Learning to Trust Again Means Trusting God First
It's less about trusting people and more about the trustworthiness of my God.
Betrayed. Back-stabbed. Slandered. Disowned. Ignored. Forgotten. Cheated. Misused. These words pummeled me every time I saw the faces or heard the names of those who had proven unfaithful to me despite my years of confidence in them. Even church, the church that had loved me and my kids for so long, became an unsafe place for us as harmful gossip was spread from it.
From then on, every person who claimed to love me, believe me, and support me fell under my suspicious gaze. But for how long? I wondered. I analyzed every nuance of their expressions and tones. Have they changed sides? Do they doubt me now? I felt like I was going crazy, but I also couldn’t imagine another way to live. Survival depended on keeping everyone at a suspicious distance. I held my battered heart behind my back in a bulletproof safe.
We all know unfaithfulness. Maybe it was a friend who talked behind your back. Maybe it was a parent who abandoned you or was never present. Or a church that used their spiritual authority to manipulate and gaslight you. Unfaithfulness, no matter the story, is painful. Even the people who love us the most and desire to be faithful to us will, at some point, fail in this aspiration. They may break a promise, forget us, or say a cruel word in a moment of weakness.
Who can be trusted? Can we rely on anyone? If even those who love us most will still be unfaithful due to their sin, is there anyone who we can look to that will be steadfast?
Of course, Scripture tells me to look to God himself. “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?” (Num. 23:19). God can’t tell a lie, and he can’t break a promise because God can’t do anything outside of his character. God never needs to be forgiven by us because he is perfect in all his ways.
Yet this requires much of our hearts, doesn’t it? Believing this truth isn’t as simple as flipping a switch—full trust in God on, full trust in people off.
I must set my gaze on the cross and grip the pierced hands of Christ. There, at the cross, he proved his love to me, to what extent he’d go to save me. When I force myself to reckon with this, I know such love means much more to me than anything I have lost at the hands of betrayers and oppressors—even the love I thought they had for me all combined. This kind of self-sacrificing love is one that can be trusted.
At the cross, I also find a relentlessly faithful God who died for faithless humanity—including me. Even after we become believers, we will continue to be unfaithful to God, yet he will remain faithful to us. “If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself” (2 Tim. 2:13).
We are unfaithful every time we choose to sin rather than obey his Word. Yet in the midst of our unfaithfulness, God forgives when we confess. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). He is faithful to not leave us in our current state, but to sanctify us: “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it” (1 Thess. 5:23–24; cf. Phil. 1:6).
This same God who is eternally faithful to me despite my unfaithfulness, and who knows the unfaithfulness of us all, calls me to learn to trust again. When fear fills me at this calling, I am learning that obeying these commands, to allow others to carry my burdens, is less of an act of trust in them and more of an act of trust in my faithful God who gives me such a command.
He knows everything, and he knows with what trembling and trepidation we bring our hearts out from behind our backs. Yet still he calls us to this because he also knows what will lead to our wholeness on this broken earth, and it does not come from closing ourselves away from everyone out of fear. It does not come from perpetual solitude. Something else comes out of locking ourselves away from love in this world: Hell. As C. S. Lewis wrote,
Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.1
Despite the heartache, despite the risks, we must love and trust again.
One of the most common, practical ways we experience the love of God is through his people, but such love cannot be experienced without a certain level of vulnerability. He calls us to reveal our weaknesses because where we are weak another person is strong. This is why Paul described the church as a body made up of many different parts—you might be a hand, but someone else is an eye or a foot, meaning we only operate at our best when interdependent on one another (1 Cor. 12:12–27).
Our faithful God is also wise. He doesn’t tell us to trust all people. Jesus himself did not entrust himself to everyone (John 2:24) and he told his disciples to be wise as serpents in this matter (Matt. 10:16). When he tells them to not throw their pearls before swine (Matt. 7:6) he is saying that we should not waste our time and words on people who will not give them the honour they are due.
God provides wisdom to any who would ask for it (Jas. 1:5), and part of wisdom is learning to discern good character from bad. Jesus regularly told us to judge a tree by the fruit it bears and to not expect good fruit from a bad tree (Matt. 7:18). God doesn’t expect us to bear our lives before those who have proven to be unhealthy trees or trampling pigs.
I can’t, nor should I, put my full trust in any human being. I must be ready for heartbreaks, both little and small, because we are all singed by sin. Yet I can trust my heavenly Father, my Saviour, and the Spirit who indwells me. If he, who loved me enough to suffer on my behalf when I did not love him, calls me to trust others because it will bring me closer to him and the healing he offers, I know I must trust his leading. As I do, I can look to him for the wisdom necessary to choose the right people to trust and how much of myself to give to them. In my stumbling steps forward in learning to trust, God will patiently keep working at my own heart—because he is faithful to see us to the finish line.
C.S. Lewis, “The Four Loves,” in The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (1940; repr., New York, New York, United States of America: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017), 823–824.
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