How to Trust Again When You Have Been Hurt by God’s People

Trust is a hard thing to come by, and once our trust is broken we usually make vows or statements to never trust again.

Trust … What does it look like? What does it feel like? How do we obtain trust, and how do we learn to trust again?

I am sure there are many questions you have pondered and asked yourself over and over and over again. How do we know who we can trust and what do we do when we don’t know how to trust? Trust. It must come forth. We must allow ourselves to trust again.

What about God? What about trusting Him? Trusting God is not a natural response. Being in ministry, I have met many people who have not trusted God and don’t know how to truly give it all to God.

As I ponder the word “trust,” many things come to mind. I think to myself, how can I impact the world on the word “trust” in one little simple article.

I remember the first time I discovered I didn’t trust God. I was prayer walking near my home in the early morning hours. I always have my iPod ear buds stuck in an ear listening to worship music. As I was prayer walking, I started singing at the top of my lungs this song and the word “trust” came out. I stopped in my tracks as I discovered I didn’t trust God. It was devastating. I listened to the song repeatedly as the revelation came forth and I am staring at the clouds. I didn’t trust God.

It led me on a journey to journal everything about trust—what I could trust God for and what I couldn’t trust God for. I wrote down scriptures in the Bible and allowed the Father to take me on a journey of discovering how to trust Him. 

Along the way as I was learning how to trust people, I was being hurt by the church and by people of God. You know what I am talking about, right? We all have been hurt by people in the body of Christ, right?

I am discovering we all have hurts as I travel the U.S. The pinches, the distrust, the hurtful words, people not believing in our concepts and ideas, people in the church not embracing our passion for Jesus or the controlling spirits attempting to rule over us and the church. It seems like the church has torn us down and disintegrated the trust we once had for people and for God. 

As we journey on further through life, we discover it is difficult to trust people again. The same hurts, the same lies, the same rejections seem to keep rearing their ugly faces around us. Instead of seeking to be healed from these deep wounds, we seem to allow them to pile up on top of each other. We continue to get hurt and sit under leadership that has also been wounded which in turn further wounds us when our leaders are ministering out of a place of hurt. How can we learn to trust again when the church has been wounded and continues to wound its people? 

We must first learn to trust in our most heavenly Father. Our Father loves us with an everlasting love (Jer. 31:3). He has plans and purposes for us and there is no room for distrust in those plans and purposes (Jer. 29:11). He is a Father who desires to give good gifts to His children (Luke 11:13).

We need to come to a place of total surrender and trust with our Father. We can’t look at our Father as a representative of a person in this situation. Our heavenly Father is not going to let us down, like earthly people do. Our heavenly Father can be trusted.

We need to trust God daily, minute by minute, hour by hour, second by second. It is a conscious decision … it is a choice. What choice are you going to make? Men will fail us, we will fail ourselves, but God’s love never fails and His mercies are new every morning (1 Cor. 13:8, Ps. 59:16). 

God proves Himself to us time and time and time again, even when He doesn’t have to. He chooses to. We need to choose to trust Him. We need to choose to sacrifice to Him.

As I ponder the year and the things once again He causes me to trust Him with, I discover that I learned my lessons years ago and I can trust Him, and so can you. We can trust Him when we give up something He has asked us to give up that it is for our good.

We trust Him that we need to live by faith and not by sight. As we surrender those things most precious and valuable into the hands of our living omnipresent God, we can trust that He will replace them, restore them and rebuild them. We don’t always know why God calls us to sacrifice money, time, ministry, employment, friendships, homes, relationships, churches, possessions or anything else He calls us to give up for Him.

However, as we look back we can discover while we were in the situation that perhaps, maybe for that small moment we did trust Him, and then as we add up the number of moments we will discover we have built up some trust for our heavenly Father over the years.

As we trust our heavenly Father, then we will begin to trust people. We will trust the God we see in people. It must start with our Father, our heavenly Father.

As we begin to truly know Him we will see His reflection in people. Everyone can trust God for something, but how many of us can trust God for everything? Think about where you need to trust God. Pray and ask the Holy Spirit to show you and reveal to you how to move into a place of trust with Him, because He is trustworthy. 

Kathy DeGraw is the founder of DeGraw Ministries, (degrawministries.org). She is a prophetic deliverance minister who is passionate about releasing the love and power of God. She travels hosting conferences, teaching schools and evangelistic love tours. Kathy enjoys empowering and equipping people through writing and is the author of five books.