We must have a love for the truth. Who could speak into your life, in a way that you won't get offended and upset, and take a hike? When someone last tried to say something to you, how did you respond? Are you a lover of the truth, and welcome the truth? Or is your pain, and your hurt, so driving you, and preoccupying you, that all you can do is react?
Jesus said: in the last days many will be offended – multitudes; and they will betray one another, and then hate one another. How do you hate people? Lots of ways… It can be active, by hostility coming against them; or it can be just in this way… The word ‘hatred’ in the Bible means ‘to love less’, or ‘withhold love’. You may not think you hate people, but when you withhold love - is something wrong? Yep. Nah. Nothing is wrong. Won't talk about it. Build a wall. Just walk away, further and further...
You're not walking away from that person. You're walking away from God. He's trying to help you, to grow you, because He needs you mature, in the End Times. He needs you to grow, in the End Times. He needs you to be in a good place, spiritually and relationally. He needs you locked into a community of people that can help you grow, and support you, and help you in your journey. He wants you connected, and offences are the main stumbling block of the devil, to take people out of God-given relationships, that were designed to help them, and bless them.
The four things that I notice, comes whenever there's offences...
Number one is distance - relational distance; because now you're preoccupied, not with love and building together - you've now got another agenda: preserving yourself.
Prov. 18:1 – “a man who isolates himself seeks his own desire, and rages against all wise judgement”.
The second one is demons. When you allow offences to get in your heart, you will become demonised. You will. Jesus said that will happen. That's a prophesy!
Matthew 18:34-35 – “If you will not from your heart forgive your brother every one of his trespasses, then you will be handed over to the tormentors”.
Unforgiveness, and offence in our heart, leaves an open door for demonic spirits to wreak havoc; to torment you, with remembering all the things that were done against you, causing you to be angry and upset. They torment you!
Someone shares something, or you read something, or see something on the news, and now you're angry, and you don't even know why you're even angry. Why are you angry? We're just lost in some dots on a screen. No, there was something tapped into the spirit that was there, and it stirred up your anger, stirred up your issue.
The third one is deception. Deception comes when you're offended, because you become blinded, and you can't see why your life's going the way it is. You can't see the truth, when you've got offence in your heart.
1 John 2:11 – “Anyone who hates a brother or sister is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness”.
When there's hatred in our heart, when we've withdrawn love, because of offence, it says we ‘walk in darkness’, and we can't work out what we're stumbling over.
When you're offended, you have a lot of things go wrong in your life, and you can't work out why these things are happening, because you can't see. If you can't see, then it's like you keep tripping up all the time, and you can't work out why you're having these setbacks. It's because your heart is offended, there's anger and hate in the heart, and now you can't see.
The hatred blinds your eyes. It causes you to be in a spiritual darkness, where you have no perception. Then when the word of God is preached, you don't even pick anything up. These are important things. In the last days, many, many, many will be like that - so deception is another one.
The last one is defilement. Defilement will come.
Hebrews 12:15 - "See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.”