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

by Brant Hansen

The thing that you think makes your anger “righteous” is the very thing you are called to forgive.

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

Yes, there is right and wrong, and what Jesus has done for us is the antidote to both fuzzy-minded relativism and selfrighteous religiosity.

Whatever anyone’s done to me, or to anyone else, I stand just as guilty.

People have lied to me, but I’ve lied too. People have been unfaithful to me, but I’ve been unfaithful too. People have hurt me, and I’ve hurt them. I get angry toward murderers, and then here comes Jesus, telling me if I’ve ever hated someone—and I have—I am the murderer’s moral equal.

We want to follow the gospel, wherever it takes us. God has a way for us to live—a humility that He has called us to—and it’s the way we humans happen to really flourish.

Natural as this is, Jesus came along and gave us a distinctly supernatural, and radically better, way to live.

We have no idea what is in someone else’s heart. We don’t know the backstory. We don’t know what’s happening in his mind. We don’t know how her brain works. We think we do, sure, but we don’t.

God knows others’ private motives. We don’t. God knows our private motives. We don’t. We think we can judge others’ motives. We’re wrong.

We simply can’t trust ourselves in our judgments of others. We don’t know what they’re really thinking, or their background, or what really motivated whatever they did.

Oh yes, the heart is deceptive. And that calls for humility above all else, because my heart isn’t deceptive because it fools other people. It’s deceptive because it fools me.

I can’t handle anger. I don’t have the strength of character to do it. Only God does. We can trust Him with it. Jesus gets angry, but His character is beyond question, so He is entitled.

We all think that we deserve to carry anger, but it will destroy us unless we let it go. We have to deny ourselves, die to ourselves, and surrender ourselves. Whatever it takes.

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