God Will Allow People More than They Can Handle and He will Allow Them to be Broken

A common saying is “God will not give you more than you can handle.”  The song, “He Said” with all its good also returns to this idea:

You may be knocked down now
but don't forget what He said, He said

I won't give you more, more than you can take
and I might let you bend, but I won't let you break
and No-o-o-o-o, I'll never ever let you go-o-o-o-o
Don't you forget what He said

Jesus did say He would be with us, but as for more than you or I can take that is a different matter.  The idea flows from the passage in 1 Corinthians where Paul is dealing with the temptation to sin.  Here it is:

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.  1 Corinthians 10:13 NLT

Temptation to sin is not sin but it can lead to a transgression so God works to get us out of its way so we that we don’t break and give in to sin.  That battle is real and I need that assurance even when I choose sin’s way rather than the way out.  This passage in Hebrews is far too real for me:

In struggling against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. Hebrews 12:4 HCSB

But temptation to sin is different from the pressure of the world on me or the shaping of my character or my destiny by God.  God allows a broken world to continue to run and as I live in it I run into the brokenness and sometimes it breaks me.  God hasn’t abandoned me by allowing it.  He will instead use it for my ultimate good.  (Remember God’s ultimate good includes the uncountable ages to come not just my comfort in the years on earth.) 

Here are some examples of tough times for good people. 

• ·        Job suffered the loss of his children, his business, his health, his good standing among his friends.  That is a list that is more than I could take, how about you?  God used it for His good and the good of others. 
• ·         John the Baptist came to announce the Kingdom of God and the Messiah.  He was imprisoned.  He was beheaded.  That is more than bent.  That is broken.  That is more than I could take. 
• ·         Jesus’ friend Lazarus was sick, but he let him die.  That is broken not bent; although the Lord did bring him back to life because there was more to his story on earth. 
• ·         Jesus sat at a table for a meal with His friends and announced that the bread He was breaking symbolized His body broken for them. 
• ·         Stephen was helping people and telling them about new life in Christ and he was crushed by stones hurled at him. 
• ·         Paul was rejected, beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned and eventually beheaded. 

A.W. Tozer has said, “It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.”  And Alan Redpath has said, “When God wants to do an impossible task, he takes an impossible person and crushes him.”  And the Scripture says of those broken for the Lord:

But others were tortured, refusing to turn from God in order to be set free. They placed their hope in a better life after the resurrection. Some were jeered at, and their backs were cut open with whips. Others were chained in prisons. Some died by stoning, some were sawed in half, and others were killed with the sword. Some went about wearing skins of sheep and goats, destitute and oppressed and mistreated. They were too good for this world, wandering over deserts and mountains, hiding in caves and holes in the ground.  Hebrews 11:35-38 NLT

These who were broken were too good for this world.  God was with them.  He loved them and loves them still as they are with Him.  And He loves His people.  You and I.  Nothing can separate us from His love.  Look at Romans 8:

Can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death? (As the Scriptures say, “For your sake we are killed every day; we are being slaughtered like sheep.”) No, despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ, who loved us.

And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Romans 8:35-39 NLT

How wonderful is His love that is greater than all that may break me. 

Negative outcomes of the idea that God doesn't give me more than I can take

I can be tempted to imagine that I am able with the smarts, strength and sweetness that is me to handle it. “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” –Invictus, William Ernest Henley.  I may imagine that the “seeds of greatness are in me.”   Where is humility beyond the nod to God? Oh, no, it is all about me.  If God doesn’t give me more than I can take and I have overcome.  And if I have somehow made it “good” by this world’s standards I am all the more convinced of my own greatness and of my special place in God’s order of things because He did not give me more than I can take. 

But for some the pressures of life and the pain is too much and they break.  What then?  Then there is the possibility of intense guilt.  Guilt over failing when they believed God doesn’t give more than I can take.  So if I can’t take it I must be weak and worthless and abandoned.  And then I can be washed over with guilt. 

Another outcome for those who may buckle beneath what they experience as too much.  They may have a feeling of being justified in their anger and disappointment with God when things don't go as they intended.  Satan sneers at God. And the blood boiling in me if I expected God to keep more-than-I-can-take far from me leads me to join him. 

Bless You God for My Brokenness

God can allow exactly what He desires at any time.  In any amount as it is measured by His perfect standard for His purposes and for my ultimate good.  At times things come, and they have, which have broken my heart.  Things surprised me with outcomes that seemed unfair and I wondered where God was.  I have not endured by any measure those things which were too much for me to handle.  I have under the hand of God been crushed and broken.  And if it were not for Him I would have been destroyed.  But as Lazarus was brought back from the dead so the Lord has pieced me together in new ways according to His design.  And for me to consider not being broken is the worst thing.  It is there in the flames that I saw one walking with me who was like the Son of God.  I remember these helpful words on brokenness by Solzhenitsyn who was imprisoned for criticizing Josef Stalin and share them here:

In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.... That is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: “Bless you, prison!” I...have served enough time there. I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life.”  -The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn

 And I say, “Thank you, my God, my friend, for having placed the heaviness of life upon me so that I could take no more.  I have learned to lean on You.  I have learned to better listen to You. Bless you, Lord, for having been my life.”

God allows more than you or I can handle so you and I will hand ourselves and our burdens to God who can truly handle all things.