God will give you more than you can handle
“We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to resist, so that we despaired of life itself…” These are very familiar words. They are, in effect, the words of the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 1:8. Paul goes on to say that he felt they had received a death sentence (verse 9).
Then we couple it with Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 10:13 which says that “God will not allow you to be tested beyond your strength, but He will provide a way out so that you can bear it.”
The fact is that they are both right. Both must be kept in tension with each other.
Life will not ultimately break us, but we will be broken in the process.
Many people will read those words and not understand them. It will seem crazy. But those who have experienced this paradoxical true evangelical life will attest to the enigmatic truth that this tension unites spouses.
In fact, I would suggest that the authentic Christian experience is about learning to be broken.
Elsewhere in Paul he says that “we are afflicted in every way, but not broken; distressed, but not desperate; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9)
Suffering was so familiar to Paul that it’s hard to imagine him reciting the kind of cliché that says, “God won’t give you more than you can handle.” The fact is that his own experience and his own words betray such a claim. When we hear “God won’t give you more than you can handle” there is more of our comfortable culture in those words than the reality that both Paul and we face existentially.
The deepest desire of our culture is that we had control over our own lives, but we must remember that our culture is lost in the fight for what it cannot control.
Why do we succumb to this weakness that must be strong?
The reality of life for the lucky ones is that life will take us beyond our ability to bear. I say the fortunate, because we will not know the recklessness and zeal of God’s faithfulness until we are faced with that situation in which we are broken without being able to continue.
It is only in this place where we have nothing left that we realize that we do not need anything to continue.
Because in this we carry within us the death of Christ, which is the most disconcerting paradox for an abundant life.
When there is no strength left, there is no barrier to surrender. But there should be no force left first.
When we are forced to rest we rest very well. Perhaps it is a hopelessness that sticks to us and we feel besieged. Maybe it’s day after day, week after week, month after month, and the only relief we get are fleeting experiences of peace interspersed with the helplessness of it all.
Fortunate is the person who has experienced the death of himself – the imperative of the Gospel. We only die to ourselves when we are made to die to ourselves. Nobody volunteers to die to themselves because they think it’s a good idea. It is always an admirable idea, but we cannot do such a thing until we are forced to do so.
The pride of self-sufficiency cannot bring about the death of the self. However, it is in a situation where God gives you more than you can handle that you finally learn to put off yourself and put on Christ.
God gives us more than we can handle in the moments of our lives. He does this often enough that we can learn something. It took me several months, up to a dozen and more, before I finally learned what was most needed from the most valuable internship anyone can sign up for.
God uses the circumstances in our lives that break us to show us that, in Him, we will never be broken.
We may feel broken beyond repair so often, but that shred of hope keeps us tantalizingly in the game.
We never enjoy being pushed beyond our limits, but when we look back, we enjoy the fact that we survived…and grew!
And we marvel at the faithfulness of God that leads us to the brink and the abyss.