Offence: Are You Offended?

A person's discretion makes him slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offence. – Proverbs 19:11

Offence is more than being angry and hurt. Offence is holding onto a grudge, nursing bitterness, and allowing the wrong to change your heart condition and contaminate your emotions and thinking. Don't look at the world through the eyes of offence.

The dangers of offence 

Offence makes you blind to others' good qualities and causes you to focus on their negative traits. 

Offence causes you to compare and focus on how you deserve justice and blinds you to your sin. 

Offence causes hardness of heart and affects the way we interpret the world around us and how we perceive others.

How can we choose to live unoffended?  

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Psalm 51:10

1. Forgive Quickly 

Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. – Colossians 3:13 

Choose forgiveness. It's not the easy option, but it is the right option. Don't hold onto the pain. Let it go. Give it to God. Forgive.

2. Choose love.

Keep your love on. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. – 1 Cor 13:4-8

Love is seeing the best in others. Love is being patient and kind. Love is honouring others even when you think they don't deserve it. Love is forgiving others and not holding them to the wrongs they did. Not the easy option, but the right option.

Prayer

Dear Father,

Thank you for sending Your Son to die for us even while we were still sinners. Thank you for forgiving our wrongs and loving us so well. Help us not allow bitterness to grow in our hearts, and give us the strength to let go of any offence we might have carried thus far. Help us to choose love daily, and to see others not through a lens of offence, but through Your eyes of love. Create in us a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within us.

We love You, Lord, amen!