Hammer on Anvil '

A dear friend took me aside at church Sunday and asked me to blog about this topic. Probably many of my readers have heard someone say, "God will never give you more than you can handle." Perhaps someone said it to you after you lost a loved one. Or maybe when you were in the throes of a nasty divorce. Or when your child had just been diagnosed with autism.

Though I don't doubt that people have good intentions when they use this phrase, the problem is that it is not scriptural. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that God will not give us more than we can handle.

Then where did this awful phrase come from? Probably 1 Corinthians 10:13, which says:

The temptations in your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand. When you are tempted, he will show you a way out so that you can endure (New Living Translation).

Paul is talking about temptation here -- not suffering or overwhelming circumstances. Things happen in life over which we have no control. But we do have control over how we respond to temptation. God promises to give us victory in times of temptation; He does NOT promise that nothing will ever happen to us that we "can't handle."

The issue here is that what we think we can handle, and what God KNOWS we can handle, are often very different things. Last year, I (and many others) prayed for months for a man to be healed from Stage 4 cancer. He was only 42 years old when he died, leaving behind his wife and 3 young children. Did his wife think this was more than she could handle? YES. But her faith in God has enabled her to persevere through this dark time in her life. She and her children are learning that God is their source of strength and hope.

Dear friends, only God knows what we can handle. We may believe we could never cope with a given situation, only to find that when actually faced with it, God came in like a flood and we made it through. Sometimes dire situations are the only thing that awaken us to the fact that we need to depend on God for everything. Acts 17:28 says, "In Him we live and move and have our being." Yet we sometimes live our lives without giving God a second thought -- let alone making Him first in our lives.

Recently I was going through a dark, scary time in which I felt hopeless and powerless. In the middle of the night, God spoke Isaiah 41:10 to me: 

"So do not fear, for I am with you. Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with My righteous right hand." 

I fell back to sleep in peace, knowing He would sustain me and see me through.

If you are going through something right now that is so overwhelming that you feel like you're drowning, know first of all that it's okay to feel desperate! Remember David in Psalm 22? He cried, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?" Jesus later quoted that gut-wrenching sense of abandonment as He hung on the Cross.

Even when you can't sense God's presence and it feels like He's a million miles away, be assured that He is right there with you. Suffering is never pointless in His economy. Be still, and know that He is God.