“God will never give you more than you can handle.”
What a crock of….!
Have you ever been in the depths of despair and had a friend feed you this line? As if to make things better, they contend that God would never give you more than you can handle (you strong individual you)! Yet, if He never gave us more than we could handle, what reason would we have to call on Him?
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” -Matthew 11:28 (NIV)
What burden would we need rest from if God would never give us more than we can handle?
Have you ever been in the dire straights of hopelessness? Have you ever felt true, utter despair? Hoplessness felt? When you are at the end of your emotional rope, the last thing you want to hear is that you can get through this (on your own). You want helpful advice, a helping hand, or just plain help period. You do not want regurgitated, baseless chatter.
“And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.” -1 Corinthians 10:13b
So the line may not be entirely baseless, but the (mis)interpretation of the verse is where the error lies; read it again: ‘he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.’ If you read further, you read the request to ‘flee from idolatry’. The Bible says that He will not let you be tempted more than you can handle, not that He will not give you more than you can handle. We are not meant to be able to handle everything; God is. We are meant to give our burdens over to Him. We are meant to call on Him. We are meant to resist temptation, but we are never guaranteed to be given only what we can handle.
I am never encouraged by those words; it never makes me feel better to hear that ‘God will never give you more than you can handle’ because it has always felt like a cop-out.
“A righteous man may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers him from them all.” -Psalm 34:19
God will never give you more than He can handle. The caveat to that though is that He can handle anything. He wants us to call on Him; He wants us to lean on Him. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”