Nathan risked offending King David (2 Samuel 12); it’s why Paul risked offending Peter (Galatians 2:11–14); it’s why Jesus risked offending the scribes and Pharisees; and it’s why we are sometimes called to risk offending someone with a painful rebuke. In these cases, if our motive is love and our goal is to remove a stumbling block from someone’s path of faith, our hard words are not truly offensive. They are acts of love, the “faithful . . . wounds of a friend” (Proverbs 27:6). If our hearers find them to be “a rock of offense” (1 Peter 2:8), it may be due to the hard knots of unbelief in their hearts, rather than the sharp wedge of our words.

A few months back, considering the heightened level of contention among some American Christians in recent years, I stumbled upon this golden nugget of pastoral wisdom from Richard Sibbes, the English Puritan pastor from four hundred years ago:
It were a good strife amongst Christians, one to labor to give no offense, and the other to labor to take none. The best men are severe to themselves, tender over others. (The Bruised Reed, 47)
Sibbes was exhorting his Christian brothers and sisters during a terribly contentious historical moment, when professing Christians in England were saying and doing appalling things to one another. And it seems to me that we would be wise to heed Sibbes’s counsel, and do our part to contribute to the collective public reputation Jesus desires for us: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).
We all know from Scripture, however, that there are times when faithful love requires us to speak hard, even sharp, wounding words (Proverbs 27:6). And we all know that those on the receiving end of our hard, wounding words may, and often do, find them offensive. So, if we embrace Sibbes’s biblical principle that, when possible, we all, for the sake of love, should labor to give and take no offense, what principle should guide us for the (hopefully) rare exceptions when we must, for the sake of love, risk offending someone with our words?
Well, not surprisingly, Sibbes has something very helpful to say about this as well. But first, I need to provide the biblical context from which Sibbes draws his principle.
Jesus on the Offensive
It was during the last week of Jesus’s earthly life, just days before his crucifixion. There had been numerous tense verbal exchanges between Jesus and the religious leaders, as the scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees all tried to get Jesus to incriminate himself with his words — and all failed. So, they gave up that strategy (Matthew 22:46).
And then Jesus laid into them, delivering seven prophetic, scathing “woes” to the scribes and Pharisees, requiring 36 of 39 verses in Matthew 23 to record. Here are a few choice excerpts:
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. (Matthew 23:13)
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. (Matthew 23:15)
You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel! (Matthew 23:24)
You are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. (Matthew 23:27)
You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? (Matthew 23:33)
This is Jesus at his most offensive — at least we would have thought so, had we been scribes or Pharisees back then.
But this raises an important question: Just because most of the scribes and Pharisees would have taken offense at Jesus’s words, does that mean he was truly being offensive? The distinction may seem small, but answering the question illuminates when our own love requires hard words — and what our aim in those hard words should be.
To answer, we need to briefly look at how the New Testament defines an offense. (Then I promise I’ll share that other gold nugget from Sibbes.)
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, July 26, 2024
 Most of the Christian life is about the quiet ordinariness of your domestic life. Your Christian duty is to love your spouse if you’re married, to raise your children in the faith if you’re a parent, to be a good friend and neighbour, to look after the poor, and to see the kingdom of God invade your locality. Most of this ‘whole life’ discipleship is ordinary. It’s not exciting. It’s a walk forwards into a new way of living, but it’s also very mundane.

What does our discipleship crisis look like? Our lives look the same as our neighbours and they shouldn’t. We don’t all have to be radical, but we do need a small number of radicals among us to help us see that our lives could be different.
I do think ordinary faithfulness is the goal for most, even then our lives should still be recognisably different to our peers. When I first moved away from home to University, I was struck by the radical nature of the faith I met. I hadn’t encountered this before.
Other students were aware that their faith was their life: I remember spontaneous all night prayer sessions, evangelising on campus, long conversations about the Bible (that were probably more heat than light, honestly). A lot of that was youthful enthusiasm and it is good and right for it to be tempered as life moves into a more typical rhythm.
Yet, the adults I knew were radical too. Most of the families in the church didn’t have a TV. They gave their lives to Jesus and raised their children into the faith in ways that caught me as a fresh-eyed older teenager.
I’m not sure that not having a TV is the thing we all need to do, I feel no impulse to get rid of mine—though Rhys Laverty’s recent description of giving up the TV for the sake of their kids and the transformative effect it’s had on their children is inspiring—but I don’t encounter many people who don’t have one at all. People are shocked we don’t pay for a streaming service (which is about cost rather than ideology, we watch plenty) and we watch plenty of TV. It feels like the bar has shifted.
I’m not sure this example is a universal one. I suspect those families were being deeply counter-cultural in the early 00s. I was impacted by this example because it was shocking. Yet as culture has pulled in entirely the opposite direction, you’d think we’d see more pulling against the tide. If we turned to what should be an easy one, not giving smartphones to children, you’d hope Christians were there but we’re not.
Even if you disagree with my opinion on that, I can’t think of a common against the culture stand that we do see amongst Christians in terms of what we do with our lives. We sometimes talk a good talk but when it comes down to it, we don’t live differently.
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A little consideration of the hearers will go a long way to making sermons more understandable. Are many of your hearers from a different culture to you? Then keep your vocabulary as simple as possible and try to avoid idioms. Are there likely to be those with little to no Bible knowledge? Then don’t use obscure illustrations from the Bible with no explanation. Is there a difficult word in the Bible text itself? Take time to explain it in simple words.

Too many sermons are more complicated than they need to be. Like any specialty, the Christian world has its own special vocabulary. Words like holy, justification and glorification do turn up in the Bible, yet they rarely if ever turn up in everyday conversation. On top of this, there are all kinds of theological terms used to describe Biblical concepts that are rich and meaningful if you know what they mean, like Trinity and ordo salutis and transcendence. Yet the majority of people in our churches listening to sermons don’t know or use these words. Anyone whose task it is to explain the word of God to others needs to think carefully about the words they use lest they are misunderstood.
Think about Jesus in his teaching. He used the common language and common illustrations that everyone would understand. Sure, they might not have understood what he meant, but the words were clear. Likewise, when Paul spoke to the Athenians who were educated but not experienced in the Jewish Scriptures, he spoke plainly. He explained God’s sovereignty and aseity without using those words. It is more than possible to explain difficult concepts in simple words.
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