Too Much to Handle [B]

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Transcript:

If you haven’t already turned there, we’re going to be back in 1 Corinthians tonight. We’re going to look at 1 Corinthians chapter 10, where we were this morning, and we’re also going to look at 2 Corinthians chapter 12. So you might, if you’ve got a bulletin, put it in one of those spots and mark the other.

1 Corinthians chapter 10 and 2 Corinthians chapter 12. We started looking this morning at the passage in 1 Corinthians chapter 10 that, as I said, is a lot of times taken out of context, twisted a little bit, and presented to us as the correct sounding teaching that God never gives us more than we can handle. And we’re given that in times of difficulty, in times of trouble, oh, you’ll get through this, God never gives you more than you can handle.

And as I shared with you this morning, there are a few problems with that. First of all, we know from experience that it’s not true. Because there are times that the troubles in this life that if we were left just to, you know, for it to say God never gives us more than we can handle, the implication there is that we’re supposed to shoulder this burden.

And I’m sorry, the fact of life is just sometimes that the world and circumstances are thrown at us that are beyond what we’re capable of handling. I like to think that I’m fairly good in a time of crisis, but there are things that have been thrown at me in my life that if it had been just up to me to get myself through it, I wouldn’t have gotten through it. And I can almost guarantee that everybody in here is in the same boat, and if you’ve never been in that boat, you probably will be.

And I hate to threaten you with that, but that’s just the way of the world. We all have trouble. We all have difficulty at some point in life.

And as you go from one point of life to the next, your troubles and difficulties seem to change, but what doesn’t change is the fact that you’re going to go through troubles and difficulties. What I thought were my troubles 10 years ago and seemed insurmountable then, I kind of look back on now and think, man, I wish that’s all I had to contend with. I look back about, it’s been a little over 10 years ago, but I guess it was 11 years ago, I was in high school.

I still have, I still wake up, don’t give me that look, I still wake up sometimes at night with that nightmare that I have not turned in the English assignment or something. And folks, I wish that was the biggest of my problems in life. But the troubles seem to change, but what doesn’t change is the presence of the troubles.

and whatever station we’re at at life it seems like they’re just more than we can handle on our own so that’s the first problem with that teaching is that we don’t find it to be true from our experience but secondly and more importantly that’s not what the scriptures teach we went back this morning and we looked at that passage and saw that when it’s talking about God not suffering us beyond what we’re able to to bear the word is right in there the word tempted the word tempted you know we’ve talked about a lot of these passages that get taken out of context and you can whittle them down you can cut everything else away to where you’ve got just one little phrase and that’s what people seize on and build their doctrine around this one you can’t cut it down so much that that you just narrow it down to God not giving us more than we can handle without that word tempted being in there there’s no way to look at this and not see I mean if you’re if you’re looking at what it and not just what we want it to say.

If you’re looking at what it says, there’s no way to read this and not see that he’s talking about temptation. When it says that God will not allow us to deal with more than we’re able to bear, it’s talking about temptation. And God understands temptation, not because God can sin, but because God in his human form, God in his human incarnation as Jesus Christ, came to earth, and as a man he was tempted in every way that we are.

Every temptation we deal with, Jesus Christ dealt with. Now we see three of them recorded, three instances recorded in the scriptures when Jesus went off into the desert and was tempted by Satan. But we know that in 40 days, I’m sorry, I don’t know if you’ve ever gone through a 40-day period where Satan’s tempted you three times.

I’d say that’s pretty good. I don’t think he left Jesus alone but for those three times. Those are the three recorded in scripture, but I just can’t help but believe that it was a relentless pressing on him for 40 days, on top of which the Bible says that he was tempted in every way that we have been, yet he was without sin.

So there’s no temptation that we could struggle with that God doesn’t understand because Jesus Christ went through that temptation. And so now the Bible tells us that he will not suffer us to be tempted beyond what we can bear, but that he makes a way of escape from it. God is familiar with the temptations.

God is familiar with the way the devil works and his tricks. And you know what? God is always several moves ahead of Satan and all his tricks.

On top of that, God does not tempt us. God doesn’t tempt us with evil. You know, sometimes we confuse the word test and the word tempt.

And sometimes God will test us. Sometimes God will test our faithfulness. Sometimes God will test our strength.

But the Bible makes it clear, I believe in the book of James, that God can’t be tempted with evil. God the Father can’t be tempted with evil. It was Jesus in his human form that was tempted with evil.

But God can’t be tempted with evil, and neither does he tempt any man. If we suffer temptations, it’s not because God put them there. It’s because the devil put them there, and God only allows it up to a certain point.

And yet God says, I’m not going to allow it to occur to you beyond what you can stand and what you can get out of with my help. So living in a fallen sinful world as we do, where Satan for a time, for a period of time, has certain power to tempt and to create mischief, living as we do in a fallen sinful world, we are bombarded with temptation. It seems like every day, and yet God has made a way of escape in all of it.

We talked this morning about four ways to have victory over temptation, learning from others’ examples, good and bad, guarding ourselves against pride, never getting to the point where we think, oh, I’m too big, that temptation can’t get me now, where we’re no longer on guard. And that’s when the monster strikes, when we’re least expecting it. By seeking God’s intervention, that really is the big one.

Asking God for help because his shoulders are so much bigger than ours. And finally, running away when we have the opportunity. Don’t stand and fight.

Don’t prove how spiritual you are. Just get out of there. So this passage is not talking about our troubles.

It’s talking about our temptations. And so we come back to the question, does God give us more than we can handle? And I maintain that from the Bible and from experience that the answer is yes.

Not only does God allow us to have more than, I don’t know that it’s always God giving it to us. Sometimes it’s the world, sometimes it’s the devil, sometimes we create the problems ourselves. Sometimes God may give us more than we can handle so that we realize our reliance on him.

But when it comes to troubles, I believe the answer is yes, that sometimes God does allow us to have more than we can handle, more than we can reasonably shoulder on our own. And so I would ask you to turn to where I asked you to mark earlier, 2 Corinthians chapter 12. 2 Corinthians chapter 12.

I want to look at another place where Paul talked about this idea of God’s ability to handle things versus our ability to handle things and what it looks like in times of trouble. Temptation, trouble, two different things. Okay, we’re going to start in verse 6 of 2 Corinthians chapter 12 tonight.

It says, For though I would desire to glory, I shall not be a fool. For I will say the truth, but now I forbear, lest any man should think of me, above that which he seeth me to be, that he heareth of me. And lest I should be exalted above measure, through the abundance of revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan, to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure.

And so what he’s been talking about here is glory and suffering leading up to this. And Paul was sort of the guy that you could look up to. I mean, we still look up to Paul today.

He’s influenced our faith with his teachings more than any other person other than Jesus Christ, I maintain. I mean, Christianity was founded by Jesus Christ and his teachings, And it’s Paul who really, I think more than anybody, spread those teachings all over the known world. At least to the Roman Empire, it was Paul who was sent as an apostle to the Gentiles and to Rome.

And so he brought this gospel and people, he started churches, he led people to Christ, he discipled people, he trained pastors. He did all these things that helped give Christianity the footing that it had. And it was easy in their day, just as it’s easy in our day, to look at Paul and say, wow, there’s a great man of God.

And we’re sort of inclined toward that as well, the hero worship aspect of things. I talked about that a few weeks ago. We as human beings want to be on the bandwagon.

We want to look up to someone. I think that explains to me all of the worship of celebrities that goes on in our culture. People just want to be a part of something bigger than themselves.

They want a hero. well Paul could very easily be looked at as that kind of hero almost a superhuman person but he says he does not want to glory in his position he said though I would desire to glory I should not be a fool it would be foolish ladies and gentlemen for me to boast on my part about what God is doing in me and through me and he said I will say the truth but now I forbear lest any man should think of me above that which he seeth me to be or that he heareth of me. He said, I don’t want anybody to think that I’m any greater than I really am.

And this is sometimes the curse of somebody in ministry. I mean, I can tell you from experience. People see you up here and you preach or they see you travel through their church and you preach or you sing or you teach a class or you lead crusades.

I mean, you do something in ministry and enough people see you and they just, he’s just wonderful. because you see us up here. You see us doing ministry.

You see, I know me. And I wish I was as together as I seem on Sunday. And it’s not that I’m putting on an act.

I think most pastors are not necessarily putting on an act. But we kind of wish that we were as together as people, not as we’re pretending to be, but as people assume that we must be. When really we’re just like the rest of you, have the same problems that everybody else has, same difficulties, same struggles, just added responsibility with it.

But it’s easy to look at somebody who’s in ministry and think, oh, he sure is great. I wish he could be like him. And Paul is saying what so many of us in ministry feel.

Oh my goodness, if you only knew, I’m just like you. I’m human just like you are. And so he says, I would not want anybody to think me higher than I really am.

And he says in verse seven, lest I be exalted above measure through the abundance of revelations. He said, because God would speak through Paul. This word revelations means God was revealing things through Paul.

In the time, and we talked about this last week with the speaking in tongues, in a time before the word was completed in its written form, in a time before the scriptures were completed, God tended to give more special revelation than what I believe he gives today.

When I hear somebody say, well, God spoke to me and he told me, I’m sorry I don’t mean to sound unspiritual but automatically a red flag goes up in my mind I’m thinking okay let’s let’s look at this a little more closely in their day that was normal it was normal for God to speak through people in that way and because Paul was because Paul was so often the vessel for God to to give his revelation Paul was often sent to speak to the churches as an apostle and straighten them out and given an authoritative word that they were supposed to listen to because he was speaking on behalf of God, there’s a lot of power and there’s a lot of prestige in that position. And he said, lest I be exalted above measure, lest people glorify me above what I deserve merely because God is speaking through me.

He said, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan, to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. In other words, to keep me from getting too big for my britches, God gave me this thorn in the flesh. And there’s been a lot of debate, ladies and gentlemen, over what the thorn in the flesh was.

Was it a literal physical thorn in the flesh? I don’t know. I would like to think that that would have come out sooner or later like a splinter.

Some people think it was a physical ailment. Paul had eye problems. We kind of read between the lines in some of his later letters and he seemed to have eye problems. May have had stomach problems, may have had chronic headaches. These are some of the things that theologians have suggested.

Some have suggested that it might have been people. Sometimes people can be a real thorn in the flesh. It could have been a false teacher in one of the churches, maybe in Corinth.

It could have been some of the people he mentions who had done him wrong. We don’t know for sure. There’s a lot of speculation.

I say this a lot when talking about theologians on an issue. There’s a lot of speculation as to what it really is. And I suspect if it really mattered what it was, God would have been a lot clearer about what it was.

What we know is that there was something in Paul’s life that he was suffering from. And he said it was a thorn in the flesh. It might have been a physical ailment.

It might have been a situation. It might have been a person who was around him. But all I know is a thorn in the flesh is painful.

And whatever the situation he was that he was describing as a thorn in the flesh, a messenger from Satan there to buffet him. And to buffet, folks, means to trouble somebody, but it means more than that. It’s like troubling somebody on steroids.

Not somebody who’s on steroids, but the troubling is what’s on steroids. And he says, this is a thorn in my flesh. I am suffering.

I am suffering because of this. And it’s a reminder. Hey, your life’s not perfect.

You struggle, and you go through hard times just like everybody else. You go through trouble just like everybody else. It was a reminder to him.

He said, for this thing, I besought the Lord thrice that it might depart from me. Paul had begged God three times for it to depart from him. And when we go through a difficult circumstance, I think we pray, or we should pray on a regular basis for God to deal with it.

I don’t know. I could be wrong in this. I don’t know that he’s just talking about regular prayer because I would think if it was that bad, he’d be praying on a regular basis.

I have to read this and assume when he’s talking about I besought this thing from, I besought the Lord three times. That he’s talking about there were three times that he just dedicated some time and some real energy and poured his heart out before God and just begged him to deal with this thing. I have been there.

I have been there, ladies and gentlemen, with a thorn in the flesh. I’ve been there before when I thought I was dealing with a thorn in the flesh. Today, I really deal with a thorn in the flesh, and I have spent lots of time begging God.

And I’m hoping it’s not a situation where God says, no, you need it to stay there and continue to trouble you for this reason. I’m hoping it’s just their first season. But I sort of understand, because this thorn in the flesh, these thorns in the flesh are things that threaten to turn your world upside down and keep everything in chaos and keep everything painful.

And Paul, it’s no wonder whether it was a physical ailment, whether it was somebody creating havoc in his ministry, Whatever it was, it was so painful that he’s begging God, please take it away. Please take it away. But God’s answer in verse 9, specifically, ladies and gentlemen, Christ’s answer.

If you’ve got a red letter version of the Bible, you’ll notice that it’s in red letters. Because it’s Christ speaking. His answer here is very telling.

Verse 9, and he said unto me, my grace is sufficient for thee. My grace is sufficient for thee. What is grace?

It’s unmerited favor. Now, in one specific instance, we refer to grace when it comes to salvation. It means God’s unmerited favor, God’s gift of His willingness to forgive us our sins when we don’t deserve to have those sins forgiven.

That’s one specific example of grace. But you know what? God is gracious beyond just salvation.

When God gives me the heartbeat every second that I really don’t deserve, That’s grace. When God gives me any good thing, that’s grace. When God steps in in a moment that I’m just in a panic because of a situation I’m dealing with, and that really does happen.

When I’m just in a panic and I don’t know up from down, and God steps in with that peace that passes all understanding, folks, that is grace. And so we talk about grace most when we’re talking about salvation, But His grace encompasses, His grace surrounds our entire lives. His grace provides for every good thing that we have.

His grace makes every moment of peace, every moment of growth, every good thing that we could possibly bring out of this life, His grace makes it possible. Because we haven’t earned it, and we don’t deserve it after turning our backs on God and sinning against Him. But His grace is there.

It’s the favor. It’s the blessing. that we don’t deserve.

And he says, my grace is sufficient. That word sufficient means enough. It means enough.

The Bible also talks about his grace being abundant, his grace abounding. And so let’s not be misled by this word sufficient. When it says sufficient, when it says enough, I don’t think it means just enough.

But God gives us so much grace, more than we could ever expect, more than we could ever need. And you know what? It’s enough.

It’s sufficient to deal with any problem that we face. My grace is sufficient for thee. Folks, that is a promise.

That is a scripture principle and a scripture promise that his grace is sufficient because his grace has not diminished since the days of Paul. His grace is his grace. It comes from who he is because he is a gracious God and he can’t be any more or less gracious than he is.

If his grace was sufficient for Paul, His grace is sufficient for you and me today, 2,000 years later. My grace is sufficient for thee. My strength is made perfect in weakness.

That sounds like a paradox. It sounds like a contradiction. That strength is made perfect in weakness?

Well, again, look at the context. Look at who he’s talking to, what he’s talking about, this thorn in the flesh, where Paul’s begging him to take it away. And Jesus is telling him, my grace is sufficient for you, and my strength is made perfect in weakness.

meaning your weakness. When we are at our weakest point, ladies and gentlemen, when we are facing troubles that just simply beat us down and threaten to take us out, that’s when Christ’s strength really shines through. How much glory would he receive?

I’m not asking how much he deserves because he always deserves more glory than we could ever conceive of giving him. But how much glory would he receive if we were strong enough to handle all of our problems and they got handled? the world looks at that and says well he handled his problems but it’s when we’re at our weakest point and we can’t possibly go on and yet the strength is there for us to pick ourselves up or better yet the strength is there so that we are picked up and we are carried forward that people look at it and we look at it and say I I could not have done that but for the lord because we can even delude ourselves into thinking well I I got myself through it no in my weakness his strength is made perfect.

I was utterly at a point where there was no strength whatsoever. He carried me forward. And when I read this and I read passages like it, I always think of Gideon’s army, where Gideon gathered up a massive army to go take on the Midianites.

I hope I’m getting the details of the story right. It’s been a while since I’ve gone back and reread it. But he was told, you need to whittle down your army some.

So he whittled it down from this huge army to just a few thousand. and then God said, no, that’s not good enough. You need a smaller army.

Wait a minute, that goes against everything. I’ve never been in the military. This is going to sound really stupid.

I’ve never been in the military, but I watch a lot of military documentaries. Does not make me an expert by any stretch of the imagination. But I will tell you from all that I’ve read and all that I’ve watched, that goes against everything of military strategy ever.

You need a smaller military? You’re going up against a huge army in head-to-head combat, and you need a smaller army? Because we’re not talking about a commando raid here.

They’re going head-to-head, or so Gideon thought. And God said, you need to whittle them down even further. And sparing you some of the details, he whittled the army down to 300 people.

And they went to war, and God caused the enemy that they were facing to attack and kill each other in the confusion. And we see there that the reason why Gideon needed such a small army is because nobody, nobody would believe that these pagan tribes were defeated by 300 men. That that massive army was defeated by 300 men.

There’s no way that Gideon’s army had the strength to take on that army and defeat them as utterly and completely and finally as they did. So what happened? Everybody knew it was God.

You know what? Our weakness allows His strength to be shown. When we handle our problems, great, I handled my problems. But when we’re at our weakest point and Jesus steps in with His strength and takes care for us, takes care of us, picks us up, moves us forward, then even we are reminded, hey, I didn’t do that on my own.

I didn’t get through that because I was able to handle it. I got through it because God was able to handle it. And so Paul says in verse 9, Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

He said, so then I can be glad when I go through these troubles and struggles, because the power of Christ rests upon me. Now I will tell you that is an incredibly, that is an incredible statement. That’s an incredible point of view to have, to say, you know what, I’m willing to have trouble if it glorifies God.

I will be honest with you, I’m not sure I’m there yet. I’m willing to have trouble in a lot of things. I’m willing to endure trouble in a lot of things.

But the area where my thorn in the flesh is, if you really want to know, I’ll tell you later outside the pulpit. It’s nothing embarrassing. But if you really want to know the thing that troubles me in life, the thing that causes me to lose sleep at night, the thing that just causes my stomach to churn inside out and my blood pressure to go up and I can’t eat.

You know what? I want Christ to be glorified in my life, but I honestly don’t know that I’m to a point where like Paul, I can say, yeah, I’m willing to go through that in order that He be glorified. I think I’m still there begging Him to take it away and say, can’t you be glorified some other way?

Can’t you be glorified some other way? Can’t I be troubled in some other area? But I know that’s the goal, to realize that it’s all about His glory.

And I’m not telling you tonight that, oh, you should be as spiritual as me and we should all be saying this together that I would rather glory in my infirmities. Or that I would, yeah, I would glory in my infirmities. Folks, I fully understand if you’re not there because I’m not there either.

But that’s where we need to get to. That’s where we need to go to get to a point where we realize these troubles in life really are just fleeting. They’re not, they won’t last forever.

But what matters forever, what matters for eternity is whether or not our lives bring glory to God, bring glory to Jesus Christ by His work being evident in it and in our lives and through our lives. And there’s an example that I’ve given many times before that I have to remind. .

. This example came to me because of some difficulties I was dealing with in my life. And I thought, well, maybe this will make sense to other people.

And I’ve been told by people in church that it’s made more sense than anything I’ve ever taught. So here it is for what it’s worth, that when we’re in the middle of a storm, we can be in the middle of a small storm, and it can seem huge because it’s all we can see. It’s a little storm, but when we’re in the middle of it, we turn around and every direction we look, there’s just storm all around us.

And when the storm moves on a little further down the road, we see it for what it really was. It was just a little rain cloud. But when you’re in the middle of it, it looks huge because it’s all you can see.

Now, that’s not to say that it’s not painful. That’s not to say that it’s not a struggle. That’s just to remind you and really to remind me that we get in moments where it feels like the struggle, the trouble is insurmountable.

The cloud is all around us. So it must just engulf the whole world because that’s all I can see. But it moves on a little bit and I see I was just in the middle of it and it was just a little rain cloud.

Folks, even the little rain clouds can be insurmountable for us. Even the little rain clouds can be too much for us to handle if they hit us at just the right point in our lives. And yet we have the promise that His grace is sufficient.

His grace, I’ll say it this way, is enough and more than enough. And that His strength is made perfect in our weakness. That when we don’t have the strength to pick ourselves up, He picks us up, He dusts us off, and He carries us forward.

As I said this morning, the whole point of tonight’s message is to correct this idea when we’re looking at troubles of saying that God never gives us more than we can handle. Paul certainly had more than he could handle. I think we’ve all had more than we could handle.

Gideon with his 300 soldiers had more than he could handle. Folks, there’s no problem so big that God can’t handle it. There’s no problem too big for God to handle.

So when we get to one of those moments where it feels like life is just going to beat us down, when we get to one of those moments where we’re in the middle of the rain cloud, we’re in the middle of the storm, and we think it’s just the whole world is engulfed, and there’s nothing we can do. Folks, we need to look to God, and we need to look to His strength. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but He will deliver us.

It doesn’t mean that the trouble always goes away, but sometimes His deliverance means changing our hearts about it, changing our hearts about the situation. I think that’s what happened with Paul. He prayed and begged God to take the thorn out of his flesh, And instead, God changed his heart to where he accepted the role of the thorn.

We need to seek God in those times where we feel like, I’m supposed to be able to handle this because I know God won’t give me more than I can handle. We need to forget that idea. And when we get to the point where it’s so heavy and so burdensome on our shoulders, we need to call out to God knowing that his grace is sufficient and his strength is made perfect.

His strength shines through in our weakness.

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