My Least Favorite Religious Cliche

"God doesn't give us more than we can handle." What does this mean? If we were weaker people, God wouldn't let such awful things happen to us?

HB et al., what are your thoughts on this? My wife's family, which has more ministers in it than you can shake a collection plate at, use it for every family tragedy and mishap.

 

how does this apply to children who are abused? i guess htey "handle" it -- it's just a matter of how everything gets handled.

i think it's a throw-away quote.

 

god works in mysterious ways.

 

You're baaad.

 

The wording of that principle comes from a misapplication of 1 Corinthians 10:13...

...which is clearly talking about fighting temptation. One could make the argument that going through hardship brings about all kinds of temptations, and I wouldn't disagree. But the idea of God not giving us more than we can handle finds it's foundation in Philippians 4:13.

The Christian life is not about independence. On the contrary, the core message of Jesus' teachings was to become dependent on God. The idea is when our ability stops, His abilities can be shown, and that draws more people to Him. Sometimes His greatest masterpieces are pictures of endurance through hardship.

In an outtake of Bruce Almighty, Morgan Freeman and Jim Carrey are walking through a room full of pictures of people's lives. They stop in front of one of Lance Armstrong winning his 5th Tour de France. Freeman turns to Carrey and says, "If you want to paint a picture like that, you've got to use some dark colors."

In essence, it means God can handle anything -- so you can handle anything with His help.

 

i've never heard of this way before, hb, thanks.
I've always hated that saying too, like who wants to hear that from somebody when you are going through some hard crap. It sounds like they are really telling you to stop whining and they really don't know what to say to you so they just throw that saying out to ya.

 

I don't it when people die and someone tries to comfort you with
"They are in a better place"
Heck I don't want them in a BETTER place I want them with ME!

I'm careful and just tell people I love them and then I try to do something or offer to do something for them. Words can be very meaningless.

 

I don't think God gave us the tragedies and mishaps. I think that we in our own free wills caused or allowed them to happen, and that God will give us the strength and wisdom to know what to do and to then do it, in order to get through them.

 

In a way. If you look at any given tragedy, it could almost always be worse. Working from that perspective, it really begs the question, "So why wasn't it worse?" The generic answer is that God didn't allow it to be so. This idea is illustrated in the book of Job in the Old Testament. The idea is that every bad thing that God allows to happen to us has a distinct purpose, and usually several distinct purposes.

 

Pretty much.

God never promises that He'll protect us from hardship or pain. On the contrary, Jesus tells us we will have hardship. Not maybe, but absolutely (John 16:33). Most of the time, that hardship is a direct result of the free will of other people (i.e. your child abuse scenario). Sometimes it's less direct. But allowing someone to go through something hard to enable him (and others, very likely) to benefit directly from it in the long run isn't an act of cruelty or apathy.

Parents do it all the time.