Pride keeps you from dealing with the truth. It distorts your vision. You never change when you think everything is fine. Pride hardens your heart and dims the eyes of your understanding. The problem with being offended is you focus on the other person and not yourself. This keeps you from the change of heart that will set you free. Pride causes you to see yourself as a victim. Your attitude becomes, “I was mistreated and misjudged; therefore, I am justified in my behavior.” Because you believe you are innocent and falsely accused, you hold back forgiveness. Though your true heart condition is hidden from you, it is not hidden from God. Just because you were mistreated, you do not have permission to hold on to an offense. Two wrongs don’t make a right!
Jesus said our ability to see correctly is another key to being freed from deception. Often when we are offended we see ourselves as victims and blame those who have hurt us. We justify our bitterness, our unwillingness to forgive, our anger, envy and resentment as they surface. Sometimes we even resent those who remind us of others who have hurt us. When we blame others and defend our own position, we are blind. We struggle to remove the speck from our brother’s eye when there is a plank in ours. It is the revelation of truth that brings freedom to us. When the Spirit of God shows us our sin, He always does it in such a way that it seems separate from us. This brings conviction, but does not bring condemnation.
The Bible speaks a lot about love. There are two main types of love. There is agape love, which is the love of God. The other is phileo, which is defined as the love between friends. Agape love is defined in 1 Corinthians 13. Agape love does not put itself first, as we do when we are offended and refuse to forgive the offender. Agape love is the love God sheds abroad in the hearts of His children. It is the same love Jesus gives freely to us. It is unconditional. It is not based on how the other person behaves, or even if it is returned in kind. It is a love that gives even when it is rejected. Do you realize that without God’s help and His example, we can only love with a selfish love — one that cannot be given if it is not received and returned? Agape love, however, loves regardless of the response. This is the love that Jesus shed when He forgave from the cross. How could you or I possibly forgive our tormenters as Jesus did?
We have to realize that when we sow the love of God we reap the love of God. We need to develop faith in this spiritual law — even though we may not harvest it from the field in which we sowed, or as quickly as we would like. I came to realize that the love I express unconditionally (which is not a frequent occurrence) is made possible by the Holy Spirit. Eventually, I would reap those seeds of love. I don’t know from where, but I knew the harvest would happen. No longer do I see it as a failure when love isn’t returned from the person I am giving it to. This freed me to love the person even more! If more Christians recognized this, they wouldn’t give up and become offended. Usually this is not the type of love we walk in. Our love is a selfish love that is easily disappointed when our expectations are not met. We need to lower our expectations and increase our acceptance. We will be much happier.
If I have expectations about certain people, those people can let me down. They will disappoint me to the degree that they fall short of my expectations. But if I have no expectations about someone, anything given is a blessing and not a debt owed. We set ourselves up for offense when we require certain behaviors. The more we expect, the greater the potential offense. We construct walls when we are hurt to safeguard our hearts and prevent any future wounds. I offended someone recently and they all but cut me off to avoid being hurt again. We become selective, denying entry to all we fear will hurt us. We filter out anyone we think owes us something. Here’s the thing. Without us knowing it, these walls we build eventually imprison us.
The focus of offended Christians is inward and introspective. We guard our rights and personal relationships very carefully. Our energy is consumed with making sure no future injuries will occur. If we don’t risk being hurt, we cannot give unconditional love. Unconditional love actually gives others the right to hurt us. Love does not seek its own, but hurt people become more and more self-seeking and self-contained. The love of God cannot express itself in this type of environment. An offended Christian is one who takes in life but because of fear can’t release life. As a result, even the life that comes in becomes stagnant.
Get this. When we filter everything through past hurts, rejections and offenses, we find it impossible to believe God about the abundant life we can have through Christ. I read something in a book about Hinduism that if we remain offended by someone in the past and don’t deal with it, our present actions are more driven than they are undertaken. In other words, we lack the freedom to chose how to behave or how to react. Our past chooses for us. If we are offended and in unforgiveness, and refuse to repent of this sin, we have not come to the knowledge of the truth. We are deceived, and we confuse others with our hypocritical lifestyle.
We must come to the place where we trust God and not our flesh or our emotions. Many give lip service to God as their source, yet they live as if they were orphans. They take their own lives in their hands while they confess with their mouth, “He is my Lord and my God.” I hope by now you see how serious the sin of offense is. If it is not dealt with, offense will lead to death. But when you resist the temptation to be offended, God brings great victory. Of course, we have to adopt a God-like love, the agape love, in order to walk this most difficult walk. The good thing is, we can choose this path anew every day, always coming back to unconditional love, by the grace of God.
The Accidental Apologist 