Not only do friends sometimes disappoint us, but celebrities can do that, too. I was reminded of this by the recent Brian Williams scandal.

Since 2004 Brian Williams has served as the anchor and managing editor of the NBC Nightly News. During that time Mr. Williams has been awarded 12 Emmy Awards, as well as the Peabody Award, the DuPont-Columbia University Award, and the George Polk Award.

    On February 10th NBC announced that Brian Williams was going to be suspended for six months without pay–meaning that he will lose half of his $10-million-dollar-a-year salary.

    Brian William’s stellar career began to unravel when an American soldier challenged a recent news story. In it Williams claimed he was in a military helicopter during the Iraq invasion that was hit by enemy fire and forced to land. As it turns out, Mr. Williams arrived at the scene about an hour after the incident. In 2007 he said, “… I looked down the tube of an RPG that had been fired at us, and it hit the chopper in front of us.” Then in 2013 he claimed that HIS helicopter was “hit and crippled by enemy fire.”

    The helicopter story isn’t the only time Brian Williams’ integrity has been questioned. In 2006 he was recalling what he saw in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. He said he looked out of the 8th floor of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Canal Street and saw a dead body float by. Experts have since firmly established that there never was any flooding on Canal Street.

     In a 2005 television interview Brian Williams stated that he did not witness a suicide that took place inside the New Orleans Super-dome at the time of Katrina. His exact words were, “We heard the story of a man killing himself, falling from the upper deck.” Then in a 2014 interview he said, “We watched, all of us watched, as one man committed suicide.”

    These revelations are particularly difficult because Brian Williams appears so honest and trustworthy. We could make a list of celebrities who appeared to be honorable, but circumstances proved otherwise. Among them, we could name CBS news broadcaster Dan Rather, Coach Joe Paterno, and even Philadelphia’s famous comedian Bill Cosby.

    This is all very upsetting. If we can’t trust popular public figures, then who can we trust? Down deep we all want to find winners whom we can look up to and admire. I think we have a deep-seated desire to find people we can have confidence in, people who won’t let us down.

    Stay with me for a minute, but I have some bad news. We will always feel let down at some point when we put our faith in another person. The Bible makes this clear with these very blunt statements: “Do not trust in princes, in mortal man, in whom there is no salvation” (Psalm 146:3); “Thus says the Lord, ‘Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind and makes flesh his strength, and whose heart turns away from the Lord’ ” (Jeremiah 17:5).

    There is a good reason why we can’t find people who will never disappoint us. It’s because every one of us has been infected with sin. That is why the Bible says, “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man” (Psalm 118:8).

    When we trust other people to make us feel safe, we are expecting them to do for us what no human being can do. (By the way, we can’t do that for others, either, no matter how much we wish we could) God is the only One who is able to make us feel completely safe. He will never make a mistake and will never let us down. “O Lord of hosts, how blessed is the man who trusts in You!” (Psalm 84:12). “In God I have put my trust, I shall not be afraid. What can man do to me?” (Psalm 56:11). “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose trust is the Lord” (Jeremiah 17:7).

    God made us for Himself, and that is why we are safest and happiest when we give our lives over to Him. You can have a rock-solid relationship with your Creator “if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation. For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes in Him will not be disappointed”” (Romans 10:9–11).

    Life is filled with disappointments, but “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). Millions of His children have been trusting Him completely down through the ages, and He has never let any one of us down. You can trust Him–always.