Was it true? Was it deserved? Was it necessary? The trouble is that a sentence can pass all three questions and still contain the kind of workless words Jesus admonishes. It can be accurate, warranted, and strategically useful and still come out of a vault stocked with contempt. But truth does not sanctify motive.

Jesus closes that loophole by adding a fourth question: What did I want to happen to the other person when I spoke?

That question is why our political speech has become such an efficient spiritual diagnostic. It is the arena with the fewest number of people willing to correct us and the largest crowd ready to cheer. And so it functions like a stress test. Our speech tells us what we love, because we defend what we love. It tells us what we fear, because fear is loud. And it tells us, if we will listen, whom we have quietly learned to despise.

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As a pastor, I grieve the results of this test. I’ve watched people who are tender at hospital bedsides—people who would drive across the country at midnight for strangers from church—become entirely different with phones in their hands. I’ve watched the same man weep over a wayward son on Sunday, mock a stranger’s suffering on Tuesday, and see no connection at all between the two.

I would not call that hypocrisy. The tenderness at the bedside was real, but something else had been building up alongside the kindness, and the storehouse eventually opens.

This brings me to Titus 3, where Paul gives a command and then a reason, with the reason being the gospel. He tells Titus to remind church members

to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all people. For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. (vv. 2–3)

If verse 3 gives the address of our former home, then verses 4 and 5 say who moved us: “But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy.”

The worst true thing has already been said, and God said it. And then he moved toward us at a cost to himself. God refused the false choice between truth and mercy: He told the whole truth about our sin and bore its judgment, which means we no longer need what contempt provides.

That is why Solomon can say, “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles, lest the Lord see it and be displeased, and turn away his anger from him” (Prov. 24:17–18). Gladness at an enemy’s ruin may purchase his reprieve, because God is willing to spare any of our enemies in order to deal with us.

All this should produce a people capable of a combination that’s become almost extinct in public life: telling the truth without enjoying one another’s destruction, saying the hard thing without glee for the wound it makes. Paul tells Titus to avoid controversies that are “unprofitable and worthless” (3:9), and there is that idea again: the worthless word, the argument that employs no one and builds nothing.

All people will give an account for their words. The question at the end of this is not whether any one of us was right. Many of us may well have been. But what did the rightness feel like in the chest, and what happened to the bruised reed in our hands?

Thomas Anderson is the pastor of disciple making at Grace Community Church in Fulton, Maryland.

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