Good News at Rock Bottom: A 5-Day Devotional Plan With Ray Ortlundಮಾದರಿ

Good News When You Are Betrayed

Betrayal crushes us because real relationships are built on trust. Real friendship is grounded in the solid bedrock of steady faithfulness we can count on through thick and thin. When we trust someone, we take a risk. We hand over to them something of ourselves deep within. We become vulnerable. If our trust is then violated, it isn’t just our plans that get changed. Our hearts get broken. It couldn’t be more personal - and sharply felt.

We enter into Christ by being forgiven, and we display Christ by forgiving others.

It might take a long time. It might feel like you have to forgive over and over again, because the injury flares up over and over again. Jesus spoke of forgiving not seven times but “seventy-seven times” (Matt. 18:22). We might have to remind ourselves repeatedly that God’s anger is better than our anger. And after seventy-seven times, we might start to feel it and relax and forgive. But our Lord—not our betrayer finally owning up, but our Lord himself right now, with his grace and his wrath—is why we can open up to forgiving our betrayer.

What is forgiveness? It is deciding we will not make the traitors pay for what they did. Look how our Lord puts it: “as we forgive our debtors” means that they owe us. What they took from us they should restore to us. But forgiveness means we absorb the impact of their wrong. We accept the losses we suffered because of their evil. We trust God to turn the wreckage into beauty we can scarcely imagine. His covenant faithfulness will overrule their betrayal, bending it around in the opposite direction. He will take us further into what we really want than we ever could have achieved by a comfortably undisturbed mushy-middle existence.

You are never more like Jesus, never more powerful, than when you forgive the real evil that ruined your life. That merciful you is the most alive you, the most beautiful you, the most consequential you that could exist in this generation. And that tear-stained, glorious you, down there at rock bottom, is shifting the balance of power in this world away from evil and toward the high and holy one, by grace, for his glory.

Reflection Questions

1. What was the occasion, or the moment, or the relationship when your trust was most betrayed? I am sorry to ask. But let’s remember: Jesus is the most present right where your heart is the most broken.
2. In the ongoing struggle to forgive your betrayer, Jesus supports you. It isn't easy to forgive over and over again, as painful memories come flooding back. But how can you trust your Savior to help you in those hard moments?