Am I Unoffendable?

““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).

This book is one of those that comes along and does a seismic shift on your thinking. I’ve always grown up believing that we’re supposed to be righteously angry about injustice and wrongs and sin, but this book is showing me that you can be actively against all those things without giving in to anger.

Based on what I understand, the Bible never calls for us to be angry. It does say that in your anger not to sin. It also says that anger does not produce the righteousness of God. I think when it says to be angry but don’t sin, it’s making allowances for the natural human tendency to anger. It also says not to stay there.

The only one allowed to be truly angry is God — and of course, Jesus — because God can have pure anger rooted in a holiness and righteousness that we don’t have. We can choose not to give in to anger without also giving in to all the wrongs and oppression in the world. We can fight those things out of love rather than anger.

I don’t want to give too much of the book away. It’s worth reading and says all the things I just said but way better than I just said them. Plus, if you get the audio version you get the book read by the author, which is almost always a bonus (and it is in this case).

A lot of our anger comes from the misguided view of calling out the sin in others while ignoring our own sin. We can easily become Pharisee-ical in seeing evil and wrong as being “out there” and “in them” rather than acknowledging my own sinful depravity and capacity for evil apart from the grace of God.

I’m a little over halfway there, so those are my takeaways thus far. My assignment for you is to find the actual book or the audio book and to devour it in short order. It’s an easy read (or an easy listen if you prefer). I’m even going through all the trouble of providing a link to the book on amazon.com. You’re welcome.

https://www.amazon.com/Unoffendable-Change-Better-updated-chapters/dp/1400333598/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.CCApAzLdwJEJ_bILerbPnP92PX4ePbEFxUdfzlwKQuQp8W7M9XUk146MAeiZVMFn_gCWS1YcpqnZy9olfkdcAfSWcn5iw6qDCNSMfQHhWM4EdxijLEVgmtywazlTVSyAjhJq8cHtUVNdhY2iyqRj5RPo8i-hjYAd2LH_aHTRyJG9DkQ7VkckmFOCsXjPi3Xs1hSaBdb8kGdBR9qVSFqkSUFMAdfYgPn_TY8uuyNJF1s.loHWjW318gTjgxlSS8Hem4fAJ5QuDVig1J42IDbTcCk&dib_tag=se&keywords=unoffendable&qid=1730083531&sr=8-1

Weeping Prayers

This is not me currently, but I know a few people who are navigating the process of grieving a loved one. It’s never an easy process and even though I’ve been around a while, I still can’t say that grief is a natural process because death really isn’t natural. It’s a product of the fall brought about by sin and not in God’s original design.

I do believe that God hears weeping as a prayer as much as He will hear your words and desires of your heart. The Bible says that God collects our tears in a bottle. I know that someone in deep grief may not have anything more than tears to offer to God, and that is enough.

As a reminder, there is no time limit on grief, because grief is the price of love this side of heaven. It will never be right that the person isn’t here. It will never be right that you will never hear that familiar voice or see that face again until heaven.

I love the fact that Jesus, knowing He was about to call His friend Lazarus out of the grave, still wept over his death. He wept over the grief of his friends who had no inkling of the coming miracle. He wept to show that we can believe in heaven and the resurrection and still be sad at the same time.

So I’m saying that there’s no shame in grief. Sometimes tears can be the only prayers we have.

Come Out from Among Them

“Therefore go out from their midst,
    and be separate from them, says the Lord” (2 Corinthians 6:17,ESV).

I think the time is coming when true followers of Jesus will have to “come out from among them and be separate,” as the old King James puts it.

I think for some of us, it will mean leaving churches and denominations that no longer teach the Bible or the true gospel of Jesus. It might mean distancing yourself from a political party (or both of them) that no longer follows biblical morality.

I have to tread carefully here because I don’t want to be judgmental, but I think America has a lot of people who identify as Christians but a lot less who actually follow Jesus. Many are spiritual or religious but far fewer have been truly born again and are regenerate new creations.

The answer to the moral free fall the country is in is not to get “our” people elected or to get “our” platform made into law. It’s not even to get lost people to act right. It’s to get Christians back to believing and acting like Christians. It’s to get churches back to the whole gospel of Jesus and the whole Bible, teaching those old-fashioned concepts like hell, sin, atonement, and salvation.

We probably need to learn how to believe in the gospel again apart from the American Dream that we’ve woven into the redeeming narrative of the cross. We need to return to being the prophetic voice of God instead of vying for political power. We could do with a present day John the Baptist or two to tell people to repent because the Kingdom of God is coming.

We need to get back to the gospel that is for all people. Not a gospel of God loves you just as you are and wants you to stay that way, but God loves you too much to let you live in anything less than His absolute best for you. We also need to love the least of these like Jesus did, remembering when we serve one of these, we serve Jesus Himself.

We need a true revival not of showy emotions and signs and wonders but of confessing sin and repenting and turning from our way and following God’s way. We need to stop conforming with the world and letting it teach us theology and return to being transformed by the renewing of our minds by God’s word.

At this point, I think it will take a miraculous act of God to turn us around. You did it in the past, Lord. Do it again, God. Do it again.

Praying for the Lost

“Oh, our glorious Lord, you have taught us to pray for others, for the grace which could have met with such undeserving sinners as we are must be able to meet with the vilest of the vile. Our Father in heaven, we offer prayer for those who never think of you; who, though created by you, are strangers to you; who are fed by your bounty, and yet never lift their voices to you, but live for self, for the world, for Satan, for sin. Father, these cannot pray for themselves for they are dead; your quickened children pray for them. These will not come to you, for, like sheep, they are lost; but seek them, Father, and bring them back.
Amen” (Charles Spurgeon).

Sometimes, I think we get so caught up bashing our enemies that we forget that we’re commanded to pray for them. Note that Jesus did not make a suggestion or a friendly reminder, but instead gave us a command. We don”t get to choose whether we want to obey or not.

But when we see lost people acting lost, why are we surprised? Maybe we should be more amazed that we’re not lost because when we were dead in our sins, God made us alive. If not for the grace of God, we’d all be just as lost and hopeless as anyone out there in the world.

So we can pray for those apart from Jesus just as others prayed for us when we were just as far from God and just as dead in sin. We can pray that God will do what no one else but God can do — save people.

It’s good to have a list of people that you’re praying for their salvation. You could pray daily or weekly or however you feel led. Even now, I’m thinking of someone who’s far off from God at the moment and praying he’ll come to a true saving faith in Jesus. Not because I’m extra special super spiritual, but because I know how much I needed Jesus when I was lost (and how much I still need Jesus now).

The Bible teaches us that no one is past saving or beyond the grace of God or ever too lost for God to find. Who knows but that our persistent praying might lead some of them in the the kingdom of God. Wouldn’t it be amazing to run into one of them and say, “You know, I prayed for you to be here, and here you are. Isn’t God good?”

Convictions and Compassion

“Having Christian convictions can’t ever negate having Christ’s compassion” (Ann Voskamp).

It’s not a case of either/or. It’s both.

In today’s culture, there are those on one side who let their compassion override their convictions. They preach tolerance (except for those who happen to disagree with them) and teach that loving people means loving their sin.

On the other side of the fence, there are people whose convictions have turned them into people who not only need to be proven right but everyone else must have their faces rubbed in the fact that they’re wrong.

If you truly follow Jesus, you’ll have both. Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery “Neither do I condemn you” with compassion, but He also told her “Go and sin no more” with conviction. Yes, Jesus loved sinners and ate with tax collectors and prostitutes, but He loved them into repentance and transformation. When He ascended into heaven, they weren’t sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes anymore. They were devoted disciples living a new way of justice and holiness.

Remember, it’s not either/or. It’s both/and. God was compassionate toward you while you were a sinner far from grace but He still calls you through conviction to repent and turn to Jesus in faith.

Holding on to the Gospel

“Too many times we give away the one thing the world needs from us to secure the shallow security of ‘fitting in'” (Mike Glenn).

“One of the most striking evidences of sinful human nature lies in the universal propensity for downward drift.

 In other words, it takes thought, resolve, energy, and effort to bring about reform.

In the grace of God, sometimes human beings display such virtues. But where such virtues are absent, the drift is invariably toward compromise, comfort, indiscipline, sliding disobedience and decay that advances, sometimes at a crawl and sometimes at a gallop, across generations.

People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, and obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord.

We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance;

we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom;

we drift toward superstition and call it faith.

We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation;

we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism;

we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated” (Don Carson, For the Love of God, p. 23).

I remember in ye olden days when I first heard the plan of salvation. I can’t remember the exact details, but it involved a loving God, sin separating me from God, Jesus shedding His blood on a cross to make a way for me to be right with God, and eternal life that comes from salvation.

Now a lot of churches are preaching a gospel of “I’m okay, you’re okay, there’s no sin or need of salvation.” There’s no such thing as hell and God accepts everyone, regardless of lifestyle choices or addictive behavior. Churches are bending over backward to accommodate a culture we’re supposed to be trying to reach for Jesus. We’re blending in when we should be standing out, as I’ve heard it said.

We’ve traded in the gospel that is the power of salvation for something that has the form of godliness but without any actual power to do anything other than make people comfortable in their sin. The Apostle Paul would call such a gospel false and would say that anyone who preaches such a gospel, even an angel from heaven, is anathema or cursed.

The point was never to fit in. We’ll never fit in. Eventually, we’ll look and sound so much like the world that we’ll be unrecognizable as a church and cease to have any anointing or authority. When churches host pride events or have nights that celebrate people like Beyonce instead of Jesus, they have stopped being churches.

I think nothing short of revival will do. Nothing short of a supernatural movement of God in American churches will stop the drift away from true and orthodox faith. But God is still able. All we need to do is humble ourselves and pray.

A Puritan Prayer

This is most likely a repeat, but it’s worth reading again. It’s from The Valley of Vision, a collection of Puritan prayers that is one of the best books I have ever read outside of the Bible:

“O God of Grace,
Thou hast imputed my sin to my substitute,
and hast imputed his righteousness to my soul,
clothing me with bridegroom’s robe,
decking me with jewels of holiness.
But in my Christian walk I am still in rags;
my best prayers are stained with sin;
my penitential tears are so much impurity;
my confessions of wrong are so many aggravations of sin;
my receiving the Spirit is tinctured with selfishness.
I need to repent of my repentance;
I need my tears to be washed;
I have no robe to bring to cover my sins,
no loom to weave my own righteousness;
I am always standing clothed in filthy garments,
and by grace am always receiving change of raiment,
for thou dost always justify the ungodly;
I am always going into the far country,
and always returning home as a prodigal,
always saying, Father, forgive me,
and thou art always bringing forth the best robe.
Every morning let me wear it,
every evening return in it,
go out to the day’s work in it,
be married in it,
be wound in death in it,
stand before the great white throne in it,
enter heaven in it shining as the sun.
Grant me never to lose sight of
the exceeding sinfulness of sin,
the exceeding righteousness of salvation,
the exceeding glory of Christ,
the exceeding beauty of holiness,
the exceeding wonder of grace” (The Valley of Vision – A collection of Puritan Prayers & Devotions, Edited by Arthur Bennett).

Prone to Wander

“Robert Robinson had been saved out of a tempestuous life of sin through George Whitfield’s ministry in England. Shortly after that, at the age of twenty-three, Robinson wrote the hymn, ‘Come, Thou Fount. Come, Thou Fount of ev’ry blessing, Streams of mercy, never ceasing, Call for songs of loudest praise’.

Sadly, Robinson wandered far from those streams and like the Prodigal Son, journeyed into the distant country of carnality. Until one day—he was traveling by stagecoach and sitting beside a young woman engrossed in her book. She ran across a verse she thought was beautiful and asked him what he thought of it. ‘Prone to wander— Lord, I feel it— Prone to leave the God I love’. Bursting into tears Robinson said, ‘Madam, I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then.’

Although greatly surprised, she reassured him that the ‘streams of mercy’ mentioned in his song still flowed. Mr. Robinson was deeply touched. Turning his ‘wandering heart’ to the Lord, he was restored to full fellowship” (Kenneth W. Osbeck, 101 Hymn Stories).

I love a good back story, especially when it comes to how hymns were composed. It’s no coincidence that the very words Robert Robinson penned were exactly the words he needed to hear when he had wandered from his faith. God used his own words to speak to him and woo him back.

God still speaks to us in a variety of ways, but primarily through His word. I think so many of us — me included — will go through the day with our Bibles closed and wonder why we haven’t heard from God.

I remember when I got my very first Bible as a first grader, the pastor wrote in the inside of the cover, “This Book will keep you from sin, or sin will keep you from this book.”

How true that has been. We need God’s word and God’s people around us to help us find the way back when we’ve wandered. We may be prone to wander, but God is always faithful to bring His wayward child back.

Holiness and Mercy

I was watching a podcast video with Andy Chrisman and Steve Camp talking about how Steve took such a bold stand in the late 90s against what was going on in the Christian music industry at the time. He also spoke about a couple of his songs related to the emerging AIDS crisis in the 80s. One phrase that stood out to me was “holiness never compromised, mercy never restrained.”

That’s the essence of the gospel. We’re never to tolerate sin in the name of mercy, but we’re also never to condemn the sinner in the name of holiness. The same Jesus that told the woman that He didn’t condemn her for her adultery also said, “Go and sin no more.”

Jesus never accommodated sinful lifestyles, but He also never withheld His love from those in those lifestyles who earnestly sought Him in their need. The message He proclaimed was not “I’m OK, you’re OK, just do the best you can” but “I’m calling you out of your sin into something better because I love you enough to want God’s best for you.”

I can’t say that I’m the best at balancing holiness and mercy. I can testify that I’m really good at looking down on sins that I don’t struggle with. I can be more permissive with my own faults than forgiving of others with theirs.

But I believe that Jesus is the one who perfectly embodies holiness and mercy as the 100% God, 100% man who is both just and the justifier. I believe in the gospel message that Jesus can change and transform anybody from anything into something holy. I’m seeing it in my own life and in so many lives of the people I know and love.

The challenge is to hold to both holiness and mercy, not pitting one against the other or elevating one at the expense of the other. We need both. Most of all, we all need Jesus.

Palm Sunday

“Almighty and everlasting God, who, of thy tender love towards mankind, has sent thy Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, to take upon him our flesh and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may both follow the example of his patience, and also be made partakers of his resurrection, through the same Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen” (from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer).

Today is Palm Sunday, a week out from Easter Sunday. This is traditionally the day that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey to shouts of “Hosanna!” and “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.”

The crowd was cheering and laying down palm branches before His path. Apparently, in that day palm trees symbolized victory and triumph. Maybe the crowd was anticipating an imminent overthrow of Roman rule. Maybe they were expecting Jesus to start acting the part of an earthly king.

Were those people the same ones who later shouted for Barrabus to be released and for this Jesus to be crucified? I’ve heard a lot of sermons that hinged on the same people at one moment praising Jesus and at the next condemning Him. But I’ve also heard that it wasn’t necessarily the same people.

Regardless, Jesus looked beyond the praise to the pain. He focused beyond the crowds on the cross and all the torture He would shortly endure. His mission wasn’t to get the approval of the crowds in that moment but to set His face toward Jerusalem and Golgotha. His purpose was to lay down His life for the flock.

I heard in a sermon today that to appreciate the joy of Easter Sunday, you need to walk through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Take in all the mocking. Being abandoned by His disciples. The beatings. The whip that tore strips of flesh of His back. The carrying of the cross up the hill to Golgatha. All those hours in agony up on that cross. Giving up His spirit and dying.

It’s important to remember that sin isn’t something that God ever takes lightly or brushes off. The Father doesn’t wink at our transgressions and ignore all the wrong we’ve done. Sin always has a cost, and that cost is always death. In the Old Testament, the price was the sacrifice of an animal that pointed forward to the ultimate sacrifice to come. In the New Testament, that ultimate sacrifice is Jesus willingly laying down His life for us.

Take time in the next week to reflect on the fact that Jesus bore the whip and the nails for you and me. He chose the wounds and scars that we might be healed. He died that we might live. And then you can celebrate Easter Sunday a week from today with joy.