Good morning! I invite you to turn with me to the book of 2 Corinthians.
When Trish and I lived in Kingsport, Tennessee, we always flew in and out of Tri-Cities Regional Airport. And if you’ve ever flown out of a regional airport, you know there are no big jets. No jumbo planes. You get six-seaters. Twelve-seaters. Prop planes. Planes that look like they should say Lawn-Boy on the side instead of Delta.
And I noticed something about myself whenever I had to fly on one of those little puddle jumpers: the smaller the plane, the more I started paying attention to the people getting on board.
Now, I want to be very clear—I wasn’t judging anyone. Not at all.
I was just… doing the math.
You start quietly wondering things like: What’s the weight limit on this plane? Does luggage factor into this? Is there a margin of error? What if a sumo wrestling team is on this flight with me?
I wasn’t being unkind. I was being… scientific.
Maybe you’ve been there. Maybe you’ve been on a flight where the flight attendants asked passengers to change seats before takeoff. Something about the center of gravity.
And the issue isn’t that you distrust the pilot. The pilot seems calm. Confident. Knows exactly where he’s going.
You trust the pilot.
You’re just not entirely convinced the plane can handle everything we’re asking it to carry.
Today we’re beginning a new sermon series called God Never Said That—
We’re going to look at things people sincerely believe are in the Bible. They quote them confidently. They usually mean well when they say it.
But the truth is, they are all things God never actually said.
The first one may be the most famous of all:
“God will never give you more than you can handle.”
In other words, God will never load more weight onto your life than you were designed to safely carry.
But is this true? As followers of Jesus, we have to weigh everything we hear against the truth of Scripture. We have to be like Bereans— those guys Acts 17 describes as “examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.” And so let’s examine the Scriptures. Let’s use the Apostle Paul as a test case to see if it’s true that “God Will Never Give Us More than We Can Handle.” We are going to read 2 Corinthians 1:8-10 together. Please stand to honor the reading of God’s Word.
2 Corinthians 1:8–10 ESV
8 For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. 9 Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. 10 He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.
This is God’s Word. Thanks Be to God. Pray with me.
[pray]
1. God doesn’t adjust our burdens to match our ability to bear them.
If we’re going to be honest with Scripture, we have to start here.
The Bible is filled with stories of God’s people finding themselves in situations they cannot handle on their own. We just read what Paul says to the Corinthians:
“For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself.”
Notice he doesn’t say, “It was hard, but we hunkered down.”
He doesn’t say “we put our shoulder to the wheel and found that extra gear”
No. Paul says he was so utterly burdened beyond his strength that he thought he was going to die.
And if you’re wondering, “what in the world happened to Paul in Asia,” he spells it out a few chapters later. Flip over to 2 Corinthians 11:23-28
2 Corinthians 11:23–28 ESV
23 Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one—I am talking like a madman—with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. 24 Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. 25 Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; 26 on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; 27 in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. 28 And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.
My goodness. Any one of those would have been enough to make me feel burdened beyond my strength to endure. I read this, and I’m like, how could anyone ever get the idea that God will never give us more than we can handle? Just look at the Apostle Paul!!
And Paul’s not the only one.
Moses got so overwhelmed with leading the children of Israel that he finally cries out,
Numbers 11:14–15 ESV
15 If you will treat me like this, kill me at once, if I find favor in your sight, that I may not see my wretchedness.”
Elijah got to the point where he said to God, “I've had enough, Lord. Take my life.” (1 Kings 19:3-4)
How about King David? You read the Psalms, and does it sound like someone who’s handling it?
Psalms 55:4–5
“My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death have fallen upon me. Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me.”
Even Jesus, in the garden, said, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” (Mark 14:33-34)
Friends, if it was true that God would never give you more than you could handle, then feeling overwhelmed would be failure. Feeling exhausted would mean you were weak. Needing help would mean you didn’t have enough faith.
Someone needs to hear this: Being overwhelmed is not a sign that you are out of God’s will. It’s often where God does His best work.
Look back at verse 9:
9 Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.
Did you hear that? God gives us more than we can handle so we will rely on Him to handle it.
And here’s the second truth:
2. Over time, God expands our ability to entrust our burdens to Him.
As I was preparing for my sermon this week, I wanted to fact check my opening illustration about airplanes. So I talked to Noah Whaley. Noah has his pilot’s license, so I asked him how much margin for error there really is when it comes to a plane’s weight capacity. And he said something that surprised me.
He said, “Commercial airlines assume every passenger weighs 300 pounds. So they build in a pretty big cushion.”
And I thought to myself, well, if every passenger weighs 300 pounds, they need to build in some pretty big cushions.
Then Noah said, “So really, the plane can actually handle a whole lot more than you think it can.”
And I thought, ok, there’s a rich truth from Scripture here as well. As we grow in Christ, we grow in our ability to trust Him with our burdens.
Once again, let’s look at some of the heroes of faith in Scripture. Many of you started reading the Bible through again this year. And as you’ve gone through Genesis and Job, you may have noticed that God gives the toughest tests to the oldest saints?
Turn for just a moment to Genesis 22. There are three words in at the beginning of Genesis 22 that change everything. Genesis 22:1-2
Genesis 22:1–2 ESV
1 After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 2 He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”
“After these things…” What things? Consider what Abraham has done up to this point:
• Leading his family from Ur to Canaan ()Genesis 12:4
• Offering Lot the first pick of the land ()Genesis 13:9
• Rescuing Lot when he was taken captive ()Genesis 14:16
• Believing the promises of God ()Genesis 15:6
• Submitting to circumcision for himself and his household ()Genesis 17:23
• Interceding for the people of Sodom ()Genesis 18:16-32
Do you see it? Abraham had already demonstrated decades of trust in God before this ultimate test. Spurgeon wrote this about those three words, “After these things:”
God did not try Abraham like this at the beginning… There was a course of education to prepare him for this great testing time, and the Lord knows how to educate us up to such a point that we can endure, in years to come, what we could not endure today.
Do we have any engineers here today? Any structural engineers? Ok. I’ll ask you: In the physical world of buildings and bridges does load bearing capacity increase or decrease over time?
Right. It decreases.
Think about an old railroad trestle crossing a river. After years of stress, weight, and weather, the iron begins to fatigue. Cracks form. What once held firm can no longer bear the same strain.
But one of the strange and hopeful truths of the Christian life is that, under God’s care, the opposite can be true.
A faithful saint who has walked with God for decades is not untouched by suffering—but often deepened by it.
Not because they are tougher.
But because they are more deeply rooted.
Jesus describes this difference in Matthew 7:24–27.
Two men each build a house. One builds on sand, one builds on the rock.
The rain falls. The floods rise.
The winds blow and beat against the house.
Jesus does not say one house avoids the storm. The same storm hits both.
One stands. One falls with a great crash.
The difference is not the storm. It’s the foundation.
Over time, as we walk with Christ, God does not promise fewer storms. He promises a deeper foundation.
And that’s why Scripture so often shows the heaviest tests coming late in the journey—not because God expects more strength from His people, but because they’ve learned how to depend on Him.
Our load-bearing capacity actually increases the longer we are walking with God.
Now, here is the third truth. And I want to make sure you don’t mis-hear it. If you aren’t listening, it sounds like the lie.
The lie is, God will never give us more than we can handle.
The truth is:
3. God Will Never Give Us More than HE can handle.
If God doesn’t promise that life will always be manageable, then the natural question is this:
What does He promise?
And Scripture’s answer is clear.
God promises His presence and His power when we reach the limits of our own strength.
Let’s go back to 2 Corinthians 12, he talks about what he calls a “thorn in the flesh”—a weakness or hardship that would not go away.
Three times Paul begs God to remove it. And God’s answer is not what Paul was asking for.
God says:
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
Notice what God does not say.
He does not say, “I’ll take it away.”
He does not say, “You’re stronger than you think.”
He does not say, “You can handle this.”
Instead, God says, “I will be enough for you.”
And this is where the phrase “God will never give you more than you can handle” completely falls apart—
because God never intended for you to handle life on your own in the first place.
Weakness is not something God despises.
Weakness is the very place where His power shows up most clearly.
Look how Paul responds:
2 Corinthians 12:9–10 ESV
Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 10 For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
Paul isn’t a masochist. He isn’t saying he enjoys pain. What he says is that real strength comes in the pain, not instead of the pain.
God’s power does not replace our weakness.
It is made perfect through our weakness.
The heresy of the phrase “God will never give you more than you can handle” is that it trains us to value independence instead of dependence.
• If I believe I’m supposed to handle everything, then needing help feels like failure.
• Admitting weakness feels like shame.
• And prayer becomes a last resort instead of a first response.
This is why Scripture keeps inviting us to bring our burdens to God:
“Cast all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.” (1 Peter 5:7)
“Come to Me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28)
When life gives you more than you can handle, God isn’t standing back and watching.
He is standing near… and waiting.
He’s standing near— inviting you to lean on His strength, receive His grace, and let go of the pressure to be enough on your own.
INVITATION
Some of you walked in today carrying something that is heavier than you’ve been letting on. You’ve told yourself, I should be stronger by now.
Other people have it worse.
I just need to push through.
But hear me clearly: God is not disappointed by your weakness. He is not standing back, waiting to see how you handle it. He is standing near, waiting for you to trust Him with it. .
And He is inviting you—not to prove your strength—but to receive His.
So in a moment, we’re going to pray. And when we do, I want to invite you to bring before God whatever feels like “too much” right now.
You don’t have to name it out loud.
You don’t have to explain it.
You don’t have to justify why it still hurts.
Just bring it.
If you’re exhausted, bring your exhaustion.
If you’re overwhelmed, bring your overwhelm.
If you’re afraid, bring your fear.
And instead of asking God to make you stronger, maybe today the prayer is simply this:
“God, I can’t handle this. But I trust that You can.”
And if you’d like to pray with someone this morning—if you need help carrying what you’ve been carrying—we’ll have pastors here during the final song. That’s not a sign of weakness. That’s what the church is for.
Because the goal of faith is not independence.
The goal is intimacy.
And the God who raises the dead is strong enough to carry you.
