Unoffendable Quotes

“Anger is extraordinarily easy. It’s our default setting. Love is very difficult. Love is a miracle.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“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.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“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.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“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.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“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.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Jesus encountered one moral mess after another, and He was never taken aback by anyone’s morality. Ever.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“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.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Few want to hear this, but it’s true, and it can be enormously helpful in life: if you’re constantly being hurt, offended, or angered, you should honestly evaluate your inflamed ego.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Quit trying to parent the whole world. Quit offering advice when exactly zero people asked for it. Quit being shocked when people don’t share your morality. Quit serving as judge and jury, in your own mind, of that person who just cut you off in traffic. Quit thinking you need to “discern” what others’ motives are. And quit rehearsing in your mind what that other person did to you.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“So how about taking this idea to all of our experience: You really can’t believe politicians would lie? You can’t believe a preacher would cheat on his wife? You can’t believe someone would try to steal from you? You can’t believe a neighbor would set off fireworks at 2:00 a.m.? You can’t believe a world leader would tyrannize his own people? Are we going to live in perpetual shock at the nature of man?”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“In the moment, everyone’s anger always seems righteous. Anger is a feeling, after all, and it sweeps over us and tells us we’re being denied something we should have. It provides its own justification. But an emotion is just an emotion. It’s not critical thinking. Anger doesn’t pause. We have to stop, and we have to question it.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“We should forfeit our right to be offended. That means forfeiting our right to hold on to anger. When we do this, we’ll be making a sacrifice that’s very pleasing to God. It strikes at our very pride. It forces us not only to think about humility, but to actually be humble.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Choosing to be unoffendable out of love for others is ministry.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Whenever there’s an injury to a relationship, a hurt, a broken heart, or even a broken thing, and you are willing to forgive, you are saying, “I got this. I’m going to pick up the bill for this.” This is, of course, precisely what God has done for us.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“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.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Grace isn’t for the deserving. Forgiving means surrendering your claim to resentment and letting go of anger.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“We're told in Psalms 46:10, to "be still," or to "cease striving," and know that He is God. Some people are familiar with this verse but not the larger context, which is that of someone looking over the remains of a battlefield. The original Hebrew is suggestive of stopping the fight, letting go, and relaxing.

God wants us to drop our arms.

No more defensiveness. No more taking things personally. He'll handle it. Really.

Trust Him. Rest.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“We hold on to worry because we don’t trust God. We hold on to anger because we don’t trust God. We feel threatened because we’re insecure, and we’re insecure because—surprise!—we don’t trust God.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Everybody’s an idiot but me. I’m awesome.”—@branthansen)”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“rules don’t change anyone’s heart, ever. Grace does.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Love people where they are, and love them boldly.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Being offended is a tiring business. Letting things go gives you energy.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Why isn’t righteous anger ever listed among the things that a Spirit-filled life will bring us? If it’s righteous, why is it not akin to the “fruit of the Spirit,” like love, joy, peace, and gentleness? Why is anger in Scripture so consistently lumped in the other lists, with things like, say, slander and malice, with no exclusions for the “righteous” variety? (See, for example, Colossians 3:8.)”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Your life will become less stressful when you give up your right to anger and offense. And by the way, if you don’t, you’re doomed. So there’s that too.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“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.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“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.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Forfeiting our right to anger makes us deny ourselves, and makes us others-centered. When we start living this way, it changes everything.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Honest question: If I am a good Christian, and have faith and stuff, will God protect my children? Honest answer: He might. Or He might not. Honest follow-up question: So what good is He? I think the answer is that He’s still good. But our safety, and the safety of our kids, isn’t part of the deal. This is incredibly hard to accept on the American evangelical church scene, because we love families, and we love loving families, and we nearly associate godliness itself with cherishing family beyond any other earthly thing. That someone would challenge this bond, the primacy of the family bond, is offensive. And yet . . . Jesus did it. And it was even more offensive, then, in a culture that wasn’t nearly so individualistic as ours. Everything was based on family: your reputation, your status—everything. And yet He challenges the idea that our attachment to family is so important, so noble, that it is synonymous with our love for Him. Which leads to some other spare thoughts, like this: we can make idols out of our families. Again, in a “Focus on the Family” subculture, it’s hard to imagine how this could be. Families are good. 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. Here’s another thought: As wonderful as “mother love” is, we have to make sure it doesn’t become twisted. And it can. It can become a be-all, end-all, and the very focus of a woman’s existence. C. S. Lewis writes that it’s especially dangerous because it seems so very, very righteous. Who can possibly challenge a mother’s love? God can, and does, when it becomes an Ultimate. And it’s more likely to become a disordered Ultimate than many other things, simply because it does seem so very righteous. Lewis says this happens with patriotism too.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Choosing not to take offense is not about simply ignoring wrongs. If someone, say, cuts in front of you in line, you can address the situation. You don’t have to simply accept it. But you can act without contempt, anger, and bitterness.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“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.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better