Why Are We So Easily Offended?

We live in a society where it seems like everybody's offended.

Everybody's offended over somebody, right?

I don't know if I've ever seen a time where people are so easily offended by somebody else. And we have all these avenues where we can just attack each other. Someone will... I saw something the other day. It was a TikTok thing. They get attacked by an Instagram thing. They get attacked by something else. And then everybody had to issue apologies on all platforms. I mean, it just went all over the place. Everybody had to apologize to everybody, but nobody seemed to mean it. No, but it was the sort of expected thing to do.

Everybody's offended, and yet everybody has an opinion, and everybody's angry. Just so much anger and angst and anxiety and worry. And you look at all that, and you think about us. How easily do we offend each other? How easily do we offend each other? Now, when we're offended, it's because either in reality or sometimes just a perception. But many times it's true. Somebody has said something to us or done something to us that hurt our feelings and made us feel bad. Maybe it made us look bad in front of somebody else. Maybe it's something that wasn't even completely true. Something has happened to us, and it hurt our feelings. Now, many times we'll just say, ah, well, it's not that important, right? Eh, so what? They were having a bad day, or I know them better than that. And we just forget about it. But what happens when you can't? And I'm talking today about inside the church. And I want to stress that. I'm not talking about offenses that happen outside the church. And we're going to talk a little bit about healing from being offended. I'm not talking about, I mean, real abuse. I'm not talking about those kinds of things. Those are totally different discussions. I'm talking about the daily things or regular things that happen between Christians in the congregation and where they offend each other. And they carry that around with each other. I want to talk about that by first looking at some of the core reasons why we get offended. Now, usually when you hear a sermon like this, the sermon is, here's how to go deal with somebody who's offended you. And I'm not going to talk about that at all. I'm talking about when you've been offended, what do you do before you go deal with it? So we're not even going to go to Matthew 18. Or the Scriptures you usually go to, they say, here's how you deal with offense. We're not even going to go there. Now you might be thinking, that makes no sense. If someone's offended me, I need to deal with it. Oh, thank you.

I'm going to talk about what do you do when you've been offended first. I've known people who haven't talked to each other. I don't know what this congregation, and other congregations for 25 years because something that happened 25 years ago. And the question is, how can people in the body of Christ, how can we do that? How can we do that with each other? Oh, good. Now I'm going to go confront them. Wait a minute. Before you do that, something else has to happen. So let me mention some of the motivations, some of the reasons why we get offended, and why we have such a hard time dealing it when we are offended. Why do we have such a hard time? So someone's offended me. Why is it that I can't let go of it? Because here's what happens to us. You can't forget the offense. You just can't forget it. You become absolutely distraught over what the person said or what they did. You can't get over the feeling of being offended. It becomes an obsession. You think about it a lot, and then you think about it all the time. And everything reminds you of how you've been offended. Everything reminds you of that person. And there's actually a way the brain does that. I won't go into that. But it actually, through association, if you get angry with somebody and you think about it long enough, it'll begin to associate it with all kinds of memories so that another memory comes up and you immediately think of that person. You can't get away from that person. We become obsessed with it. And then what happens when the other person, you finally do something about it, and they won't even admit they did something wrong. Now what do you do? Here's why we have such a hard time dealing with offenses. First of all, is when we're offended, we have an emotional need to be healed. Right? When you're hurt by somebody, you have an emotional need to be healed. And you want the other person to do it. I remember a man years ago, I saw him. He looked distraught. I said, are you okay? And he said, he told me a situation about a man who he really respected, he really looked up to, and that man had really done something wrong to him. And then the man had died. And he said, it's like he's reaching up out of the grave and controlling my life. I can't get him to say he's sorry. I can't get him to pay for the horrible things he did to me and my family because he died. How can I be healed? He can't heal me. He can't heal me. We need to be healed. And sometimes we have real trouble solving conflicts because actually what we're trying to do is get the other person to heal me. You ever see two people, the argument level get higher and higher, two of them yelling at each other, saying terrible things to each other, but the real issue is way down here, and they don't even know what the real issue is. You say you're sorry. You say you're sorry. I mean, it's almost like that level. No, you say you're sorry. No, you say you're sorry. Because you have to heal me before I can deal with you or deal with the problem. A second is that here's a real reason for conflicts. We expect other people to satisfy our needs and desires. This is one of the greatest reasons for conflict in marriage. We think the other person is there to make me happy. Right? That other person is there to make me happy. Nobody can make another person happy all the time. Nobody. In fact, nobody can be happy all the time. It's not possible. But if the other person's sole existence is to make me happy, what happens when they do something that doesn't make you happy? Well, they have to do something. They must be corrected and they must make me happy.

See, more divorces based on, I'm just not happy. I'm just not happy. Okay? But why aren't you happy? Well, because my wife will do this, this, and this, or my husband will do this, this, and this. They won't meet my expectations and fulfill my desires. Now, this is also true if you think somebody else is blocking your happiness. You know, it's the guy at work that gets the promotion and you don't, so you hate his guts. And maybe you find out he doesn't even know you exist. But it was personal. He blocked my happiness. He blocked what I deserve. He blocked my expectations. And many times we create expectations so high that nobody. We're disappointed in God sometimes because He doesn't meet our expectations.

A third is the need to control. This is a very interesting thing. The more insecure we are, and of course as human beings, what's scary is how little we have to control, right? That's why there's so much angst and anger and anxiety in the world today. Everybody feels like there's nothing they have control over as if they did before. But they feel like they have more, they should have more control. And what the need for control creates two things you've heard this before, a fight or flight reaction. You either run away or you punch the person in the nose. So to control it, because if I control it, nothing bad can happen to me. The problem is, fight and flight was designed to keep us from getting eaten by bears. It wasn't designed because someone hurt your feelings. That's not why God designed that hit us. Fight and flight is something that we apply to somebody who disagrees with us on some issue, or somehow takes away my rights, or tramples on me in some way. So we have to get control. A fourth reason is pride.

Pride is simply an exaggeration of your own importance. And that's why it's such a deceiver. You believe in pride because it makes you feel better, or important, or good, or whatever it is you're trying to be. Righteous? So pride deceives you that you are always right. And what happens with pride is you lose track of life based on how you treat others to a life based on how others treat you.

A humble person looks at other people and is concerned about, how do I treat other people? And every once in a while someone mistreats us, and we don't like that. It's uncomfortable. We don't like it. But a prideful person, they lose track of that to all they're concerned about, is how people treat me. And they lose track of, how am I treating other people?

I'm talking very broad terms here, but I'm going to bring this down into something specific here in a minute. A lot of times with pride, everything's about winning, winning, winning, winning. We have to win. It was mentioned in the sermonette. It's, you know, if you have any drive at all, you like to win. And at some point, you have to realize losing is part of life, and you have to be able to handle that. It's not personal. It's not personal. So there were these four basic issues that we have as human beings. Now, am I going to tell you how not to have pride?

Am I going to tell you how not to need so much control? I'm going to start in a place you may not think about. Before you deal with the conflict you have with another person in the church, go deal with your conflict with God, because that is the source of all conflict.

I'm sorry. It's not the source of conflict. It's why we have it, the source of conflict to Satan. But our conflict with God is why we're so susceptible to conflict.

Now, conflict, by the way, is bad. You can have some different opinions, and different people sit down and work out an excellent solution based on different opinions. But that's manageable conflict. Unreasonable conflict is what we're in most of the time. It produces nothing but strife and hurt and disunity among the people of God. Let's go to Romans 8, verse 7. Romans 8, verse 7. Simple statement, because the carnal mind is enmity against God. In other words, the carnal mind, the normal human mind, is an enemy relationship with God. This is one of the hardest things we're going to have to do to get people to come to God in today's society.

That they have to realize that their human nature is corrupted, and they're actually in an adversarial relationship with God. Because people today believe, and I'm using general sense, not everybody believes this, but it is the most common belief in our society is that human nature is basically good, and God loves me. And He just wants me to be nice.

I talked about that a couple weeks ago. But no, no, your human nature has been corrupted, and you're actually in an adversarial relationship with God. He still loves you, and that's not the issue. The issue is why the relationship isn't working. For it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. So this is the natural state that we're in. Any human being naturally is in conflict with God, and nothing gets fixed until we deal with that first. I say, no, no, no, my conflict is with this person over here.

No, my conflict is with my wife. No, my conflict is with my mom and dad. Okay, fine. That's a real conflict. But before you deal with that, make sure your conflict between you and God is settled. We're rushing off trying to deal with all these conflicts when the key to deal with all conflict is the first, be it right with God. You be right with God. If two people are both right with God, they'll solve their conflicts.

It may not be easy because we're still of human nature, but if two people are right with God, they'll solve their conflicts. Now, two people may not be right with God at the time, or one may be and one may not, and it doesn't get solved. But if they're both right with God, because why? Because God is involved in solving the conflict. Because if God's involved in solving the conflict, the only way it doesn't get solved is us, right? He doesn't fail.

So if the conflict doesn't get solved, it's we got in the way. So how do we as flawed, finite human beings, how do we make this happen? Okay, I have a conflict with God. You've been called out of that conflict. You were called to repent and be baptized or receive God's Holy Spirit and not have that conflict anymore.

But before you rush off with your sword drawn to deal with the conflict you have with another member in the church, remember how you got reconciled to God. And that tells us a little bit about reconciling to another person. Romans 5. Just back a few pages. Romans 5. And verse 10.

For if, and I know I'm just pulling out a verse here. I'm not going through the whole context, but if you take what Paul writes here in all these chapters, they all fit together. So I'm just picking two sentences and showing how they fit together. For if when we were enemies, oh yeah, that's right, we were enemies. We were not in a right relationship with God. The carnal mind is enmity against God. It's in conflict with God. For if when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more have it been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. We were reconciled to God through Jesus Christ. So there's no greater conflict on earth than between God and you and me. Maybe it was Satan, but he's not trying to reconcile Satan. The only way that conflict gets fixed is if Christ dies for us, we accept that and then enter into this relationship with God as our Father. Now we are reconciled. The conflict is being solved. You and I don't get up every morning and say, oh boy, am I mad at God today, right? You're not in conflict with God every moment of every day. The reason why is because He's reconciled you. You didn't reconcile to Him. You agreed, you participated. We don't participate, it doesn't happen. But He reconciled us to Him. We didn't reconcile Him to us.

We didn't reconcile God to us. How do you do that?

So before we go off to deal with each other, let's remember you were an enemy of God. That's how He saw you. That's how He saw you. But He said, I want you to be my child. And here's how this works. First of all, Christ reconciles you to me. His death and resurrection pays your penalty and brings you into relationship with me if you accept that.

And now we have concepts like being converted, being changed, having the fruits of the Spirit, all these things out, obedience to God, all faith to God, all these things become real because we have been reconciled. We can't make them up. You can't make up the Ten Commandments. None of us are that smart. None of us have the ability to create faith the way it has to be created in us. We just have a little bit. God has to create all the rest of it. God has to do all that through reconciliation. He brings us back into relationship. That's what reconciliation means. So you have someone you're in conflict with before you go deal with it, especially if you're angry. Think about the conflict you had with God and how God is healing that. How is God fixing that? How is God bringing you into relationship with Him?

Because Jesus Christ came to earth, lived as a human being, and He knows exactly what you and I experience except without sin. That's what's amazing. Except He has no sin. Therefore, He says, there's nothing you're going through I don't know something about, because I've been there. And I will reconcile you to God.

So before we can really deal with any other conflicts, we start there. You think, wow! You think, wow! But this person really mistreated me. I thought you were going to tell me how to go to deal with Him and correct Him and get back in, you know, maybe what He did was sin. I need to go do that. Well, well, well, before you do anything, make sure you're right with God.

Pray about it. Think about it. Read in your Bible about reconciliation, because that conflict is the greatest conflict. Now, if you're doing that, something I guarantee is going to happen. You're going to start praying that God helps reconcile the other person to Him.

Sometimes that's hard because you don't want that other person to be reconciled to God. You want Him to be punished. If you're really honest about it, what you want is punishment.

Now, pray that that person, remember we're talking about in the body of Christ here, is reconciled to God. You know, it's interesting. You pray for your husband, please God, correct this man, or please God, reconcile this man to you, and I'll have a better husband. See? What is it we want? What is the… we really want is the end result. Now, let's go back to… now you want to go to this person. I've prayed to God to be reconciled to God. I've repented of my sins again. Now I can go talk to the person. What do I do? The first thing you do is you desire and you seek to be able to forgive that person. You want the issue to be solved, and when it's done, you have forgiven them. It's gone. Remember, God offered us forgiveness while we were still sinners. Christ reconciled us to God, and then He offered that to us while we were still His enemies. God didn't offer reconciliation to His friends. He offered reconciliation to His enemies. So we have to be right with God to have God's viewpoint. Now we say, okay, what is forgiveness? I mean, I just forget about it? No.

We have to deal with certain things. We have to deal with certain things. We can't ignore certain things. Now, sometimes you can. You say it's not that important, but sometimes you have to deal with it. But remember this. Forgiving somebody doesn't mean you forgive them of their sin. If they committed sin, that's sin against God, you can't forgive them of that. You could only forgive them of what they did to you. Now, somebody stole from you, and you say, I forgive you. You're in the church, and you really mistreated me, and you did a bad business deal, and you stole money from me. And you go talk to the person, and they say, look, I'm sorry. It was wrong. I know it was wrong. And so you forgive them. They still need to go to God and receive forgiveness from Him. So we can only forgive what's been done to us. You can't forgive because that's part of the relationship with that person of God. Now, you maybe help them to say, you know, you really need to go repent to God to make sure you're reconciled to God. Wait a minute. I'm helping the person who hurt me. Yes. You're actually now helping the person who hurt you. You need to go repent to God just so you can be reconciled to God and be right with God.

So forgiveness is a very broad thing. It doesn't mean you excuse what they did. It doesn't mean that you have to have a close relationship with someone who refuses to repent. If a person refuses to repent sometimes, you just can't have a relationship with them. It doesn't mean you can hate them, but you can never let you with somebody who refuses to repent. But here's what forgiveness does mean. It does mean that you give up your need for that person to meet your expectations. Why expect you to? You know, it's not just sorry. You have to say sorry in a certain way. Have you ever seen that? I've actually dealt with cases where the people, one person apologized, the person said, Wonderful, we're brothers again. And a week later, the person called me and said, You know, I've been thinking about that apology, and that wasn't really a good apology. I don't, I'm not, no, no, it was wrong because he didn't say this, this, and this. So the person was sincere, but he didn't meet your expectations. And I think of one case like that where the person was practically destroyed, but the other person really was sorry. We have to give up that that person, I have to control everything to my expectations. You also have to choose not to think about things.

We can't obsess over the past. We can't. You can't hold on to everything that's happened to us in the past. You will absolutely be miserable today, and you won't even have much of a future then. We have to let go of things that have happened to us. And the only way to do that is when they pop into your head, you acknowledge them, but you refuse to dwell on them. And that's really hard when we get into certain abuses and so where that's reason I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about the normal stuff that happens between us as Christians, the stupid things we do and say to each other. We also have to decide not to gossip about it. You want to be miserable about being offended. Keep passing on that offense to other people. And now you just keep ingraining it into your brain more and more and more. And so you're living in the past. You'll never let go of any animosity. And if you're filled with animosity towards a person, that will affect the way you act towards other people. It's just the way it is. You can't say, I love everybody but you. I'm filled with animosity towards you. And I'm going to think about you all the time. That will affect the way you treat everybody else.

When we do that, when we hold on to that, and we hold on to that obsession, we play back the offense like a movie. And actually what we do is we write the script. We make it in Technicolor. We make it in 3D. We make this thing more and more and more and more until it's so enhanced. Sometimes it's not even really what happened. There's just parts of it that happened. Oh yeah, that person came in one day. That person came in and told me that I had a bad attitude and I was rotten. They called me a bunch of names. They hit me. What really happened, the person came in and said, I think you have a bad attitude. But over time, that movie gets to be instead of a four-minute thing. It's a 20-minute thing that happened screaming and hollering and yelling. Rocks were being thrown. It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger because it's what you feel. We expand it out and expand it out. Let's go to Colossians 3.

Because I mentioned this, but I'm going to read it.

How can we – and I know this. I think of things that have happened in my life that if I think about it today, it makes me angry or it makes me feel incredibly sad. The things people have done, maybe told a lie, and destroyed relationships I had with people that for 20 years haven't even talked to me because they were told a lie. I can talk about those things. But you know, you get angry, you feel hurt, and then you say, no. No. Those people don't know any different. They're still my brothers and sisters. God will fix that. The person that told the lie, I can't do anything about it. I just hope he repents. Right? I just hope the person repents. And gets right with God. Because I just want to be right with God. Because if I don't do that, guess what I'm going to do? I'm going to think about it all the time, and so I'm filled with anger and hatred, and I'm unhappy every minute. And that'll affect the way I treat my wife. It'll affect the way I treat you. It'll affect everything. Because I'm obsessed with something that happened 20 years ago. I can't do that. Colossians 3, 12. Therefore, as the elect of God, holy beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, long suffering. Now this is in the church, remember. Bearing with one another, and forgiving one another. If anyone has a complaint against another, even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do. He goes on and says, when you do this, the peace of God will rule in your heart. You want peace? Then remember how you were reconciled to God. And look at your brothers and sisters and be reconciled in the same way.

Because we really do some very mean things to each other. But see, if we don't, what we do is we begin to build a barrier between us and God. And we actually warp our own emotions. Now forgiving doesn't solve all the problems in the relationship. It just means you can move forward. The closer you are, husband or wife has to forgive each other all the time. The closer you are to somebody, you just have to forgive all the time. Little stupid things. Most of it is not even important that you start to realize after a while, after 40-some years of marriage, there's not that much important that happens that it's worth getting mad over. Maybe for five seconds, and then that's it. It's not that important. And it's sure not worth feeling animosity toward each other. Why feel that way?

That means, though, you have to give up your need to control that other person.

Because you have to give up. If your emotional state depends on them being controlled by you, you will just drive yourself more and more into a depth of dysfunction. The more I control you, I'll get you, I'll show you, and then I'll feel better. You're still expecting them to heal you. Let God heal you and then deal with the person. You'll usually find out that they're pretty… they're in need of healing, too, from God. So you have to seek healing from God's… from your damage emotions from God.

And be careful about sharing things with other people that don't need to be shared. And also realize most things aren't worth being offended over, because we're all imperfect. Now, there are things that are offensive. There are terrible things people do.

You know, you ever read… I read blogs all the time just to know what's in Christianity, and I find these blogs that all Christians are this and all… I get mad. Like I'm offended by a person I don't even know. Then I stop and say, this is silly. I'm offended by a person I don't even know. What would Christ say? Forgive them, for they do not know what they do. That's what He would say. And then turn it over to God. Oh, okay. And suddenly, you know, you don't care. Not that you hate the person, because you don't hate the person. You don't even know the person. But you're not going to be controlled by that emotion. There's an interesting scripture in Ecclesiastes 7.

Ecclesiastes 7, our last scripture here.

I've covered some of this before in a little different way. I was trying to bring out a few different aspects of this very complicated subject. Like I said, we never even got into how to actually go talk to the person. Be healed by God so you're not filled with so much anger. You're not filled with so much angst or hurt. That that has been brought down to a level you can now have a conversation. It's not like it's all gone. But it's been brought down to a level that you can have a conversation instead of a fistfight. And that means you go get reconciled to God, you get healed by God, and God gives you the ability to go deal and help, hopefully, help the other person. But this, Ecclesiastes 7, I find this very interesting, verse 21.

Also, do not take to heart everything people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you. He says, wait a minute, don't go around trying to figure out what everybody's saying about you. Because you know what you're going to find out? Some people say bad things about you. They just do. So he said, instead of trying to figure out what everybody's saying about you and being concerned, realize that even nice people sometimes say bad things about another person. If you hear it that's out of context, you may despise that person. You know, you could hear someone say something and have them later say to the person, you know, I shouldn't have said that about that person. They're really a nice person. I'm just having a bad day. But you didn't hear all that. All you heard was them say something sort of mean about you. Okay. Because the next verse is very interesting. For many times also, your own heart has known that even you have cursed others. He says, instead of being always worried about what other people said about me, they shouldn't be saying that. Remember, you have said some pretty mean things about other people yourself that you hope later. I hope nobody ever heard that. I hope that never gets back to that person. That wasn't right. So before you're just getting so out of whack all the time about what someone may say about you, just remember all the things you said about somebody else. That little proverb has come to mind a number of times in my life. Gary, why get upset over what that person said? It's no big deal. You know that person. They're just like, Christian, trying to do what they're trying to do. It's like, so what? How many times have you, even if you have maybe said it, but you've thought something really mean about a person? Yeah, let it go. It's not that important because they're my brother, they're my sister. That's more important. That's where we're going to have to get. You know, you've heard me say there's four things that so many of the sermons are going to be about over the next year. And what if it's how we have to have strong congregations. And in strong congregations, we're brothers and sisters no matter what, because we're our brothers and sisters just physically. We're brothers and sisters in Christ. And Christ died for us to be reconciled to God and for us to be reconciled to each other. If we're reconciled to God, we have to strive to be reconciled to each other. That's actually a command in the Scripture. Or Satan will pull us apart. Satan will pull us apart.

The Bible, it contains lots of instructions on how to try to deal with each other when we've offended each other. What I want to talk, just wanted to cover today was some simple concepts. That before we do that, let's make sure that we're first reconciled with God so that He can heal us so the anger and the hurt has now been brought down to a level where you can go to that person as a brother and a sister and rebuild the relationship instead of just creating more conflict.