More Than You Can Bear?

While going through hardship or a trying season of life has anyone ever said to you: “The Bible says that God will never give you more than you can bear.” Fact is, the Bible never says this exactly.

You might be thinking, “Now Steve, I know there has got to be a verse in the Bible that says this, because my grandma used to quote it to me. There’s not, but here’s the verse your grandma was most likely referring to: 1 Corinthians 10:13 – “No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. 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.”

Let’s take a look at what this verse is actually saying, and not saying.

Many people interpret this passage to mean that God will not let more hardship come into your life than you can handle. Paul says, “…when you are tempted.” None of us can avoid temptation. It says, “when,” not if. The verse says that God will “…provide a way out so you can endure/escape it.”

What is temptation? Temptation is the desire to do something, especially something wrong or unwise. In context, the above verse is saying that God will always provide a way for you to not sin. “No temptation” means NO SIN can overtake you, not no hardship. It’s saying that God will always provide an option for you to choose that does not involve sinning.

What Paul is basically saying is that no Christian ever gets to say, “Yeah, I sinned, but I had no choice.” That’s not true biblically. None of us can ever use the excuse, “Well, the devil made me do it because he was too powerful for me to resist.”

You and I have no idea how many times in our lives that God has held up His hand and protected us from Satan’s attacks. However, God will not let His people take a temptation test that is impossible for them to pass. He will always show us a way out, apart from sinning.

However, there is no way out from suffering, apart from the resurrection. The same apostle that said we never have to disobey, wrote a second letter to the same church (Corinth) and said we might have to live with a certain amount of suffering or despair. 2 Corinthians 1:8 – “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself.” Ever been there?

So, while not sinning is always an option that God will provide for us, Paul says that not suffering is not always an option on the table, because God has built hardship into the very fabric of life for His own sovereign purposes―purposes which we might not always understand―and none of us can escape it (Job14:1; John 16:33). This is simply the consequence of living in a fallen, sinful, and broken world.

One scholar said concerning David’s psalms: “More than 50% of David’s psalms had the general theme of: ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ God will let us go through times when all we can do is cry out to him. Remember Jonah in the belly of the great fish? A ‘more than you can handle’ season is not an elective course that only some of us have to take. It is a required course, not an elective, that every one of us will be required to enroll in at various times in our lives.”

It’s hard for us to comprehend, but suffering can actually be a gift from God. In the very next verse, Paul writes, “In fact, we expected to die. But as a result, we stopped relying on ourselves and learned to rely only on God, who raises the dead” (2 Corinthians 1:9).

So, why does God give us the gift of “too much to bear”? Why does God give us more than we can handle in our own strength? I believe it’s because He wants to teach us to rely on Him, and we will understand it better by and by. We all need those difficult but faith-building moments in our lives when God says to us, “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).

You need to know something about me. And you need to know this about me because what is true of me is also true about you. My sinful flesh values self-reliance. I want to “cowboy up” and fix my own problems. I want to believe I can just hunker down and power through anything I have to deal with—in my own strength. But I was created (just like you) to need God. And I am never in more desperate shape than when I forget how desperately I need God. And that’s why “too much” can sometimes be just right. In fact, some of our closest, most intimate times with God will be spent in the valleys of life, not on the mountaintop.

You will never know just how dependent on God you are until every crutch and prop is taken away from you, and God is all you have left to keep you standing. You will never know how strong the grace of God is apart from going through a season of tremendous weakness. Just know that whatever you’ve had to come through has prepared and strengthened you for what God might be calling you to.