Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

by Brant Hansen

Forfeiting our right to anger makes us deny ourselves, and makes us others-centered. When we start living this way, it changes everything.

Grace isn’t for the deserving. Forgiving means surrendering your claim to resentment and letting go of anger.

Being offended is a tiring business. Letting things go gives you energy.

Offense obscures our vision. Removing offense enables us to see people in wonderful, new ways.

Yes, the world is broken. But don’t be offended by it. Instead, thank God that He’s intervened in it, and He’s going to restore it.

War is not exceptional; peace is. Worry is not exceptional; trust is. Decay is not exceptional; restoration is. Anger is not exceptional; gratitude is. Selfishness is not exceptional; sacrifice is. Defensiveness is not exceptional; love is. And judgmentalism is not exceptional . . . But grace is.

We have nothing to prove, and when we really believe that, we’ll hardly be quick to anger.

Refusing to be alienated and put off by the sin of others is what allows me to be Christlike.

Love people where they are, and love them boldly. And if you really want to go crazy, like them too.

Refusing to be angry about others’ views isn’t conflict avoidance or happy-talk. It’s the very nature of serving people.

Anger and action are two very different things, and confusing the two actually hurts our efforts to set things right.

Acting out of love, to show mercy, to correct injustices, to set things right . . . is beautiful. Love should be motivation enough to do the right thing. And not “love” as a fuzzy abstraction, but love as a gutsy, willful decision to seek the best for others.

Choosing to be unoffendable out of love for others is ministry.

You’re supposed to get what’s coming to you based on how you keep the rules. It’s the common-sense thing. It’s, you know, “balanced.” Jesus is imbalanced.

Rules don’t change anyone’s heart, ever. Grace does.

Loving people means divesting ourselves of our status. We’re not being naive in doing it. We’ve surrendered it for good reason, believing that there is something better in exchange. We decide to be unoffendable because that’s how love operates; it gives up its “status” entirely.

When we consider our sinfulness, consider what God has done for us. Is there anything left, anything He didn’t cover? Are we so bad that Jesus needs to suffer again? Did He not go far enough to cover my rebellion? Or yours? No way. I’m not that special, and neither are you. There’s not one thing left undone, not one more punishment God has to take on our behalf, to meet the demands of the Law. Nothing. “It is finished,” Jesus said. The Law has been fulfilled, completed. Done. And if that was too subtle, the curtain that divided God from the sinners was ripped in two.

People are positively beaten down with guilt, beaten down with the demands of religions, including the Christian one, and feeling like they can never measure up. This is because they can’t. But Jesus can.

Many of us would rather go down on our own terms than be humble. It’s that simple, and it’s that tragic.

A well-established concept in psychology is the “imaginary audience,” and one particularly great experiment plumbing this had college students, given new T-shirts, attending a large lecture. The shirts had oversized, and embarrassing, pictures of Barry Manilow’s face. After the class, they were asked, “What percentage of fellow students noticed you?” They all guessed around 80 percent. Reality: almost no one noticed.

This is how the kingdom of God works. The last are first, the first are last, and in the end, as much as we want to think our performance is all that matters, the victory has exactly nothing to do with us.

The things you think matter so much? They don’t matter so much. If you put your trust in God, you’re already a “success” because Jesus succeeded. You needn’t be insecure in who you are—not because you’re so great, but because your security isn’t found in who you are.