Fourth Presbyterian Church: A Light in the City

Sunday, February 13, 2022 | 4:00 p.m.

Things Jesus Never Said: “God Doesn’t Give You More Than You Can Handle”

Nanette Sawyer
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 145:8–19
Matthew 11:25–30

Our sermon today is the final one in our series about “Things Jesus Never Said.” How many of you have heard of the saying “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle” or “God won’t give you more than you can handle”? Many of us have heard it, and some of us have said it.

Our intentions are good when we say it. People who say it to us have wanted to encourage us. We might be tempted to use this phrase when someone we know is going through a terrible divorce or breakup. Or perhaps when they receive a frightening diagnosis. We might want to say it when someone loses a loved one to an accident, to an illness, or even when death comes at the end of a long life well lived. The grief, the pain, the trial and tribulation could come from any number of things. And there is the impulse to say “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.”

What people are trying to say is You are strong. You can handle this. You will get through this and come out the other side. By using God’s name, I think they are also trying to say that God is with you in this. God has a plan. God is in control, and you can trust God.

I do believe that people have good intentions when saying this. They are trying to offer comfort and encouragement. But the impact of this saying is often quite different from the intention of the speaker who says it. In spite of a positive intention, there is often a negative impact.

This saying actually has negative connotations, negative implications. It says something about God; it says something about the nature of our experience; and it says something about our relationship to the people around us.

If God chooses how much suffering to give us—and decides how much is enough and how much is too much—that says that our suffering comes from God. This is a description of God that I cannot accept. I don’t believe that God causes suffering. I do believe that God walks with us through our suffering and loves us through it all.

If God won’t give us more than we can handle, then that implies that no matter what is happening, it’s not that bad. We can handle it. Chin up. Look at the bright side. This will be over before you know it. When God closes a door, God opens a window.

When we feel the impulse to say this—when we want to say “God won’t give you more than you can handle”—I have another question to consider. Is there a part of us that wants to contain the pain so that it doesn’t frighten us so much?

This is where the phrase may imply something about us. It might sound to someone who is walking through the valley of shadows that I don’t want to hear how truly awful this is for you. It can be awkward and painful and scary to hear about the pain that someone is experiencing. We can want to box it up and add a bow and move on with our day.

So our intention in using this phrase might be to offer comfort and encouragement, or it might be to comfort ourselves about the existence of suffering in the world, or it might be some of both.

But the impact of using this statement might be that the person hearing it feels we are not listening and don’t want to listen deeply to their experience. It might feel like we are saying that somehow they deserve their suffering, because God has caused it. I know there are people who have left the church because they have heard this description of God when they were in their deepest, darkest place.

Kate Bowler is a professor at Duke Divinity School, and she has written a book called, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I have Loved. At the age of thirty-five, Dr. Bowler was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer and given two years to live. Before her diagnosis she had written a book called Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel.

She became somewhat famous when she wrote a piece for the New York Times Sunday Review that had millions of readers and thousands of shares. It went viral. It was called “Death, the Prosperity Gospel, and Me” (13 February 2016). In the article she explains that the prosperity gospel is “the belief that God grants health and wealth to those who have the right kind of faith.” To write her book on the prosperity gospel she had spent ten years interviewing prosperity gospel preachers and churchgoers. She had immersed herself in their culture and their churches.

In the New York Times article, and also in her book, Dr. Bowler describes a time that her neighbor came to their door to tell her husband that “everything happens for a reason.”

He responded, “I’d love to hear it.”

“Pardon?” the neighbor said, startled.

“I’d love to hear the reason my wife is dying,” he said.

In telling this story, Dr. Bowler uses a specific example to describe how much people want there to be a reason that bad things happen to good people. Bowler wrote about the neighbor, “She wanted some kind of order behind this chaos. Because the opposite of #blessed is leaving a husband and a toddler behind, and people can’t quite let themselves say it: ‘Wow. That’s awful.’ There has to be a reason, because without one we are left as helpless and possibly as unlucky as everyone else” (Bowler, New York Times).

In her book she explains that she got thousands and thousands of letters from people in response to her article in the New York Times. In the letters there were three different kinds of life lessons that people were trying to teach her.

One type she calls the Minimizers. These are the people who tell her not to be so negative and not to worry about dying. Religious people tell her it doesn’t matter whether we are “here” or “there” in heaven; that it’s all the same. Atheists tell her to stop looking for meaning where there is none and just accept “that we are living in an uncaring and neutral universe” (Everything Happens for a Reason, p. 75). The Minimizers say It’s not so bad.

The second type of letter comes from those she calls the Teachers. These are the people who say that everything happening to her is “an education in mind, body, and spirit.” These would be people saying that our suffering makes us stronger and is a test of our faith. The Teachers say This is happening for a good reason.

The third type of letter she describes as coming from the Solutions People. These are the people who believe she can heal herself by having the right attitude, the right diet, or the right faith. They’ve done research. They’ve had experience. And Bowler writes that they seem to be a little disappointed that she is not saving herself. The Solutions People say This can be fixed. This can be avoided. You can save yourself.

Jesus never said that we can avoid pain or loss or death or illness or grief. Humans do suffer and sometimes badly. God does not prevent our suffering or remove our human nature, our human vulnerability. Jesus himself, though he was God, suffered and died a human death.

In the second letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul writes, “We do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, of the affliction we experienced in Asia; for we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death so that we would rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (2 Corinthians 1:8–9). Unable to save themselves, they turned to God for consolation and strength.

The biblical foundation for the saying “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle” is thought to come from the first letter to the Corinthian church. There, Paul wrote that, “so if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall. No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it” (1 Corinthians 10:12–13 NRSV).

That’s the New Revised Standard translation (NRSV), which we have in our pews here at Fourth Church. The New International Version (NIV), which is more commonly used in evangelical churches (this is a sweeping generalization), does not speak of “testing” but of “temptation.”

Listen again: “So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! 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” (1 Corinthians 10:12–13, NIV).

This scripture is in the context of warnings against falling to immorality and idol worship. Don’t fall to temptation. God will help you not fall into temptation, and God will help you escape temptation.

This is very different from implying that God will test us by causing tragedy in our lives, but only as much as we can “handle.”

When interpreting the Bible, translations matter, and context matter. For the greatest understanding, we always want to ask ourselves, what is the bigger context of these few sentences we are reciting.

God does not give us more than we can handle because God does not give us suffering at all. But God is with us in this vulnerable human life. And God does give us people who can help us.

Kate Bowler wrote that of the thousands of letters she received, the ones that spoke to her the most were the ones that didn’t talk about why things happen or why we die. They were the letters that talk about who. “Who was there. When you were afraid that the end had come, were you alone?” (Everything Happens for a Reason, p. 76).

And then she described her own experience.

It seemed too odd and too simplistic to say what I knew to be true—that when I was sure I was going to die, I didn’t feel angry. I felt loved. . . . At a time when I should have felt abandoned by God, I was not reduced to ashes. I felt like I was floating, floating on the love and prayers of all those who hummed around me like worker bees, bringing notes and flowers and warm socks and quilts embroidered with words of encouragement. They came in like priests and mirrored back to me the face of Jesus. When they sat beside me, my hand in their hands, my own suffering began to feel like it had revealed to me the suffering of others, a world of those who, like me, are stumbling in the debris of dreams they thought they were entitled to and plans they didn’t realize they had made. That feeling stayed with me for months. (pp. 77–78)

Our Gospel reading for today invites us to rely on Jesus. “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–30).

Relying on Jesus means approaching him in prayer and offering our heavy burdens. Leaning on Jesus means wearing the yoke that connects us to him. Taking on his yoke means learning from him, from the example of his life, and from the way that he always brought people together into community and belonging. Taking on his yoke means being part of the household of faith, the church, which also connects us to him. Surrender to Jesus reminds us that we are not alone, that Christ is in us and between us and among us.

I read earlier from 2 Corinthians where Paul describes the suffering of some of the early apostles, saying, “We were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself.” He wrote that in the context of describing God’s consolations.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction.” They receive that consolation from God, he writes, “so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction.” The consolation that they received from God was the same consolation that they offered to others (2 Corinthians 1:3–5). It reminds me of the simple and important verse that says “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

Jesus never said, “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.” But Jesus also does not abandon us in our pain. We are not alone. God is with us, but God also gives us people who can help us and people we can help. There are people we can listen to, carefully and deeply, really hearing what they are experiencing. There are people we can offer a meal to, give a hug to, and sometimes just sit together with in silent recognition that whatever they, or we, are going through is simply and truly as awful as it is. No “happy face” necessary.

We don’t have to “handle” our traumas and tragedies and suffering alone. Help is available, and it’s OK to need help. We don’t have to put on a happy face and pretend that everything is fine. It’s OK to feel all the many feelings about our burdens, our losses, our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities.

When you are afraid, listen inside for the voice of Jesus saying, Come to me with your burdens, and you will find rest. Let yourself know that he loves you and is with you. When we lean on Christ, we lean on God. And this will help us all lean on each other a little bit more. Christ is within us and between us and among us. Amen.