Today we wrap up this series called hurts, habits, and hangups where we have tried to acknowledge that we can be moving along through our lives and suddenly find ourselves stuck somewhere.
And oftentimes it’s because there’s hurt that’s still holding us back, there’s a habit that keeps looping us into an old pattern, or there’s something that we get hung up on that we just can’t seem to get past.
And today, I have the privilege of taking some time to talk about hangups. Instead of talking about hangups in general, I wanted to focus in on one particular thing that so many of us get hung up on… and that, friends, is the issue of trust.
A classic study, conducted by the university of Virginia, found that the average person lies about once per day. This ranges from what you consider to be a moment of deceit or outright lie to the moment where a waiter swings by your table and you don’t really like the food, but when they ask how everything tastes you say, everything is just fine thanks. It may not be fine but you don’t want to talk about it so you lie.
More recent research was conducted by Michigan State University where they asked 1000 people how often they lied and what they lied about. Of the thousand surveyed, 59.9% of people claimed to have not lied in the last 24 hours.
So even when we self-report about 40% of us admit to having lied in the last day, meaning we are conscious about. We are aware.
They were also able to identify 1.646 different lies were told by the various participants and 800 of those lies came from just 5.3% of the people, which means some people lie a lot.
The reason I reference all of this is because if I were to ask you all to raise your hand if someone had ever lied to you before, every hand in the room would be in the air. Everyone of us has been lied to before.
If I were to go a step further and say, how many of you have been lied to by someone you were very close with, most of the hands in this room would still be up.
After all, while the research shows that we are more likely to lie to strangers it also shows that when it comes to the most serious lies, that 53% of those lies were told to the people that were closest to them. Because we don’t want to disappoint or hurt the people we really care about, even when there is hurt or disappointment to be had.
I share all this, but my goal today isn’t to focus on lying it’s to talk about trust. But, in light of all I shared is it any wonder that so many of us end up with “trust” being one of our biggest hangups.
Sometimes we get hung up on struggling to trust other people.
Today, as we talk about this, I want to look at a person found in the very first book of the bible named Joseph. Last week, Glenn talked about a guy named Jacob and Joseph is actually his son. And Joseph, as we will see, has all the reasons in the world to be hung up on trusting others. Go ahead and turn to Genesis 37.
Joseph’s story begins where we are told that he is the youngest of his many brothers. One night he has a dream where he sees his dad and his brothers bowing down in front of him. Joseph wakes up and decides that it would be a good idea to share this dream with dad and with his brothers and needless to say, this doesn’t go very well. His brothers already resented him for being his dad’s favorite and now Joseph is telling them that he is dreaming about them all bowing in front of him.
So, one day, while his brothers are out watching the animals his dad sends Joseph to go and check up on them.
Genesis 37:18-24They saw him from afar, and before he came near to them they conspired against him to kill him. 19 They said to one another, “Here comes this dreamer. 20 Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits.Then we will say that a fierce animal has devoured him, and we will see what will become of his dreams.” 21 But when Reuben heard it, he rescued him out of their hands, saying, “Let us not take his life.” 22 And Reuben said to them, “Shed no blood; throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but do not lay a hand on him”—that he might rescue him out of their hand to restore him to his father. 23 So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the robe of many colors that he wore. 24 And they took him and threw him into a pit. The pit was empty; there was no water in it.
At the beginning of Joseph’s story is a moment where he is betrayed by the people he is the closest to. He doesn’t see it coming. He didn’t know better. And suddenly he goes from having a family where he is his dad’s favorite, to being betrayed by his family and stuck in a pit.
Would any of us blame Joseph if from this point forward he ends up getting hung up when it comes to trusting others. No… we’d look at Joseph and say, “You have a lot of good reasons to struggle with trust. After all, you’ve been through a lot.”
And friends, this is how this often happens with us too.
The betrayal or lies we experience in our past often leave us with a sense of distrust in our future.
You see if you are someone here today who gets hung up on trusting others, it’s probably because you have good reasons to struggle with trust given moments you have walked through in the past.
Some of you know what it is to feel betrayed by your own family.
Growing up, your family was supposed to be the people who showed up for you or who you felt the safest around, but some of us know what it’s like to feel like our family wasn’t there when we needed them or like the house we grew up in wasn’t a safe place, or maybe you were lied to by the people you wanted to trust the most and now you’re hung up on trust.
Some of us know what it’s like to feel lied to or betrayed by a friend or coworker.
And you used to engage that relationship or your work place so differently, but now you feel uneasy and guarded because you find yourself hung up on trust.
Some of us have been in romantic relationships where there was deceit or betrayal. And you came into that with an open heart and so much trust and that’s why it hurt so much when the deceit happened.
And because of that hurt and how real that pain is, you find yourself holding back or defensive when it comes to relationships. So now you find yourself in relationships where you never really feel seen or known because you are too guarded to let yourself be seen or known because you’ve gotten hung up on trust.
And some of us know what it is to be blamed for what we didn’t do. Some of us know what it’s like to have someone else’s lie become our reality that we have to live
And the hurt and the anger and the fear take root in our heart and we start closing ourselves off to others because we just don’t trust it.
I want to share a story with you about someone and I want you to know I have their permission to share it. A while back I had the privilege of sitting down with a gentleman who wanted to tell me his story. He described his childhood as pretty amazing. He had a good family and a good life. He was happy and excelled at school and sports and had lots of friends.
And then one day, he came from school, and it was like he walked into a completely different house because it was filled with anger and pain. One of his parents had an affair and their marriage was absolutely devastated overnight. To make matters worse, his family knew the other person really well and so this shook him to his core.
Amidst all the pain and confusion, his parents shared things with him that, as a kid, he didn’t need to know and he realized that things had been not ok for a while. He described this moment to me the following way:
He said, “I went to bed one night with an amazing life, an amazing family, and a world of opportunity and it’s like I woke up the next day and realized it was all just a dream”
He felt hurt, and he felt embarrassed, and he felt stupid, like he had been lied to and just ignorantly trusted everyone and everything. And amidst all the hurt and confusion he said, “I decided that I never wanted to be blindly ignorant again.”
And I looked back at him and said, “I don’t blame you. It’d be hard to trust anyone or anything after your world falls apart that way.”
He said that after that he began to be less close to many of his friends, as though he was protecting himself from getting hurt by them. When he dated someone, the moment they expressed that things felt like they were getting more serious he would end the relationship because he didn’t trust it.
He had good reasons to be hung up on trust, it just wasn’t serving well in his life. He felt stuck. Maybe some of us know what that’s like.
Joseph’s story doesn’t end in that pit his brothers left him in. His brothers decide that rather than leave him for dead, that they could sell him to slave traders and so they do. The slave traders took him to Egypt where he was sold to a man named Potiphar, the captain of the Egyptian guard.
Genesis 39:2-4The Lord was with Joseph, and he became a successful man, and he was in the house of his Egyptian master. 3 His master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord caused all that he did to succeed in his hands. 4 So Joseph found favor in his sight and attended him, and he made him overseer of his house and put him in charge of all that he had.
I read this and I find myself thinking, good for Joseph! He takes a terrible situation and he decides to do what he can with it and, even as a slave, he starts to build his life back up. His master, Potiphar, sees that Joseph is capable and trustworthy and he entrusts his entire household to Joseph.
It feels like Joseph has moved on. It’s like he has left the betrayal of his family in his past so he can create a better future and he’s working hard at it. This is a comeback story if I’ve ever heard one.
But as Joseph grows in esteem and influence, Potiphar’s wife takes a liking to him and she tries to seduce him again and again but he refuses because he doesn’t want to betray his master or become someone different then who God has made him to be.
Genesis 39:11-15 But one day, when he went into the house to do his work and none of the men of the house was there in the house, 12 she caught him by his garment, saying, “Lie with me.” But he left his garment in her hand and fled and got out of the house. 13 And as soon as she saw that he had left his garment in her hand and had fled out of the house, 14 she called to the men of her household and said to them, “See, he has brought among us a Hebrew to laugh at us. He came in to me to lie with me, and I cried out with a loud voice. 15 And as soon as he heard that I lifted up my voice and cried out, he left his garment beside me and fled and got out of the house.” 16 Then she laid up his garment by her until his master came home, 17 and she told him the same story, saying, “The Hebrew servant, whom you have brought among us, came in to me to laugh at me. 18 But as soon as I lifted up my voice and cried, he left his garment beside me and fled out of the house.”
Friends, if I’m Joseph, you know what I’m thinking … “I can’t believe this is happening again…”
First it was my family and the people I was closest to, now it’s the person I work for and all the people I work with. People keep betraying me and lying to me and I’m the one who keeps getting stuck with my life getting turned upside down because of it.
If I was Joseph, I might have thought, “wait, I’ve never been anything but honest and true to Potiphar. When he gets home, he’ll believe me because he knows I would never betray him. He knows this isn’t who I am.
But Potiphar comes home and his wife tells him the same lie she told everyone else. And now Potiphar feels angry and betrayed and Joseph is thrown into an Egyptian prison where he is left to spend the rest of his life.
Sometimes the hardest part with trust isn’t the first time our trust is broken. It’s when we opened ourselves back up only to be hurt again.
Back to the story I was telling you, it was several years after that gentleman’s discovered his parent’s marriage had imploded and he found himself saying, “I never want to be blindly ignorant again” he felt the need to change something.
During this time he met someone. She had been hurt like he had been hurt. She had struggled with trust just like he had been struggling with trust. And the two of them bonded together seeking to build a romantic relationship that was different then the lies and betrayals they had felt in their past.
And so they did. And it was good. Describing this time in his life he said to me, “I felt hope and I started to open back up again and it felt so good because of where I had been.”
It was a year and a half into the relationship that he finally looked at her and said, “I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you” and her eyes went wide and she stepped back and she said, “I think we should break up.” He said, “Why?” and she said, “there’s someone else.”
And suddenly all of those feelings came rushing back because he felt blindsided and ignorant to what was going on and like his life was coming apart again.
As he described this he said, “the hardest part about it was that this time I felt like I should have known better so it was shame on me.”
You see, sometimes our hangups with trust come not from the first time we were hurt but the second time when we judge ourselves and believe that we should have known better.
And in those moments it’s so easy to shut down, to become the cynic, to close ourselves off to others because we want to protect ourselves. We don’t want to feel stupid. We don’t want to feel betrayed. We don’t want to be hurt by people we care about and people we let in.
But the gentleman was right when he said that choosing to distrust people was hurting his life more than it was protecting his life.
Because when you are hung up on trust, you can end up pushing away the people you need in your life the most. Because when you are hung up on trust you experience being in a world where you feel like nobody really truly knows you and that loneliness is hard to carry. When you are hung up on trust you will end up judging and defining the people in your present by the hurtful behaviors of others in your past and those people will struggle to trust you too.
So what do we do with this? It can seem like quite the conundrum can’t it? Do I trust people who might hurt me, only to get hurt again or do I close myself off from people who might hurt me in a way that makes me lonely and actually hurts them? It’s hard isn’t it.
This is why so many of us get hung up on trust in a way that keeps us stuck.
Let me summarize part of Joseph’s story here because there’s a moment at the end that I want to look at.
Joseph ends up spending his time in prison and the Pharoah of Egypt ends up having this crazy dream that he knows means something but nobody can tell him what it means. He ends up hearing that Joseph is pretty good at interpreting dreams and so Joseph hears the dream and tells the Pharoah that his dream means that the rain is going to dry up and that famine is going to be widespread across the land and so they better prepare for it now so they can survive it later.
And Pharoah is so impressed with Joseph and believes he’s a messenger from God so he puts Joseph in charge of the plan. And so Joseph goes from being forgotten about in prison to becoming the most influential leader in Egypt apart from the Pharoah himself.
And sure enough famine hits, but because of Joseph, Egypt has storehouses of grain and a plan to endure it and they do. And people from the surrounding areas who are starving begin coming to Egypt for assistance, including Joseph’s own family.
And after all these years he finds himself standing before the brothers who took his clothing and sold him into slavery, except this time Joseph has all the power.
It’s a big moment, and Joseph could take all of his hurt and betrayal and enact vengeance if he wanted to. He could deny them assistance and leave them to starve just like they had more or less left him. He could close his heart and feel justified in doing so because he has so many reasons to never trust them again.
But he doesn’t and it’s remarkable. He does something differently that I think offers wisdom to us who are hung up on distrust here today.
Genesis 42:18-20 On the third day Joseph said to them, “Do this and you will live, for I fear God: 19 if you are honest men, let one of your brothers remain confined where you are in custody, and let the rest go and carry grain for the famine of your households, 20 and bring your youngest brother to me. So your words will be verified, and you shall not die.” And they did so.
You get to decide the reasonable level of trust to give away
When it comes to trusting others it is not an all or nothing moment.
Joseph doesn’t just look at his brothers, who absolutely betrayed him and hurt him, and say it’s fine, I’m fine, everything is fine and then trusts them completely.
That wouldn’t be wise and in some ways that doesn’t feel reasonable does it?
Instead Joseph keeps his identity hidden, and for several chapters he tests them, little by little to determine if they are people that are reasonable to trust. Each step of the way, joseph is determining the amount of trust he is willing to give away.
Friends, instead of seeing trust in your life like an on or off switch, you actually get to decide what level of trust is reasonable.
If someone lies to you all the time, you get to say, “it’s not reasonable to fully trust this and that’s ok.”
If someone has hurt you over and over again you get to decide what’s right and reasonable and figure out how to proceed forward.
This message is not designed to tell anyone here that if someone is hurting them over and over that they should just trust. That would be uncaring, unkind and unwise.
If someone is hurting you or abusing you or lying to you, you are not morally obligated to trust them for fear of being bad. If someone gives you really good reasons not to trust them then it becomes reasonable to scale your level of trust way back.
You get to feel the honesty of what you really feel
Genesis 42:21-24 Then they said to one another, “In truth we are guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the distress of his soul, when he begged us and we did not listen. That is why this distress has come upon us.” 22 And Reuben answered them, “Did I not tell you not to sin against the boy? But you did not listen. So now there comes a reckoning for his blood.” 23 They did not know that Joseph understood them, for there was an interpreter between them. 24 Then he turned away from them and wept.
All these years later, Joseph is still hurt. And to hear his brothers acknowledge what they did brought up all those things that he had walked through. And the author of Genesis didn’t have to include that part in the text but he did, because he wants us to know how Joseph really felt and how Joseph expressed it.
Stacie talked about hurt in the first week of this series and encouraged us in our hurts by reminding us that at the core of Christianity is a God who hurts with us and walks thorugh struggle and pain with us.
If you have been hurt through betrayal or deceit, that hurt exists in you and it’s ok to feel what you feel. In fact if you are able to be honest to what you are feeling and allow yourself to feel it in a way that allows you to release it, you’ll find it’s not just honest, but that it can be healing.
When his brothers return and they bring his youngest brother Benjamin and Joseph sees him for the first time, we read in chapter 43 that his compassion for his youngest brother became so overwhelming that he had to leave the room and find a place to weep.
And he comes back in and serves his brothers a large meal and gives the youngest five time the portion. He even ends up revealing who he really is and getting the chance to see his father once again.
You get to decide who you want to be
When the story of Joseph concludes, he ends up getting to see his father Jacob one last time and then his father dies and goes to bury him
And his brothers worry that the reason Joseph hadn’t retaliated against them was because he was honoring his father and they become suddenly aware that once their dad is no longer alive that Joseph will have no reason not to wield justice and retribution for all that they had done.
So they come to him and the fall down before him and say we are your servants… they are at his mercy.
Genesis 50:19-21 But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? 20 As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people[b] should be kept alive, as they are today. 21 So do not fear; I will provide for you and your little ones.” Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly to them.
This is a such a powerful moment and I love that we get to read it thousands of years later…
Joseph essentially looks at his brothers and says, the betrayal and deceit you chose isn’t the whole story. In fact, it’s just a sentence in the beautiful chapter that God is currently writing because this all His story.
It’s as though Joseph looks at his brothers and says, the story of broken trust you chose to tell with your life doesn’t get to become the story I now tell with my life.
Does it mean I just walk around blindly trusting everyone… No.. I get to decide the reasonable level of trust to give away
Does it mean that it didn’t hurt and everything is fine?… No…It hurt and it had impact and it still hits now and then
But there is a larger story that I want to partner with God to tell in my life and though the betrayal happened and the deceit happened, it doesn’t get to be the whole story because I get to choose.
As I sat listening to that gentleman who had gone through not one but two really big moments of disruption and distrust in his life, I found myself full of questions.
I looked at him and said, “You are married now, to a woman you love right?” He nodded. And I said, “and you have children that you seem to adore.” He smiled and said, “I do.”
And so I said, how did the guy who never wanted to be blindly ignorant again find himself opening up to trust and to love to vulnerability and intimacy all those words that mess with us when we are hung up on distrust.
And he said, “After I told my girlfriend that I loved her and wanted to spend the rest of my life with her she dumped me and I became a pretty cynical person.” He said, “I thought marriage was a sham and that people were all liars and that this world really is just dog eat dog.”
He said he lived like that for about 10 years. And I said “so what changed?” And he said he was lonely and jaded and miserable and finally reached out for help. And in talking with someone else he began to process his pain and heal a little.
And my favorite thing he said, was “at some point I decided that the difficult moments in my past weren’t the story I wanted to keep telling in my future. I can’t trust everybody but I don’t have to be a distrusting person.”
Friends, Most of us have good reasons to have trust issues. The real question is: Do you want to keep them.
You may have had a moment where someone broke your trust, but you get to decide if that is going to make you an untrusting person. It’s your trust to give away based on what’s reasonable. You get to choose to move toward healing and releasing some of the pain and distrust you might carry. And we all get to choose the next chapter that we write in this story called our life.
An the good news is, what others may have intended for evil, God works together for good. He never leaves us, nor forsakes us. He is with us. So in whatever hurts, habits or hang ups have you feeling stuck, May you know that you are not alone.
Ryan Kramer served as youth pastor at Casas Church in Tucson Arizona for eight years, and currently serves as Creative Programming Pastor. Ryan is part of the pastoral teaching team and lends compelling, authentic Bible teaching to the Casas pulpit. Ryan is a graduate of Moody Bible Institute. He is also pursuing a Master's degree in mental health counseling from the University of Phoenix. Ryan and his wife Amber have two daughters, Felicity and Harmony.
