On love, forgiveness and being offended.

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Why do people think that getting offended is a Godly trait?

If you love someone, or even if you don’t,  and they do something which offends you, here are 4 possible options:

1)  Forgive them immediately, without even needing to talk to them, figuring they didn’t know that what they were doing was going to be offensive to you, which is most likely true;   “Yeah, that’s not like them….I’m sure they didn’t realize what I’m seeing….I’ll talk to them about it sometime in the future, when the time is right.  And if the time is never right, it probably wasn’t that big of a deal.”
2)  Communicate with them right away; talk to them; discover their side of the story;   Entreat them as a brother.  You’ll usually end up in a richer relationship.
3)  Get good and indignant toward them; angry (righteously so); severely judgmental and condemning.  You probably won’t let it out at first.  You’ll end up saving these hurts up, like a saving account.  It’ll get more and more difficult to see that other person in any other light than that of the condemned….no longer worthy of kind or loving thought or attention.  Any good they do will be attributed to petty ulterior motives.  You’ll end up only accepting evidence which justifies your condemnation of them.  More and more, worse and worse, until one day you BLOW UP!
4)  Walk away from them, figuring they don’t deserve the time or attention required to do (1) or (2) above.  Good chance you’ll be tempted with bitterness or harbor some hurt or resentment, perhaps for a long time.

Did Jesus Christ ever get offended? …….. No!

Getting offended is totally based on personal likes and dislikes, on one’s own customs and mores (ways of moral thinking and behaving).  On experience.  On a personal belief in right and wrong.  (See the studies  The Need To Be Right.. and  What was The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?)  No person who gets offended is “discerning spirits” or is “getting revelation from God.”  Rather, that person’s fleshly morality meter has been dinged.

Getting offended is not a Godly characteristic or trait.  It is not a fruit of the Spirit.  It is not a working of God within.  It does not require salvation in order to partake of.  Rather, it is an ungodly trait.  It is not of God, but rather it is of Satan, of the world.  In the New Testament it is called wrath.   Wrath is righteous anger, moral indignation.  It appeals to a fleshly sense of right and wrong, and not to Godliness, which is love.  Read                        I Corinthians 13:4-8, which includes a list of the qualities of love……I don’t see resentment or getting offended or moral indignation there.

 There is no love in being offended, therefore it cannot be of God.

If I was used to praying before every meal, and there was a guest who came over, and as soon as I set the food down, he began to help himself immediately, maybe I’d get offended.  But was that guest “in sin?”  How about if I was part of a Bible study at my house, and a person kept interrupting me when I was trying to teach the Word of God.  Maybe I’d get offended, but was that person “possessed by a spirit?”  What if a man came up to my wife and said to her, “Ma’am, you are a good looking woman.”  I might get offended, but did that man have evil intent?

Forgiveness includes understanding and allowing a person’s behavior or an incident to be totally encapsulated in the past, so that it has no effect in the present on the one doing the forgiving.  Forgiveness totally frees the forgiver from the evil, negative effect of any person’s behavior.  Forgiveness does not OK the deed or the person doing the perceived evil deed; rather it disassociates the forgiver from the bad effect of that deed, of that doing, and of that doer, allowing him or her to proceed in love.

Love desires fellowship.  Love thinks no evil.  Love initiates the loving action of forgiveness….it doesn’t wait for the other to apologize.  Love allows so many evil deeds done toward it that it keeps no count….at all!  Love decides whether an evil deed done toward it was intentional, or whether the interpretation of that evil deed is only a personal like or dislike.  And then, in either case, it forgives.

Love chooses to believe the best it can of others, all the while keeping its spiritual eyes open.  And so, love discerns between evil itself, and those influenced by that evil.   Love either lets it go, realizes a need to confront, or at least seeks to understand the truth of the evil done.  Love has the strength and wisdom needed to confront in a beneficial, helpful way, if and when that is needed.

And so, true forgiveness occurs within the realm of love.  Being offended occurs only outside the realm of love.

The true discerning of spirits occurs by means of the spirit of the God of love.  True spiritual discernment thinks no evil of the one afflicted by the spirit.    Romans 8:33, 34 has this to say:

Romans 8:33, 34  Who shall lay any thing to the charge of (accuse of a crime) God’s elect?  God who justifies?  Who is he that condemns? (judges as worthy of punishment).   Christ, who died, yeah rather that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us? 

You see, if you are offended by or at someone, it cannot be the spirit of God’s revelation to you.  Rather, it must be the influence of your adversary, the devil, who is causing you to think that because something is rubbing you the wrong way, it must be wrong.

I have offended people in my lifetime.   Almost every time, I discovered I had offended someone when they “blew up” at me.  If that person I offended was a Christian,  then almost always my behavior was considered a sin, or a devilish influence by the one offended.  Seldom did that person just come to me and lovingly present me with the fact that what I’d said hurt them, or embarrassed them, or offended them.  Rather, they used words like, “How dare you,” or “How could you,” or “What makes you think you can,”…..phrases like that.  This is not Godly reproof, not love or Godliness; but rather is only moral indignation being expressed in a hard-hearted way, under the guise of Godly righteousness or Godly anger….when it is no such thing.

On the other hand, I have also been offended by people in my lifetime.   I have never been offended but that I was out of fellowship with the spirit of the living and loving God.  I’m happy to say that I get offended less and less, though I still get tempted, and I still fall to that temptation, from time to time.  The key lies in not justifying that sinfulness, but rather in seeking to be delivered from it.

You are owed nothing by anyone else.  You deserve death, yet you have been given eternal life.  Shall you now hold others to a standard way higher than what you have been held to by God?  If, while you deserved death, you were given life, are others now accountable to you for their behavior?  Oh no!  Rather:

Ephesians 4:32  And be kind one to another, tender hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for the sake of Christ has forgiven you.

God deals with us, having totally encapsulated the sin which kept us from him in and through the sacrifice of Jesus the Christ.  This is forgiveness.  He doesn’t “grin and bear it.”  He doesn’t put up with our sin or put up with us.  He deals with us as without sin.  And that love provides the environment within which we can be truly delivered from all evil.  When you’re loved by God as if you have no sin, sin is a lot easier to not partake of and to walk away from.

And so let us go forth in love toward one another, thinking kindly and with readiness to forgive any slight (real or imagined) or poor behavior toward ourself or in our presence.  Let us seek kindness, understanding and forgiveness as the tools of our spiritual warfare, rather than a hardened sense of right and wrong by which we punish with our words, our attitudes, our ostracism and our hardened hearts, those wrongdoers who offend us.

Love, forgiveness and being offended.  Excel at the first two.  Let that last one not be named among the saints.  Overlook, forgive……don’t just blow up and/or walk away offended.
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Get Over Yourself
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To Judge or not To Judge
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