Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better (updated with two new chapters)

by Brant Hansen

We aren’t to just pretend anger away or feel guilty for the initial emotion of anger. But we are to deal with it, with the goal of eradicating it within us.

Does it matter if we’re motivated by anger as long as we do something good with it in fighting injustice? For the Christian, it certainly does. Motives matter.

Living “humbly” is the part I’m so often missing in my anger.

fact, I don’t fully trust God. I’m worried He won’t handle things the way I’d like.

Choosing to be unoffendable, or relinquishing my right to anger, does not mean accepting injustice. It means actively seeking justice, and loving mercy, while walking humbly with God. And that means remembering I’m not Him. What a relief.

We hold on to worry because we don’t trust God. We hold on to anger because we don’t trust God.

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

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.

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

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.

Whether or not you currently feel that God is around doesn’t alter reality.

that very love toward one another would be an accurate test of whether we really believed all this. If we loved others with a newfound patience, a refusal to take offense, and a lack of self-seeking, it would be evidence that all this is real.

our very refusal to be offended, and our patience with one another, would point to the truth of Jesus and that we actually belong to Him.

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

Jesus ended the law as a means to righteousness. Yet so many think they can achieve—even have achieved—some kind of “good Christian” status on the basis of the rule-keeping work they’ve done.

The Founder of my faith gave us new rules of engagement. He was told, like everyone else in His society, to stay away from lepers. He wouldn’t do it. Sure, it made people mad that Jesus was flouting their rules. But He didn’t stay away from lepers. Instead, He touched them and made them whole.

Zacchaeus’s heart was changed. It didn’t take a big, blasting speech from Jesus at the dinner table, either. The very fact that Jesus wasn’t offended by him, and would be with him, and would show love to him in front of others, and would sit in his dining room—that changed his heart.

it’s always grace that changes hearts.

When we choose, ahead of time—before conversations, before meetings, before our day begins—to be unoffendable, we’re simply choosing humility.

we don’t forgive people because they deserve it. We forgive because we didn’t deserve it. We forgive because we’ve been forgiven. That’s it.