Photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash

Trust isn’t easy for many of us. 

We have been hurt, betrayed, fired from jobs, cut from teams, broken up. And people we love and care about have experienced these things as well. 

We navigate our relational worlds, wondering who is safe and if the bottom will fall out on a relationship. 

We then take this feeling and fear into our relationship with God. We wonder, like the prophet Habakkuk, “Can I trust God? Is God good? Is God really in charge of things?”

In Habakkuk 1:12-2:5, Habakkuk questions God and says, “I get that you have a plan, but I have questions about your plan.” All of us can relate to this on some level. We see God’s hand and think, “I would’ve done that differently.”

But God tells Habakkuk something key in 2:4: “The righteous shall live by faith.” 

Where is our faith put? In God. 

Trust starts with who we are trusting in.

Trust starts with who we are trusting in.
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How do we know whether to trust someone? Should we trust God?

Henry Cloud’s book on Trust: Knowing When to Give It, When to Withhold It, How to Earn It, and How to Fix It When It Gets Broken, says there are 5 essentials of trust: 

5 essentials to trust in our relationship with God.
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The first is understanding.

According to Cloud, understanding is feeling known and understood by the other person. 

This is important in any relationship. To feel safe and trust the other person, I have to know that they know me, that I’m safe, and that they understand me and my feelings. 

Do you feel like God understands you? Knows you? Do you feel safe and secure in your relationship with God? 

Habakkuk would say he felt understood by God. He was safe and secure enough to tell God what he thought and felt. 

The second is Motive.

According to Cloud, motive is believing that the other person has your best interests at heart. This is believing that God does want what’s best for you. 

The best for us isn’t always comfortable or easy. A doctor will tell us to change our diet to improve our health. Is that the best thing for us? Yes. Do we want to stop eating certain things? No. A financial planner or coach will tell us to make this choice with our money or that choice with our life or health. 

Will we want to do that? Not always, but it is best for us. 

Habakkuk believes God has his best interest at heart. He just doesn’t understand why God is doing it. 

The difference is crucial. 

Habakkuk believes God has his best interest at heart. He just doesn’t understand why God is doing it. The difference is crucial.
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The third is ability. 

The third essential to trust is ability. 

This is believing that God is able to do what He promises. That God can do what we need him to do. 

Can God come through? Yes, God can heal. Yes, God brings about miracles. 

The bible is a resounding yes to God’s ability to do what He promises. 

The bible is a resounding yes to God’s ability to do what He promises.
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The fourth is character.

The fourth essential is character. 

Who God is, that his character is trustworthy. 

That we trust God is good, true. 

5 essentials to trust in our relationships.
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The fifth is track record.

The last essential is track record. 

This is looking at who God is and what God has done in our past, others’ past, and throughout scripture, and seeing his track record. 

For me, this is one I will struggle with as it relates to God. 

When God doesn’t do something at present the way he did in the past or in the same time frame. 

But this is the testing of our faith.

When we trust someone, we are trusting their character. Who they are, their past performance, and whether they have proven themselves trustworthy.

When we trust someone, we are trusting their character. Who they are, their past performance, and whether they have proven themselves trustworthy.
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One of the things that gets us in trouble in our relationships is that we respond to people the same. The reality is that our response to people depends on some things. The boundaries we have with one person aren’t the boundaries we should have with another person.

The book of Proverbs states that there are 3 kinds of people: Wise, foolish, and evil. How do we know what kind of person we are dealing with? It depends on their reaction to the truth.

We’ve already laid out how to know if you are a wise person or dealing with a wise person and how to know if you are a foolish person or dealing with a foolish person.

But how do you know if you are dealing with an evil person? They aren’t the same, and we must deal with them accordingly. 

Henry Cloud, in Necessary Endings said, “Evil people are not reasonable; they seek to destroy.” 

Evil people are not reasonable; they seek to destroy. -Henry Cloud
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Here’s how you know you are dealing with an evil person: 

• They like to bring others down. 
• They are intentionally divisive. 
• They enjoy it when someone else fails. 
• They try to create the downfall of others. 

Traits of an evil person.
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When dealing with an evil person, you must go into protection mode, not helping mode. 

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One of the things that gets us in trouble in our relationships is that we respond to people the same. The reality is that our response to people depends on some things. The boundaries we have with one person aren’t the boundaries we should have with another person.

The book of Proverbs states that there are 3 kinds of people: Wise, foolish, and evil. How do we know what kind of person we are dealing with? It depends on their reaction to the truth.

We laid out last week how to know if you are a wise person or dealing with a wise person. But how do you know if you are dealing with a foolish or evil person? They aren’t the same, and we must deal with them accordingly. 

What makes a person foolish? In Necessary Endings, Henry Cloud states, “The fool tries to adjust the truth so he does not have to adjust to it.”

The fool tries to adjust the truth so he does not have to adjust to it. -Henry Cloud
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What else makes a foolish person, so you know if you are one or if you are dealing with one? Cloud has some examples:

• When given feedback, they are defensive and immediately come back at you with a reason why it isn’t their fault. 
• When a mistake is pointed out, pass the blame. 
• With a wise person, talking through issues strengthens the relationship. With a foolish person, it creates conflict, alienation, and a breach in the relationship.
• They will minimize the impact of their actions. 
• They will rationalize their actions. 
• They never take ownership of their behavior or reactions, or actions. 
• They see themselves as the victim. 

Traits of a foolish person.
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While a wise person seeks wisdom and feedback to make changes, a foolish person has little desire for change. 

So what do you do with a foolish person in a relationship? You need to stop talking about the problem and set limits and consequences. Often the foolish person isn’t suffering any consequences for their actions; the other people in the relationship are. 

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Photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash

One thing that gets us in trouble in our relationships is that we respond to people the same. The reality is that our response to people depends on some things. The boundaries we have with one person aren’t the boundaries we should have with another person. 

The book of Proverbs states that there are 3 kinds of people: Wise, foolish, and evil. How do we know what kind of person we are dealing with? It depends on their reaction to the truth. 

What makes a person wise? In Necessary Endings, Henry Cloud states, “When truth presents itself, the wise person sees the light, takes it in, and makes adjustments.”

When truth presents itself, the wise person sees the light, takes it in, and makes adjustments. -Henry Cloud
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What else makes a wise person so you know if you are one or if you are dealing with one? Cloud has some examples: 

How to know if you’re dealing with a wise person.
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• When you give them feedback, they listen, take it in, and adjust their behavior accordingly. 
• When you give them feedback, they embrace it positively. 
• They own their actions and reactions and take responsibility without excuses or blame. 
• Your relationship is strengthened as a result of giving them feedback. 
• They empathize and express concern about the results of their behavior on others. 
• They show remorse for their actions and behaviors. 
• They ask curious questions. 
• They are open to change, and they make changes. 

A wise person is different from a fool or an evil person. 

One simple way to know if you are wise or dealing with a wise person is if they are open to feedback. If they are not, that is a clue. 

How to know if you’re a wise person.
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It’s that time of year again, time to share my top lists of the year. Monday, I shared the top sermon downloads from Revolution Church. Tuesday I shared the books that almost made my “best of the year” list. And yesterday I shared the albums that almost made my “best of the year” list.

To see my list of favorite books from past year, simply click on the numbers: 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.

To make this list, it does not have to be published in 2013, I only needed to read it in 2013. As always, this list was hard to narrow down, but here are the top 13 books of 2013. Buckle up book worms:

13. How to Deliver a TED Talk | Jeremy Donavan

If you speak for a living or are a pastor, this is a must read book. Donavan takes the best and worst of TED Talks and breaks them down into do’s and don’ts for speakers. You can read my review here.

12. Innovation’s Dirty Little Secret: Why Serial Innovators Succeed Where Others Fail | Larry Osborne

I love Larry Osborne’s stuff. It is so simple and straightforward. In this book, he looks at why some churches and organizations works and others don’t. His chapter on mission statements is worth the price of this book. You can read my review here.

11. Eat Move Sleep: Why Small Choices Make a Big Difference | Tom Rath

Health books are everywhere. Good health books are hard to find. This is one of the great ones. Two things stood out in this book: One, every choice we make matters. They all impact every part of our life. Two, Tom Rath looks at how to eat, move and sleep so that those choices make the most positive impact in our lives. You can read my review here.

10. Sex & Money: Pleasures that Leave You Empty and Grace that Satisfies | Paul David Tripp

There are some authors you should read everything they write. Tim Keller is one of them and Paul David Tripp is another one. No matter the book, you should read their stuff. Tripp takes the two biggest temptations and sins in our culture and shows how they leave us empty. Definitely a convicting book. You can read my review here.

9. Boundaries for Leaders: Results, Relationships, and Being Ridiculously in Charge | Henry Cloud

The primary message of this book for leaders is you get what you create and what you allow. You can read my review here.

8. Chasing Francis | Ian Cron 

I read this book one Saturday night, one of those hard, dark Saturday nights many pastors have. I could not put this book down as it resonated with me on so many deep levels. So, when you have that dark night, this is a book to read. Here’s my review of it.

7. The Pastor’s Justification: Applying the work of Christ in Your Life & Ministry | Jared Wilson

This book is very similar to Paul David Tripp’s book Dangerous Calling. A challenge to pastors to apply the gospel they preach to their own lives and hearts. A great book for doing the deep dive for a pastor and confronting their idols. It also helps that Wilson is hilarious in this book. You can read my review here.

6. Discipleshift: Five Steps that Help Your Church to Make Disciples who Make Disciples | Jim Putnam, Bobby Harrington, & Robert Coleman

The effects of this book will be felt at Revolution for years to come. As we’ve moved more and more towards a missional community model, this book has helped us hone our system of making disciples. This graph has been huge for us. You can read my review here.

5. Give them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus | Elyse Fitzpatrick and Jessica Thompson 

If you are a parent or will be a parent, this is the one parenting book you have to read. It shows you how to parent to your child’s heart, which is the only way to change a child and see them become who God created them to become. You can read my review here.

4. Leadership as an Identity: The Four Traits of Those Who Wield Lasting Influence | Crawford Loritts

What set this book apart was that it had very little “here’s what a leader does” advice. This book is all about what influences and shapes a leader. Ultimately, what shapes a leader will eventually come out in their actions. You can read my review here.

3. A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World | Paul Miller

This is the book on prayer.  So good. I love the idea of prayer cards and have since created them on Evernote to use. You can read my review here.

2. In Search of Deep Faith: A Pilgrimage into the Beauty, Goodness, and Heart of Christianity | Jim Belcher

This book almost made the jump to #1, it was close. This book is part parenting book, part history, part travel, and faith. It shows the roots of Christianity and how to bring those into your family. One thing Katie and I want is for our kids to know the history of Christianity and that it is not a faith that just appeared in the last 100 years. You can read my review here.

1. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action | Simon Sinek

I love leadership books, so it makes sense that one of them is #1. A leadership book was #1 last year too. This book was insanely good. If you are a leader, this is the one book you have to read in 2014. So good. You can read my review here.

Tomorrow you’ll get my last list of the week: the top 13 albums of the year.

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Every Saturday morning, I review a book that I read recently. If you missed any, you can read past reviews here. This week’s book is Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, & Relationships that all of us Have to Give up in Order to Move Forward (kindle version) by Henry Cloud.

As the title indicates, the book is about how to know when things have run their course. It looks at how life, business, church, relationships and organizations all have a life cycle. We all know this. We aren’t friends with everyone forever, we don’t have ministries that run forever (although it might feel that way at some churches), we don’t have products that last forever. Things end. People move on. Sometimes that ending is hurtful and sometimes productive. But they happen.

What Cloud does and it is something every leader needs to learn is how to know when that ending is happening (before it’s too late) and how to end it and move on in a healthy way.

For the longest time I’ve been terrible at this. I hold onto relationships too long. I let people who hurt me stay in my head for years. While I’ve grown in this area, I’m nowhere close to where I need to be, which is why I found this book so helpful.

Here are a few things I highlighted:

• For there to be anything new, old things always have to end, and we have to let go of them.
• Getting to the next level always requires ending something, leaving it behind, and moving on. Growth itself demands that we move on. Without the ability to end things, people stay stuck, never becoming who they are meant to be, never accomplishing all that their talents and abilities should afford them.
• In many contexts, until we let go of what is not good, we will never find something that is good. The lesson: good cannot begin until bad ends.
• Often, there are no good business reasons for waiting to do something that should be done now.
• In the simple word pruning is the central theme of what a necessary ending is all about: Removing whatever it is in our business or life whose reach is unwanted or superfluous.
• Make the endings a normal occurrence and a normal part of business and life, instead of seeing it as a problem.
• One of the most important aspects to any high performance is the ability to separate one’s personhood from any particular result.
• the great leaders make “life and death decisions,” which, as he pointed out, were usually about people. Those are the decisions that cause big directional changes in businesses, where the life or death of the vision depends on someone stepping up and acting.
• What is not working is not going to magically begin working
• If you comb the leadership literature, one theme runs throughout everyone’s descriptions of the best leaders. The great ones have either a natural ability, or an acquired one, as Collins says, to “confront the brutal facts.”
• In the absence of real, objective reasons to think that more time is going to help, it is probably time for some type of necessary ending.
• When truth presents itself, the wise person sees the light, takes it in, and makes adjustments.
• People resist change that they feel no real need to make.
• In my experience with businesses and individuals, not paying attention to sustainability is one of the most common reasons that they get into trouble, sometimes unrecoverable trouble.

As a leader, this is a book worth picking up. I think for many pastors, knowing when to end a ministry, a relationship or how to handle a leader who is not performing, this book can be extremely helpful.

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I recently read Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, & Relationships that all of us Have to Give up in Order to Move Forward by Henry Cloud. He had a great list of questions to help someone determine if the life they are living, whether in work, pace or a relationship is sustainable for a long period of time. Here they are:

1. Are you in an emotional state right now that is not sustainable? I am not talking about just a “hard time” or a time that you would not want to continue forever. Life is full of difficulties, but with proper support and other resources, we can endure them if we have to and if we have a good reason to. What I am referring to is a hard time that is truly not sustainable and often continues for no good reason. Are you in a state that is eating your heart, mind, soul, or energy in such a way that you are headed for some sort of crash or burnout?
2. Are you in a physical state right now that is not sustainable? Too much travel? Too little sleep? Too much “on the go”? Too much taxing of your physical system? For a prolonged period of time with no end in sight? Too little exercise? Too much junk food?
3. Are you in a state right now in your relationships that is not sustainable? Is there some relationship that is depleting or damaging you? Is there a context in which you feel compromised or forced to adapt to another person’s needs and demands out of fear? Are you in a situation where someone has power over you and is slowly diminishing you?
4. Are you in a professional state right now that is not sustainable? In your work, is something going on in the culture or in your relationship with your boss that you cannot continue long-term without some sort of damage to your drive, talents, or passion? This does not include all difficult cultures or bosses, as most people have some period of time in a setting like that, which really builds them or equips them over time, even if it is hard. What I am referring to is something that is not equipping you or causing you to grow but is slowly wearing you down or killing something inside of you.
5. Are you in a spiritual state right now that is not sustainable? In your spirit, is something causing you to be diminished? Is hope being deferred in some way that is causing a sickness of spirit? Are you losing a sense of meaning in life? Is something happening that is causing you to feel depleted of a sense of purpose, mission, transcendence, love, or other spiritual dimensions? A diminished belief in humanity or diminished faith? Is your ability to hope being affected?
6. Are you in a financial state right now that is not sustainable? In your business or personal finances, are your expenses greater than what’s coming in, with no end in sight? Is the curve between investment and certain returns way out of whack? Do you not know how your real, fixed, non-negotiable expenses are going to be covered in the current path that you are on? Said another way, if something does not change, are you going to run out of money and have no options? If “cash equals options,” are you on a path of diminishing options?
7. Are your energy reserves being depleted in a way that is not sustainable? Is there something so draining to your energy that you have to make yourself keep going? Do you have to drag yourself in a particular path continually? Is there a clear drain that is causing that? • Are you letting your strengths fall into disuse in a way that is not sustainable? Are you on a course where your strengths are not available to you? Are you being cornered, at work or elsewhere, in a way that requires you to be “not you” most of the time? Is the real you slowly going to sleep? Do you fear that it may not be able to be reawakened?
8. Do you find yourself in a situation where you are overextended in some way, one that began as an anomaly but now has become a pattern? Many times this happens with a person’s schedule or workload. What they thought was going to be a lot of work or extra hours or effort for a while has now become what is required to keep it all going, as the entity or enterprise has become shaped and formed around exactly that ingredient, all that effort from just one source—you. So what was supposed to be a season has now become a pattern, the new normal.

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This story appeared in Henry Cloud’s book Necessary Endings. Cloud told the story of a father who knew his daughter’s boyfriend was about to ask for her hand in marriage and he asked Henry Cloud how he should handle it, what he should ask the man asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

Here’s the story

My friend told me that his daughter’s boyfriend had called and asked him to go to dinner, and he expected the proverbial “asking for her hand” conversation. He wanted some advice on how to handle that question, and I could understand his trepidation. Few thoughts are scarier to a father than wondering, Will this guy love her, treat her well, and take good care of her? As a father of two girls, as I look into the future, I could already feel what that must have felt like for my friend. We talked about how to handle it, and then I said, “After all of that, tell him that you would like to see his credit report and his last two years’ tax returns.” “What? You have got to be joking!” he exclaimed. “Not at all. I am dead serious,” I said. “Why? I can’t ask him how much money he makes. That’s so intrusive and the wrong message. Marriage is not about how much money he makes.” “Exactly, and money has nothing to do with my suggestion. I don’t care about the numbers at all, how much he makes. Tell him to blot them out if he wants. I only care about two things. First, the credit report will give you a peek into how he has fulfilled other promises he has made to people who have entrusted things to him. If he can’t be trusted to fulfill the promises he makes with something such as money, which is not nearly as valuable as your daughter, how are you going to trust him with real treasure? I would see a big yellow flag if he has a history of bailing out on commitments he has made to lenders or others.” While my friend was still trying to absorb the idea of asking for a credit report, I homed in on the tax return. “I don’t care what the numbers are. I just want to know if he has done them. Does he take responsibility for his life and get things like taxes done? If he hasn’t, then that is a sign of what your daughter is signing up for in the future: chaos and uncertainty that come from his character. That would be another big warning. No matter what his financial situation is, I would want to know that he obeys the law, has his affairs in order, gets his taxes done, and sends them in. “So, the message here has nothing to do with money. It has to do with looking at his past behavior in some areas that count: promises, commitments, and responsibility, and then seeing what the track record has been. That is important because the best predictor of the future is the past. What he has done in the past will be what he does in the future, unless there has been some big change. You can bet on it,” I told him.

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