Creating a Secure CHURCH
PART 4 : When Things Go Wrong
Chapter 17 : Thinking about Forgiveness
17.2 The Shifting Sands of Offence
Offended?
Before we look at this subject more fully, we need to clarify in our minds what we mean when we said above “we have been offended”, because it can mean many things to many people, and before we know where we are, what appeared to be simple and straight forward, becomes something quite different. So let’s think about it slowly and carefully.
Let’s start with that person who seems to ‘rub everybody up the wrong way’. The fact is that some people simply don’t know how to say things without sounding threatening or offensive. In all honesty, I think I’m only starting to move out of that mode myself. People who are naturally forthright can be offensive while being quite unaware of it – oh yes, they’re not being intentionally abrasive.
One of the problems in the church is that so often we are afraid to pick someone up on the way they speak to us, because we ourselves lack the grace or the wisdom to do it in a way that will not in itself create offence.
I used to know someone who, bluntly, was always critical – often of me, simply because they were always critical! For a long period I took it without saying a thing, believing it was ‘servant-hearted’ to take it on the chin – and anyway if I confronted them with it, they would leave, I believed, and I didn’t want that to happen. So I tolerated their sin because I lacked the courage, the grace, the wisdom, call it what you will, to pick them up on the way they spoke.
Again, if I’m honest, in addition to my general inability to confront, another reason I didn’t do it was because actually I wanted to tell them their fortune and really chop them to pieces. That’s what we feel like ‘naturally’ and so it’s an effort to come to God, confess our own weakness and seek Him for the grace to be Jesus to this other person.
What I really want to be saying here is that I don’t want you to get into a big “forgiveness meal” over fairly minor things that could be quickly dealt with by some gracious words from our mouths, coming from accepting, loving and caring hearts.
In what follows, when I am referring to you having been “offended”, I really want to deal with serious issues where you have been abused by another, verbally or physically, and you’ve been left marked as a result of it.
If it’s a minor misunderstanding thing, then just get God’s grace to talk it out gently, but if it’s a time when you were totally devastated by someone abusing you, then that’s what we’re talking about!
