Today’s food for thought is from a book I’m reading by Brant Hansen, Unoffendable. The book is based on a radical premise, that Christians shouldn’t get angry.

On being offended, and the love of God:

“The goodness of God is not dependent on my attentiveness to it. It does not come and go, wax and wane, or suddenly vanish like my misguided, untrustworthy emotions. We’re just not very attentive, honestly…

But there’s a bigger problem, and it’s based on years of interacting with thousands of self-described Christians: It’s not merely that we’re not attentive to the fact that God loves us. I suspect many of us just don’t actually believe it.

No wonder we get so angry. We’re displeased with others because we’re convinced God is displeased with us. We “believe God loves us, but we suspect it’s provisional, based on whether we ever get our act straightened out. That’s a lot to carry.

If Christians are indeed the most easily offended people on the planet, this burden would go a long way toward explaining why. We’re convinced that God has six hundred-plus rules – rules we know we can’t keep – and that he’s ticked off at us. But we try to keep them anyway. It’s a prescription for immense frustration with ourselves.

And then we see other people not trying as hard as we are and that’s downright enraging. We hope God will give them their comeuppance someday, because if he doesn’t, what the heck are we doing all this for?

So we believe the “good news,” but not really. Not fully. We simultaneously do and we don’t. Humans manage to do this with a lot of things. Many of us are a lot like the man in Mark 9 who begs Jesus to help his boy…”

“I believe; help my unbelief!”

 

It’s an interesting read…

For more, check out Unoffendable, by Brant Hansen, 2015. W Publishing Group. Nashville, Tennessee.