The easily offended heart is always reaching for the spotlight. Love reaches for the blanket instead, and it does so without needing anyone else to agree the offense was real, or small, or forgivable. Love just covers it and moves on.

I recently began reading The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, and a line near the beginning about the protagonist, D’Artagnan, describes well the subject I want to take up:

D’Artagnan took every smile for an insult, and every look as a provocation—whence it resulted that from Tarbes to Meung his fist was constantly doubled, or his hand on the hilt of his sword.

Dumas meant that as comedy, and it is comedy—a hot-blooded young man so sure of his own honor that he cannot walk down a street without finding someone to fight.

But in reality it’s not really funny for people who act like this; it is exhausting. Every glance a threat. Every silence an insult. Every person a potential enemy who must be watched and, if necessary, challenged. That is not the life of a swordsman. That is the life of a man at war with everyone he meets, including, most of the time, people who never meant him any harm at all. And the tragedy is that this very picture often characterizes Christians within the church.

Over the next couple of weeks, I want to make the case that one of the most spiritually mature things a Christian can be—and one of the most countercultural—is to be hard to offend.

An Age of the Easily Offended

We live in a time when people are more easily offended than perhaps at any point in living memory. Taking offense has become almost a posture we carry into every interaction—we go in scanning for the slight, half-expecting to be wronged, quick to feel the sting, quicker still to assume the worst about the one who caused it. We have nearly made being offended into a virtue, as though our readiness to be wounded proved that we have standards, that we care deeply, that we matter.

And once we are offended, we rehearse it. We turn it over. We nurse it, feeding it a little more oxygen every time we replay the scene, until a thirty-second exchange has occupied an entire evening of our attention.

I would love to say this is the world’s problem and not ours. But we all know that we often carry the very same thin skin right through the doors of the church. We would never say it out loud in these terms, but we act, very often, as though our own comfort and our own reputation were sacred ground no one is permitted to disturb—and the moment someone does, however unintentionally, we treat it as a small act of aggression that deserves an answer.

But here is the truth that cuts against everything our culture tells us: the Bible does not treat the easily offended person as sensitive, or principled, or admirably passionate. It treats him as a fool.

Listen to how Scripture speaks. “Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly” (Proverbs 14:29). “Be not quick in your spirit to become angry, for anger lodges in the bosom of fools” (Ecclesiastes 7:9).

Notice where Solomon says anger lives when it comes quickly—not merely in the fool’s mouth, where it might do a moment’s damage and pass, but in his bosom, lodged deep, taking up residence, becoming permanent. In the language of Scripture, the man with the short fuse is not strong; he is foolish. And the man who is slow to anger—slow to take the bait, slow to be wounded, slow to assume the worst—that man, the Bible says, has great understanding. He sees something the hasty man cannot see, and it is precisely that clearer sight that keeps him from combusting at every provocation.

Why are we so easily offended? If we are honest, it is not because we love righteousness so much. It is because we love ourselves so much. An offense stings in exact proportion to how much we are thinking about ourselves. The more a man is full of himself, the more easily he is wounded, because there is so much more of him to bruise.

It’s like a man with a great swollen bruise on his arm—the slightest brush against a doorframe sends pain through his whole body, not because the doorframe struck him hard, but because the bruise has made him tender everywhere.

Pride works the same way. It does not add strength; it adds tenderness. Pride and a thin skin are not two different problems; they are the same problem seen from two sides. The easily offended heart is a heart full of pride.

So the question I want to put before us is simple and practical: how do we become people who are hard to offend?

The Glory of Overlooking

Let’s start with Proverbs 19:11:

Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense.

Let’s look carefully at this short verse, so packed with wisdom. First, “good sense makes one slow to anger.” Good sense is the ability to see the whole picture and not just the sting. It is the same root that stands behind Solomon’s prayer in the book of Proverbs for an understanding heart, a heart able to discern between good and evil rather than merely react.

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