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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brant Hansen
Read between
November 29 - December 20, 2023
Forfeiting our right to anger makes us deny ourselves, and makes us others-centered. When we start living this way, it changes everything. Actually, it’s not even “forfeiting” a right, because the right doesn’t exist. We’re told to forgive, and that means anger has to go, whether we’ve decided our own anger is “righteous” or not.
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.
Seek justice; love mercy. You don’t have to be angry to do that. People say we have to get angry to fight injustice, but I’ve noticed that the best police officers don’t do their jobs in anger. The best soldiers don’t function out of anger. Anger does not enhance judgment.
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. And since we don’t know, let’s choose ahead of time: we’re just not going to get offended by people.
Your life will become less stressful when you give up your right to anger and offense.
Yes, God sees things we don’t. We can risk loving people—incredibly difficult, insulting people—because He loves us.
Perhaps a big part of being less offendable is seeing the human heart for what it is: Untrustworthy. Unfaithful. Prone to selfishness. Got it. Now we don’t have to be shocked.
Jesus is not a cynic. He’s never scornful, hopeless, or jaded. It’s purely about growing up enough to recognize just how messed up our world really is, and how messed up humans are.
He knows the human heart. And so should we, so we can quit being shocked and adjust our expectations accordingly.
I’ve had to adjust my expectations and stop being offended. Look, you have free will, and you can be perpetually shocked and offended. But be honest: Isn’t it kind of exhausting? This is not cynicism; this is living with realistic expectations—the very same understanding of our nature that Jesus has.
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 to everything it was meant to be. His kingdom is breaking through, bit by bit. Recognize it, and wonder at 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.
See the human heart for what it is, adjust expectations, and be grateful, not angry.
Recognize our brokenness, and then gaze at the beauty of God’s manifested love and grace breaking into the world.
When we recognize our unsurprising fallenness and keep our eyes joyfully open for the glorious exceptions, we’re much less offendable. Why? Because that’s the thing about gratitude and anger: they can’t coexist. It’s one or the other. One drains the very life from you. The other fills your life with wonder. Choose wisely.
God wants us to drop our arms. No more defensiveness. No more taking things personally. He’ll handle it. Really.
You’re not going to like this, but face it for what it is, and say it out loud: “That person I’m angry with? I’m worse.”
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.
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 hand it over. 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 relentless assessment of where we, and everyone else, stand.
He’s offering peace.
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.
When you start practicing it, you realize: choosing to be unoffendable means actually, for real, trusting God.
But if you find your value—your “glory,” as Scripture refers to your self-worth—in anything besides your identity as someone loved by God, you are never going to be truly content. That means ever-present threat, which makes being offended a way of life.
Just making the choice, and being mindful each day that “I’m not going to let people offend me,” is very helpful, and it will make life better. But ultimately, if I’m living in fear of losing something—whether it’s security through status, looks, money, family, whatever—I’m going to be fearful, more easily threatened, and therefore prone to anger.
No wonder we get so angry. We’re displeased with others because we’re convinced God is displeased with us. We “believe” God loves us, but we suspect it’s provisional, based on whether we ever get our act straightened out. That’s a lot to carry.
You suspect you’re unlovable? He loves you. You wonder, deep down, if anyone could really, truly know you and still want you? He knows you better than you know you. And He wants you. You’ve given up on yourself? He hasn’t given up on you. This isn’t feel-good talk; it’s the rightful conclusion we can draw from the cross itself. He still loves us because He’s a Father . . . the One we’ve always wanted.
If this is all true, then 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.
If I’m to love people the way God loves me, I have to love them faults and all.
Choosing to be unoffendable out of love for others is ministry. And real ministry forces us to abandon our relentless search for approval from others. That frees us to love . . . beautifully and recklessly.
We humans can’t save ourselves, but we want to be our own saviors. And many of us would rather go down on our own terms than be humble. It’s that simple, and it’s that tragic.
If they each do their thing, the thing right in front of them, the big picture takes care of itself.
I also can’t help but think that if we just responded to things God places in front of us in our lives, and entrusted the visionary role to the Lord Himself, beautiful things could happen. It doesn’t mean we don’t need leaders; of course we do. But we need humble ones, leaders who don’t need a spotlight, don’t need approval, and don’t need attention. “Ant” leaders who prod us on and serve us in order to help free us to do what God puts in front of us.
People like that are difficult to offend. When we choose, ahead of time—before conversations,
before meetings, before our day begins—to be unoffendable, we’re simply choosing humility.
At the beginning of this book, we talked about the crazy idea that we are not entitled to anger, and, how taking this idea seriously actually opens up new dimensions of rest, grace, and simplicity in our lives. We are, above all, embracing a radical humility. We’re denying ourselves, doing something seemingly self-negating, and then finding that, just as Jesus promised, we haven’t lost anything. We’ve only gained life.
Self-forgetfulness is not about mystically wishing myself into nonexistence or pretending I’m meaningless. It’s just the opposite. Self-forgetfulness is what happens when we’re emotionally healthy. It’s remembering that God is my defender, His opinion is what matters, and whatever my offenders are doing to me, I’ve done to others as well. And God has forgiven me. I simply must forgive in return and forfeit my right to anger.
So it’s not about “clearing the mind” or embracing nothingness. On the contrary, rather than clearing my mind, I have to remind myself of those larger truths. I have to consider others better than myself, consider how the lilies of the field don’t worry about themselves.
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.
Choosing to be unoffendable means choosing to be humble. Not only that, the practice teaches humility. Once you’ve decided you can’t control other people; once you’ve reconciled yourself to the fact that the world, and its people, are broken; once you’ve realized your own moral failure before God; once you’ve abandoned the idea that your significance comes from anything other than God, you’re growing in humility, and that’s exactly where God wants us all.
That’s what this book is ultimately about: living a life of radical forgiveness.
It’s the way of following Jesus. It means constantly humbling ourselves and paying a price (it’s hard to forgive!) when people don’t deserve it.
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. (John 14:27)
But 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. That’s the resource. We forgive as an act of worship. God deserves it.
I’m continually attached to a deep gratefulness for what God has done for me. I’m not “emptying my mind” to deal with anger. I’m filling my mind more consistently with the truth about who I am and how God has been good to me.
Forgiveness is freedom.
realizing the beautiful scandal of our own forgiveness allows us to live a life free of corrosive anger.
We have to constantly be grateful for our own forgiveness.
Jesus says to forgive as you’ve been forgiven. This means dropping our right to anger, of course, but people would rather hear a more complex, nuanced, subtle understanding.
