Too Much to Handle [A]

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Transcript:

All right, if you’ll turn with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 10. You know, there are things that, I mentioned some of these last week, there are things that are said so often, and they sound like they’re biblical. They sound like they make a biblical point, and they just get said so often that we, a lot of times, just assume they are part of the Bible. I will never forget a few years ago, when I went looking, trying to find where in the Bible it says that cleanliness is next to godliness.

It’s not in there. How many of you knew it was not in there? okay good most of you that that makes me feel better for a long time we hear it and it sounds good and you know what it’s it’s probably true there cleanliness is a good thing it’s something we should aspire to it’s one of those uh one of those arguments I use all the time there are a lot of things that are good good idea but I don’t know they should be the law taking a shower every day is a good idea I don’t want the government enforcing that but it’s a good idea you should do cleanliness is a good thing, but there’s nowhere in the scriptures that teach that it’s next to godliness or that somehow we become better people, more moral people, or that God loves us more by being clean.

Some of these things just get repeated so much, and they sound good, and so we assume that they’re biblical truth. As we continue on with this series of things that we’ve been in for a few weeks now about misinterpreted passages of scripture and what it is that they really are teaching us. What is the real biblical interpretation and what is it that they’re teaching us?

We come today to one of those that I hear quoted in church all the time and it’s by well-meaning people and I’ve probably said this at some point in my life too. So if I say this today and you hear this and you think, oh my goodness, I just said that to somebody this week. I’m not picking on you.

I’m not saying you’re a horrible person for having said this. I’m saying this is something that we accept as being biblical, and it’s really not. And the phrase that I’m talking about this morning is, God never gives you more than you can handle.

God never gives you more than you can handle. Folks, that is not taught in the Bible. Now, we’re going to look at a verse that’s used to support that, and we’re going to see what it really does say, because there’s some important teaching here from the Bible on two different topics that have to do with this passage.

And we’re going a look at one side of that this morning, and we’re going to look at one side of that tonight, but if you haven’t already, turn with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 10. We’re going to start in verse 11. Paul says, Now all these things happen unto them for in samples, or examples, and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.

What he’s talking about, and I didn’t feel like I had time this morning to go all the way back to the beginning of chapter 10. But I would encourage you to go back and read it at some point. Don’t just take my word or any other preacher’s word for it.

Check it out for yourself in the scriptures and see that what we’re saying is true. But if you go back to the beginning of chapter 10, he’s given a list of some things that have gone on in the history of the nation of Israel. Some places where God took care of them and some places where they ignored God and suffered the consequences.

And folks, this is a great thing that they do throughout scripture. I first noticed this when teaching through the book of Nehemiah. They come to a point later on in the book where Nehemiah begins to list for the people and with the people all the way, and not all the ways, but a great number of the ways that God has blessed them and taken care of them throughout their entire history as a people.

And he starts back with God leading them out of Egypt. And they went through and they listed all of these, and really it’s a great idea for us to do sometimes when we get to a point in life where we feel like the world is overwhelming where is God what has he done for me what has he done for me lately go back and make a list sit down and think about all the ways that God has taken care of you think about all the things that God has done or in this case in this case if you’re thinking well really why do I need to listen to God? They made a list here of all the places.

I keep saying all the places. There would not be room to list all the places. But they list several places and several ways where the people of Israel had ignored God, had ignored His directions and His promptings and His warnings, and they had suffered the consequences.

And says in verse 11, these things were given to us as an example. So we can look back through all these stories in the Bible, And there’s great teaching in all of them. And most of them point us forward to Jesus Christ. But if nothing else, these stories in the Old Testament are given to us as an example.

There’s usually a principle in there that we can look at and say, this is what God wants or this is what God doesn’t want. And here’s what happens if we ignore God’s principles. And sometimes it’s a punishment from God.

Sometimes it’s just the natural result of not doing things God’s way, not listening to his admonitions because they’re what’s best for us. To give you some idea of the difference, sometimes my child, or let’s just use anybody’s child, sometimes a child messes with something that they’re not supposed to and they get a spanking. That’s a punishment.

Sometimes a parent tells a child don’t play in the street, the child plays in the street anyway and gets hit by a car, or something like that. Now the parent didn’t send the car to run them over, that wasn’t a punishment that was just that’s what happens when you ignore directions that are given for your own good by someone who knows the consequences more than you and so he says in here these things are an example sometimes God’s people were punished for ignoring what he told them to do and sometimes it was just a natural consequence of ignoring the warning but he says you look at all of these things and God has given these for an example for our admonition for our growth upon whom the ends of the world are come.

And so he’s telling the church at Corinth, look back at what God has done and learn from the example of those who have gone before, whether it’s a good example or a bad example, because you can learn from both. You can learn from a good example and you can learn from a bad example of what not to do. And he says in verse 12, wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.

There is no temptation taken you, but such as is common to man, but God is faithful who will not suffer you to be tempted above that you’re able, but will with the temptation also make a way to escape that you may be able to bear it. Okay. And this verse, this verse is often pulled apart and one little piece is pulled out.

He will not suffer you to be tempted above that you’re able. That’s often pulled out, pulled apart from the rest of the verse and the rest of the passage and people say, see there, God won’t give you more than you can handle. It says he won’t allow us to be tempted above what we can handle, but he’ll make a way to escape that you may be able to bear it.

It goes on to say, wherefore my dearly beloved flee from idolatry. Now why would he say flee from idolatry? Because I believe idolatry is at the root of all sin.

Now the Bible says money is the root of all evil. I’m talking about the root of all sin. What was the first sin that was ever perpetrated by man?

It was the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Such a seemingly simple thing where they were told, don’t eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God gave them just that one rule.

They had this beautiful paradise to live in, and God only gave them one rule. There wasn’t a whole book of rules to follow. There was the one rule, and they wouldn’t even do that.

They wouldn’t even follow that one. And if you remember back to that story all the way back in Genesis chapter 3, the reason why they went and ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is because of Satan’s lie, oh, you won’t really die like God says. He knows that your eyes will be opened and you’ll be just like him.

And somewhere down in this depraved human flesh, somewhere in the core of us, there’s a desire to be the God of our own universe. And Eve first thought and then Adam went along with it. Hmm, I wouldn’t mind being like God.

Folks, idolatry, we hear that word and we think gold statues. We think the statues of Baal and Asherah that they would build in the Old Testament. We think of going into a restaurant and seeing a statue of Buddha.

We think about North Korea where they bow down to the gold statues of their deceased leaders. We think about all these things. Idolatry isn’t just statues.

Idolatry is anytime we take anything that is not God and put it in the place that God alone properly holds in our lives and in our hearts. An idol can be a statue. An idol can also be money.

An idol can be stuff. An idol can be a job, a title. An idol can be my children.

You know what? An idol can be me. Whenever I start thinking I’m the God in my own life, I call the shots.

even if I don’t think in the terms of the word me being God in my own life. If I begin to elevate me and what I want and what’s best for me to a position that only God is supposed to hold, that being first and foremost in my life, that is idolatry. And whenever we do that, other sins follow from that.

I’m going to cheat on my taxes. Well, that’s because I’ve put money in a position that only God should occupy. That’s idolatry.

I’m going to cheat on my spouse. Well, it’s because I put lust or another person or something of that nature in a position that only God is supposed to occupy in my life. I’m going to do this.

I’m going to do that. It all traces back to a heart condition called idolatry, where we put someone or something in the place that only God is supposed to have. And so he says, flee from that.

Flee from that. Temptation. The Bible talks about temptation in other places and says, comes about when we’re grabbed by, I’m paraphrasing here, but when we’re grabbed by our lusts and enticed, we’re pulled away.

The devil knows, Satan knows, folks, what our weakness is. He knows what that thing is that we love and that we are most likely to put in God’s place in our lives. And he entices us with that.

That’s what temptation is. And so he says, flee from that idolatry. And for everybody it’s something different you know we talked about that poor man in Ukraine and I say poor man I do feel I do feel badly for him not as badly as I feel for his family though but I do feel badly for him though because he’s ensnared in something that he probably never thought was gonna was gonna cause all of this you know what somewhere along the way alcohol became an idol alcohol became the center of his life I am not at all bothered by that temptation I am not at all bothered by that temptation.

But you know what? The devil knows what things I am bothered by and what things I’m most likely to elevate in my life. And so Paul warns the believers at Corinth, flee from idolatry.

Don’t stand and fight. Run. Run.

And we’re going to talk about that a little bit in a moment. But one of the worst pieces of advice that I ever received, or one of the worst pieces of teaching I ever received, you know, they want to teach teenagers about, Well, here’s how you stand against temptation. Here’s how you fight temptation.

Forget fighting temptation. Run. Get out of there.

Don’t see how close to the edge you can get before you fall off. Get away from the edge of that cliff. He says, flee from idolatry.

And he says, I speak as to wise men. Judge ye what I say. He said, I know there’s some wisdom.

I know there’s some common sense in there. So think about what I’m saying. Judge what I’m saying.

Listen and decide for yourselves if what I’m saying is true, because he gives good advice here. Now, ladies and gentlemen, this passage, as I said, has been taken out of context and has been used to say that God never gives you more than you can handle. God never gives you more than you can handle.

I would ask you to raise your hands and say, how many of you have ever been told that in a time of difficulty? But I don’t need to, because I would guess it’s almost 100%, if not 100%. I think we’ve all heard that.

We’ve all been told that. And I don’t know about you, but it’s almost never made me feel any better. Because we’re putting the burden back on me to handle something that I was never equipped to handle.

When my first child, when we miscarried my first child at 12 weeks, I was told, God never gives you more than you can handle. But we’re getting pretty close. When my second child was stillborn at 36 weeks, I was told, God never gives you more than you can handle.

And folks, it was always by well-meaning people. It’s amazing how sometimes well-meaning people say things that are not helpful. And so a lot of times somebody comes into a difficult circumstance and I just, I wish I knew what to say.

I can stand here and cry with you, but sometimes there’s nothing you can say to make it any better. When I ran into difficulty with the first church I pastored, I was told God never gives you more than you can handle. Apparently he did because I couldn’t handle it.

I couldn’t straighten those people out. When my wife left, I was told God never gives you more than you can handle. Really, because I feel like we’re way over the line here.

When one of my children is hurt, I know that seems like such a small thing in contrast to the others. It’s big to me. I can’t handle this.

I mean, I can handle taking care of them in a crisis, but I can’t handle, emotionally, I can’t handle seeing them hurt. We all go through things, ladies and gentlemen, where people are going to tell us, God never gives you more than you can handle. And they mean well.

And it sounds biblical. But you know what? It doesn’t square with either the Bible or our experiences. Because I saw the nods of agreement when I said it feels like we’re awfully close.

You know what? That’s not what this passage says. And that can lead to an incredible amount of discouragement when we think, wait a minute, God never gives me more than I can handle.

I should be better at handling this. What’s wrong with me? Am I deficient somehow?

Am I not close enough to God? Do I just not have enough faith and we can struggle and we can beat ourselves up? And the problem is we just really are deficient in that we’re not equipped to handle it.

There’s nothing wrong with you in this sense that’s not wrong with everybody else. The world throws things at us that are too big for us to handle. And this passage, when it talks about not being given more than we can handle, it is not talking about troubles.

It is not talking about difficulties and circumstances of life. So if you’re sitting there this morning and thinking, I’m dealing with this, and I know that God will never give me more than I can handle, so why am I doing such a bad job at handling it? It’s because that’s all we can do, is do a bad job until we let Him handle it.

And I’m going to give away, here’s a freebie for you, I’m going to give away the whole point of tonight’s message. When it comes to troubles, there’s no promise that God will never give us more than we can handle. But God will never allow us to be given anything more than He can handle.

Because there’s nothing that He can’t handle. And we’ll come back tonight and we’ll look at this passage again and we’ll look at some other passages that talk about the troubles in life and how there is no trouble, there’s no problem that’s too big for God to handle. We back up a little bit, or we go a few pages over, and it talks about His strength being made perfect in our weakness.

There is no trouble that you or I have that He can’t handle. So why can’t we handle it? Because we’re not equipped to.

Our shoulders are just not that big. Last night I carried Benjamin to bed. He asked me to carry him to bed.

He’s getting heavy. It’s hard to just carry him around as much as he wants to be carried. But he was exhausted.

He was tired. He wanted me to carry him to bed. And so I carried him and put him in bed.

And as I was carrying him, I said, when I’m old, will you carry me to bed? And he looked at me and he said, Daddy, what if I’m not strong? I said, you will be.

By the time I’m old enough that you need to carry me to bed, you’ll have a lot bigger shoulders than you have now. You know what? There’s no way on earth that he could carry me to bed right now.

I think I weigh about seven times what he weighs. I’m working on getting that down to six. But I weigh about seven times what he weighs.

There’s no way he could carry me. But I can carry him because my shoulders are a lot bigger than his. This idea of God never giving us more than we can handle when it comes to troubles.

You know what? His shoulders are a whole lot bigger than ours are. There’s no problem so big that his shoulders can’t carry the burden.

And we’re just a little four-year-old trying to carry what only daddy can carry. Folks, we’ll come back to that tonight. That God never gives us more than he can handle.

But I want to look at what this passage is actually talking about because the key is right in there. I mean, you try to pull it down to the smallest part that they use to support the idea that God never gives us more than we can handle. And even when you get it down to its smallest part, even when you take it out of the rest of the context as much as you can, the word is still right in there what he’s talking about.

And that word is temptation. He will never suffer us to be tempted beyond what we can stand. I know that’s a hard thing to imagine.

Because I know it’s not just me. I’ve talked to other people about it. And if you’re anything like me or some of the others that I’ve talked to about it, sometimes we sin, which I mean we sin a lot.

But sometimes we sin and immediately when we’re done with saying whatever it is or doing whatever it is or thinking whatever it is, we think, what is wrong with me? Why did I just do that? And we feel like the temptation comes and we are just powerless to resist. And ultimately, yes, we are powerless.

But God has equipped us. This whole passage is about God equipping us and enabling us to resist the temptation to sin. Now, even with this, are we ever going to be sinless?

Not in this lifetime. And I hate that. Every time we talk about this, I tell you, I hate that because I hate nothing more in this world than the feeling of disappointing God.

Why did I just say that? Why did I just do that? And the feeling that I have disappointed him is devastating.

But I also know that he loves and he forgives. When we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. The Bible says he chooses to remember our sins no more.

He puts them as far away from us as east is from the west. I taught on this verse in my class at the school last year and had the globe out there and was spinning. And I said, y’all stop me when we get to west, when we get all the way west. And finally, I just had to stop myself and say, we’re never going to get there. There’s only so far you can go between north and south before you hit one or the other.

You can start at the north pole and go south, south, south, south, south, south. Eventually, you’re going to hit the south pole, and no matter which direction you go, it’s going to be north again. There’s no point where east and west start over.

And so God is saying, I put your sins as far away from you, further away than you can possibly imagine. God is incredibly gracious, incredibly forgiving, incredibly loving if we will confess our sins, if we’ll repent and get right with him. We will never be sinless, but God gives us the opportunity to escape from temptation if we will take it.

He gives us the opportunity to avoid sin and temptation if we’ll take it, and then knowing that we’re still frail human beings, he offers us grace and forgiveness when we fail. But we look back at this passage, and I’ve already read it to you, but he talks about the examples that he gives us. He says, avoid these things that I’ve talked about.

Embrace the good things. Avoid the bad. Learn from their examples.

And that would be the first thing that I would tell you this morning is that God provides victory over temptation by learning from others’ examples. Now, that’s not the only tool he gives us for our tool chest. But folks, that’s one of them. We can learn from other people’s examples.

Sometimes the good, sometimes the bad.

And I’ve pastored long enough that I’ve heard people either giving testimonies and services or counseling in my office and I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard say you know I had wonderful parents and I just watched them and I knew that to follow the Lord I just watched them and tried to do tried to live up to their example just tried to do what they did or how many times I’ve heard say you know I love my parents but they were not godly people and I just decided early on that I was not going to turn out that way we’re always learning from examples whether it’s good or bad and and god god provides here a list of people you go back I’m telling you go back and read verses 1 through 10 of first corinthians chapter 10 it gives a list of examples and a lot of these he’s saying don’t do this don’t act this way he gives examples in second peter in second peter chapter 2 it says for if god spared not the angels that sin but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment, and spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly, and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them with an overthrow, making them an example unto those that after should live ungodly, and delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked.

For that righteous man dwelling among them, and seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds. The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished. And he gives a few examples there.

He gives a few examples there and said, you know what? The angels who rebelled against God, don’t be like them. He cast them into the lake of fire.

He says, there was the wicked world who rejected Noah’s preaching of righteousness. And God destroyed the world with a flood and saved Noah alive. We’ve got some examples there.

By the way, by the way, I’ve often wondered if Noah wasn’t just like everybody else before God got a hold of him. Because you notice back in that passage, it says that every thought of every man was only evil all the time, continuously. It doesn’t give any exceptions there.

It says everybody was thinking only wicked, only evil, all the time, continuously. Worse than today. Then it says, but Noah found grace.

Grace means something we don’t deserve in the eyes of God. It seems like God turned him around because he was willing to listen and obey. And so he says there were those who rejected God’s mercy and those who accepted it.

And he says, follow their examples. He talks about Sodom and Gomorrah. And I read just this week where some people are still trying to say that their sin had, it had nothing to do with homosexuality.

It was all, it was being inhospitable. You know what? Sin is sin.

And Sodom and Gomorrah were overflowing with it. God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for sin. It wasn’t homosexuality.

It wasn’t being inhospitable to guests. It was sin. And you know what?

Homosexuality and their treatment of outsiders was all part of that. But he said, and he saved Lot a lot. And so he gives examples and he says, if God knew how to act then, if God knew how to separate then, if God knew how to deliver people then, then God still knows.

This is Peter writing. that God still knows how to deliver His people from temptation. He says, look at these examples.

We’re taught, look to the good examples. Look to the bad examples. I’ll tell you what.

There have been a lot of bad examples lately. It’s just, I can’t watch the news. Which I’ve said for years I can’t watch the news on TV.

It gets my blood pressure up. I’m getting to the point I can’t read the news or listen to it on the radio. Because it’s just depressing.

Folks, I alluded to it last week, but this issue with Josh Duggar, And the website that, and I’m not even going to mention the name here, but allows you to have affairs, and he’d signed up for it evidently. I don’t remember the statistic because I thought I read 4,000. And then I heard Brother Doug say on Wednesday it was 400.

But they were estimating it was either 400 pastors or 4,000 pastors across this country would be resigning last week because they got caught in the scandal as well. Signing up for this website that guarantees affairs. I don’t care if it’s 400 or 4,000.

It’s too much. That’s too many. What are we doing?

And when I read about Josh Duggar and some of the comments, I try never, oh Lord, I try never to read the comments sections on any website because it’s just an open sewer. But folks, some of the comments that were being written about him, all sorts of ammunition was given to the world who just wants to find fault with all Christians. And we’re all being painted with the same broad brush because of what he did.

And so many others. I’m not just trying to single him out, but he’s the one most people will know. And my point in telling you that is this.

I looked at his story. It became like a morbid fascination, like a train wreck you can’t look away from. I thought, what did he do?

What all did he do? And when I read everything that I could find to read on it, I kept thinking, we, folks, because of him and others who have done this, the world is looking for reasons to discount Christianity. And we have got to use this as a learning experience and make sure our houses are in order.

Whatever it may be, you’re probably sitting there thinking, I didn’t sign up for that website. I’m not saying you did. I didn’t sign up for that website either.

But folks, wherever our houses are out of order, we need to be looking at this as a learning experience and say, this is the example we need not to follow. And we need to get our houses in order. We need to look at this example.

avoid temptation, whatever it is, because the world is just looking for Christians to fail. And we understand that we’re fallen people. We understand that we’re still sinful people.

We’ve got to take every opportunity that we can to learn, to be reminded that sin is grave and has consequences. And we need to learn from the examples that are set before us. Second of all, first of all, victory over temptation comes by learning from others’ examples.

Second of all, The victory over temptations comes by guarding ourselves against pride. It comes from guarding ourselves against pride. Verse 12 says, Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.

If you think you’re doing all right, that’s the time you need to be on guard. When you’re on that spiritual high and feel like I’m close to God, I’m doing what I’m supposed to, that’s when you need to be on guard. Because that’s when you’re going to be most easily knocked down.

That’s when we’re most vulnerable. I don’t know exactly what it means, but there’s a quote I used to laugh at when I’d hear it that said, eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines. I don’t know who made that up or what they meant by it, but it always cracked me up.

Well, there’s a principle here. The eagle thinks he’s doing all right. He’s soaring.

He’s high. He’s close to God. Next thing, he gets sucked into a jet engine because he’s not paying attention or can’t get away from it.

You know what? we could use another word because weasel has a bad connotation, like we’re trying to be weaseling. Squirrels don’t get sucked into jet engines.

The squirrel is not majestic. Nobody looks at the squirrel and thinks, oh, what a wonderful creation. Well, people might at times, but not like they do with the eagle.

The squirrel’s just a humble little animal foraging, but doesn’t get sucked into jet engines. Folks, what I’m talking about here is when we’re just soaring along and we think I’m doing a wonderful job I’m close to God and we’re not paying attention we better watch out. We’ve got to watch out.

When we stand up on that pedestal we’re easier to knock down. And I’m not saying stay in the valley stay far away from God, don’t get closer to God that’s not what I’m saying. I’m talking about pride.

It’s usually, it seems like the people who are actually closest to God in their walk are the most humble about it. And whenever you hear somebody say, oh, it’ll never happen to me, that’s probably going to be the first one it’ll happen to. I mean, I hate to say that, and I’m not calling out anybody in particular.

That’s just generally the way it works. Oh, I could never fall into that sin. I never say never.

As my friend Mike Mobley has said for years, it’s happened to better men than you or me. And I used to tell him, well, who’s better than me? But it’s true.

Folks, the moment we think that we’ve got it all figured out, The moment we think we’re invincible, we’re impervious to sin, that’s the moment we need to watch out because that’s the moment we’re not on guard. That’s the moment Satan comes in and grabs us. That’s why we’re warned in the book of Proverbs that pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit, an uppity spirit goes before a fall.

So avoid being prideful about temptation. Be humble. Remember our weaknesses and remember our dependence on God.

I’m moving on. We need to finish up here quickly. Third of all, victory over temptation comes by seeking God’s intervention.

This is huge. I’m just going in order of what it’s presented in the text, but this one, just because it’s third, doesn’t mean it’s third in importance. This one is huge.

Victor

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