February 5 2006

Who Can You Trust? Part 1

Back From Betrayal

About six months ago I read a thought-provoking book. The book, “Who can you Trust?” by Howard E Butt, got me to thinking about the reality that we all live life in the reality of disappointment and people who sometimes inadvertently and sometimes purposely hurt and betray us. The key is that the scriptures have a lot to say about living with betrayal.

All of us at some point in our lives have been hurt. All of us at some point our lives have been, or at least felt, betrayed. The problem with betrayal is that it leaves you sort of in limbo.

Betrayal leaves us scared to trust, scared to leave ourselves vulnerable or at risk. Betrayal leaves us forever feeling like we need to be looking over our emotional shoulder. However, at the same time that we are scared to leave ourselves vulnerable, we are also desperately hurt and lonely.

“Mary,” we’ll call her, helped put her husband through medical school. Six months after setting up his own practice, he divorced her in favor of his cute young nurse. It’s no surprise that she feels betrayed and angry and now she is sure she can never let herself love again.

“Cliff,” age about 55, worked for the same company 20 years and he’s just been fired. They used a nice term, “downsizing,” but the pain in the same, and the worst thing is that the promotion he thinks he earned was given to a 40-year-old coworker. Now he sits at home all day, living on unemployment pay—and tranquilizers.

Sadly, such betrayals are common in our day and age. The question is what we decide we are going to do with these all too—real moments of betrayal that we all experience in life.

On one hand it is hard to even want to ever trust anyone again. On the other hand we know that the walls we put up and the barriers we erect to defend ourselves and protect ourselves leave us isolated and so often very lonely. Then if that weren’t bad enough, what we don’t realize is that as we close the door to trust, the trust of others, we tend to discover that that lack of a trusting heart can also block our ability to trust God. So we have to come to the realization that it is important that we do learn to trust again.

Today and over the next few weeks, we will be looking at understanding our feelings of betrayal and discovering how we can begin to overcome our hurts and begin to trust again.

So where do we start? We start with some simple principles that will start you on the road to trust and guide you in making your way back from betrayal. The first step in dealing with betrayal is…

1. Take Personal Ownership Of The Betrayal.

What that means more than anything else is that at some point you have to own up to the fact that you have been hurt. That may sound like a funny way to start, but it is a necessary first step in the healing process.

If you break your ankle and you just deny it, take more pain killers or just grit your teeth and walk on as if nothing has happened, what is the likelihood of that broken ankle healing?

We must start by owning up to the fact that you’ve been betrayed and hurt. Denial is not a way out.

Now before you get too comfortable there, that is not all there is to taking personal ownership of the betrayal. It is a start, but if we stop there we end up with this heavily weighted and out-of-whack perspective. The reality is that you are not the only person who has ever been betrayed. And part of taking personal ownership of our betrayal is owning up to the fact that we are and have been a “betrayer” too! If we don’t take on the other half of this coin, we end up self-centered and self absorbed and living with a poor-me attitude about life. And that kind of attitude simply will not allow you to get beyond the betrayal any time soon.

Romans 3:23 reminds is clearly that… “ ²³for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” All of us have betrayed others and for sure all of us have betrayed God at some point. Or as the Message puts it…

²³Since we’ve compiled this long and sorry record as sinners and proved that we are utterly incapable of living the glorious lives God wills for us, ²⁴God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we’re in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ.

One of the dangers of being betrayed is that we get to feeling that we are only a receiver of betrayal. We get to feeling like the whole world is against us and that we are surely the only one ever who has felt this way.

The story is told about a man who was being tailgated by a totally-stressed-out woman on a busy boulevard. Suddenly, the light turned yellow, just in front of him and he did the right thing, stopping, even though he could have beaten the red light by accelerating through the intersection. The tailgating woman hit the roof and the horn, screaming in frustration as she missed her chance to get through the intersection with him by hugging his bumper. As she was still in mid-rant, she heard a tap on her window and looked up into the face of a very serious police officer. The officer ordered her to exit her car with her hands up. He took her to the police station where she was searched, fingerprinted, photographed, and placed in a cell. After a couple of hours, a policeman opened the cell door and escorted her back to the booking desk, where the arresting officer was waiting with her personal effects. He said, “1’m very sorry for this mistake. You see, I pulled up behind your car while you were blowing your horn and cussing a blue streak at him. I noticed the ‘Choose Life’ license plate holder, the ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ bumper sticker, the ‘Follow Me to Sunday School’ bumper sticker, and the chrome-plated Christian fish emblem on the trunk. Seeing the way you were acting, I naturally assumed you had stolen the car.”

You see, if we fail either to recognize that we have been hurt or to recognize that we in turn have hurt others, we open up ourselves to either life-draining denial or to joy-destroying bitterness. Allowing your bitter experiences to make you bitter, ends up becoming a barrier to your trusting God and something that limits the empowerment for the joy-filled life He has for you through Christ.

We do need to look over our shoulder once in a while. Otherwise we can become easy targets for every arrow of life. It is a common and even necessary reflex in all of us. But we dare not take it to extremes. Unmoderated mistrust leaves us isolated and alone. Pure distrust—distilled over time—shrivels us; our lives turn in on ourselves; and eventually our existence becomes unbearable. So we have to begin the journey back from betrayal by taking personal ownership, in a wholesome way, of the betrayal.

While that is a necessary forts step, there is also more. The second step in dealing with betrayal is…

2. Understand The Power Of Humility.

Understand something. This step in the process of dealing with betrayal is absolutely counter intuitive. Our natural human response is to either attack/seek revenge or withdrawal/paranoia. We either want to hurt back and get revenge when we have been betrayed, or we just want to withdraw, get away and protect ourselves from ever getting hurt again.

The first response leaves us bitter and angry. The second response leave us lonely and paranoid. The Bible however, gives us a third response and a healthy one. The response of humility.

There has never been anyone who was more betrayed that Jesus. He was betrayed by the leaders of his day, by his trusted friends, and then forsaken by God as he hung on a cross. What is incredible about Jesus however, was his response to that betrayal. Listen to how Paul explains this.

Philippians 2:5-8 ⁵Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: ⁶Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, ⁷but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. ⁸And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!

Despite the fact that Jesus was God, and despite our betrayal of Him, He gave Himself for us. True, the ability to respond to betrayal with love and humility is beyond us in our humanity. But it is not beyond God’s working in and through us. Only by modeling our response after the pattern of the Jesus can we learn to trust again.

But Jesus was not the only model of this. Remember David, as in King David? A true believer in loyalty and faithfulness, David not only trusted in God, but he trusted in King Saul as God’s handpicked ruler of Israel. If he hadn’t, David’s pride could have pushed him toward the throne prematurely, for the people already hailed him for his victories with the chant, “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.”

David trusted that God had put Saul on the throne and he didn’t believe it was his place to rush God’s plan. Yet Saul rewarded David’s trust, step for step, with mistrust. David trusted; Saul betrayed. In fact, Saul tried again and again to kill his supposed rival, finally driving himself mad with paranoid jealousy. David’s battle with Goliath had only been a heroic warm-up for his long, drawn-out struggle with King Saul.

How did David respond? He waited on the Lord. Although he gave himself permission to ask God over and over in the psalms why things so often seemed to go wrong, we know his core response by heart, from Psalm 23.

¹The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. ²He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, ³he restores my soul.

He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. ⁴Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

⁵You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. ⁶Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.

It’s hard to read the story of David without confronting something of the power of trust over mistrust. He had many opportunities to usurp Saul and step into the role and position that he knew was his. Yet he refused to do anything but return Saul’s anger and hatred with a trust in God and God’s timing. So if trust is such a potent and transforming force, we’re ready to embrace it immediately, to live in it at any cost, right?

Well, not really. At the root of our life we all struggle with trust. As people of faith, we know how difficult it is to keep going against the grain of our fallen, “fleshly” nature, to keep thinking the way we should think, to keep acting the way we know we should act.

So what are we to do? We can see what is necessary in our dealing with betrayal, but the tough part is deciding how to go about doing it. Let me give you a hint.

Have you ever had to take a whole handful of pills at once, like maybe 10 big chalky ones? There is a tried and true method of doing it. Don’t try to swallow them all at once. Take them one by one or at least in small steps.

That’s also the secret to dealing with betrayal. That is why the third step in dealing with betrayal is…

3. Take Practical Steps Toward Trusting Again.

Face it, when you have been betrayed and hurt, you can tell yourself that you want to just walk away and forget it, to just forgive till you are blue in the face. You might even convince yourself that you have done that. But eventually you realize that you can’t just do that. You just have to deal with betrayal in steps.

Begin by understanding that we serve a trustworthy God. A God who makes the sun rise and the spring come and the storm end. A God who we can count on. In fact, after all we have done to God, after all the times we have betrayed Him and hurt Him, listen to how he responds to us.

John 15:14 - 15 ¹⁴You are my friends if you do what I command. ¹⁵I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

Trust in fact that despite our own untrustworthiness, Christ trusts us!

If He can trust us, can we not trust "untrustworthy" others ... carefully? We have a God that, despite all that we have done to him, reaches out to us and calls us His friend. So, when all else fails, we can begin the road back to trust by trusting God. By turning to God who is trustworthy. The road back to healing from betrayal begins with trusting God.

Then, the next step is to trust in the counsel of others who have tested God and found Him trustworthy. When we place ourselves in the presence of people who have been through the fire, who have proved that God is faithful and that we can survive the betrayals of this world, we find that we begin to gain the strength to begin again to trust.

The final step is to once again begin trusting in others. Understand, you can’t trust everyone. Early in His public career, Jesus’ healings and miracles convinced some people that He was indeed the Messiah. After Jesus fed the five thousand, a bunch of people saw in Jesus an opportunity to further their own goals. The scriptures tell us in John 6, that

¹⁴After the people saw the miraculous sign that Jesus did, they began to say, “Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.” ¹⁵Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.

What we see in this instance is Jesus’ perception of human motives. His spiritual intuition told Him that the people in this incident wanted to use Him for their own purposes. They wanted to hail, recognize, and acknowledge Him, but they wanted their own preconceptions about Him to call the shots. They wanted a charismatic Jewish military leader to mount a political insurrection. They wanted a miracle machine. They wanted Jesus, but they wanted their own ideas to stay in charge.

Mistrusting people is as much a part of our obedience to God as trusting them. Never be afraid to mistrust. If you feel an inner reservation, heed it. Jesus heeded His hesitancies—and walked away. But we need to make sure that our hesitancies don’t cripple us from being able to trust again. For it is only as we trust, that we begin the process of getting healing from betrayal.

Let His trust in you enable you, with all your scars of betrayal, to start your way back from betrayal by trusting Him. Begin the process by owning the reality of it. Choose the path of humility and not revenge. And begin the trusting and healing process by trusting an absolutely trustworthy God. And allow Him to lead you back, maybe slowly, maybe only a step at a time, but allow him to lead you back to wholesome, freeing trust again.

That is the first step. Let Jesus’ trust in you enable you, with all your scars of betrayal, to start your way back from betrayal—by trusting Him! We will look at this process more in the next few weeks.