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

by Brant Hansen

Truth is, we want Jesus to leave our self-righteousness intact. He wants to smash it.

Refusing to be offended by others is a powerful door-opener to actual relationships.

At some level, of course, I enjoy trying to control the behavior of others. Only problem: I can’t even fully control me.

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.

My goal with relationships is no longer to try to change people. It’s to introduce people to a God who is already reaching toward them, right where they are.

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

don’t pretend the differences aren’t there; I just appreciate that God has a different timetable with everyone.

And yes, I’ve seen wonderful things happen as a result of this newfound patience with people, things like great conversations and changed lives. But that’s not even the point for me, because I’m not responsible for changing people’s lives. I’m responsible for faithfully loving them. As a believer, that means pointing them to a God who dearly wants them, and for whom I happen to know they yearn.

don’t control anyone, because that’s God’s job. That’s His deal. I can just...

Wait: We’re supposed to surrender the idea that we know others’ motivations?

God knows how we’re wired. He tells us to forgive and to get rid of anger. People made in His image would do well to listen. It means everything, not just for us, but for those around us.

Life is better this way. It’s better when we admit what we don’t know, realize our own moral status before God, and give up our made-up Right to Be Offended.

We think we want a right to “righteous anger.” It takes a tremendous amount of humility, an extraordinary “dying to self” to hand over this desire, this job, this obsession, to God. But He made us, and He knows how we

operate best. He says to ha...

And He’s promising something of value that no one else—and literally, no other religion—promises. He’s promising a release from the constant evaluation, never-ending striving, and relentles...

He’s promising a better way of life. He’s holding it out to us, saying, “Hand over the garbage,” and He means it, because He loves us, and He has somet...

Let’s dispense with one idea at the very start of this chapter: that anger and action are synonymous. Often, we confuse the two, thinking that if we’re not angry about an unjust situation, we’re simply accepting it. That’s completely false.

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

So you can’t just do the right thing, because it’s the right thing? The Bible gives us ample commands to act, and never, ever, says to do it out of anger. Instead, we’re to be motivated by something very different: love, and obedience born of love.

The Bible gives us ample commands to act, and never, ever, says to do it out of anger.

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.

In order for us to justify our right to anger, we have to confuse ourselves with God.

My anger isn’t a sign of trust; it’s the very opposite. I’m worried someone’s going to get away with something, like God’s not noticing and it’s all up to me. This kind of anger is perfectly human, of course, and perfectly natural, and just as perfectly destructive as any other kind of anger.

We are capable of imagining threats and staying in a kind of constant, low-grade fight-or-flight mode. We’re capable of feeling threatened all the time, by things that haven’t even happened and may not ever happen.

Animals don’t harm themselves with worry. They don’t go into fight mode by creating threats with their imaginations. Humans do.

The research says that stress can even make our DNA appear older. Remarkable. Stress, the response to threat, is designed to equip us to live longer, and yet being anxious doesn’t lengthen our lives at all. It ages us.

When you start practicing it, you realize: choosing to be unoffendable means actually, for real, trusting God.

So what have we learned from this? If your security is based on your looks—or property or achievement, for that matter—you’re in for a life of stress, because whatever it is you think you need, once you get it—if you ever get it—there’s no guarantee you won’t lose it.

But idols aren’t made of bad things. They used to be fashioned out of trees or stone, and those aren’t bad, either. Idols aren’t bad things; they’re good things, made Ultimate.

We make things Ultimate when we see the true God as a route to these things, or a guarantor of them. It sounds like heresy, but it’s not: the very safety of our family can become an idol.

God wants us to want Him for Him, not merely for what He can provide.

God wants us to want Him for Him, not His gifts. And this is the whole point of trust.

We say “I trust Jesus,” or “Trust in the Lord, and . . .” and all that stuff. But here’s where the words actually mean something: What if . . . the worst happens? Do you still trust Him? Do you believe it’s really the end of the story if it does happen? Isn’t that the point of trust itself, that you’re stepping into mystery?

And yet, His love is amazing. And His love is persistent and perpetual and unrelenting, even as our emotions, and our attention spans, aren’t. The goodness of God is not dependent on my attentiveness to it. It does not come and go, wax and wane, or suddenly vanish like my misguided, untrustworthy emotions.

God’s grace is still amazing. We can ignore it, let it slide from our awareness, and yet . . . there it is.

Whether or not you currently feel that God is around doesn’t alter reality. Whether or not you feel He loves you, or even that you are worthy of His love, doesn’t change reality either.

what we believe isn’t what we say we believe; it’s what we do.

Jesus, the one who made breakfast for His betrayers, wants us to love as He loves.

Without love, I’m just a bunch of noise. And even when well-intentioned, my arguments are abstractions. People have heard so many words. They want to see the love of God. We quote Scripture, saying, “God is love,” and “Love covers a multitude of sins” (1 John 4:8; 1 Peter 4:8 NLT), but if we don’t demonstrate this, our words are just more useless racket.

Jesus said should be our defining characteristic: love for one another.

It’s both. I know God has already forgiven me. And yet this very truth obligates me. It means if someone has done something to wound me, I have to endure a second hurt, one that feels like another wound. My sense of justice says the person who hurt me should pay; but with forgiveness, it’s the forgiver—the victim—who must pay again.

Our anger is valuable to us. That’s why we want to hold it, to savor it. It means something. It means we’ve been wronged, we’re in the right, and we’re the victims in an unfair exchange. We want to even out the scales, and one way to do it, at least psychologically, is to stay offended.

Since anger has value, giving it up requires a sacrifice.

“Give up your anger. Because of what I’ve done for you, give it up, and forgive.” Sadly, our response is, “That’s not fair.” And we walk away too.

I’m not “winning” or “losing” because I’m not even playing that game anymore. I’m off the board. Jesus is giving us a completely different way to live, and it’s one that sets us free from anger, free from ever-present guilt, free to really love people, free from constant anxiety, and free to get a good night’s sleep.