Life Happens

It seems as though the difficult events of life, more times than not, catch us by surprise! We don't wake up in the morning thinking that we'll have an automobile wreck, or discover we are being caught in our companies down-sizing decisions, or discover our spouse is seeing someone else. Most of us have had days where something tragic hit us out of nowhere.

Whatever the event, the reality is...life happens. And when it does, sometimes it knocks the wind out of our dreams, hopes, and ambitions. Is is possible to keep your dreams alive when life sucker punches you? I believe so. But I believe to do so, you have to be willing to let other people into your life. God never intended for us to do life alone.

David's relationship with his friend Jonathan was a source of encouragement and strength as Jonathan's manic-depressive father, Saul would honor David one day and try to kill him the next. David's "mighty men" enabled David to do amazing things even while on the run from Saul. They (David and his mighty men) all could have achieved a lot on their own, but they achieved far more as a group than they ever could have accomplished on their own. David knew he needed them if he was 
going to accomplish what God had called him to do.


As Perry Noble writes in his book Unleash: "We never become who God wants us to be or accomplish all He wants us to accomplish by ourselves. We all need the support of other believers to help us live out God's unleashing grace.
"

A Little Help From Our Friends

Dorothea Taylor, age 85, was waiting in her truck on her husband George, as he tool their golden retrievers, Fellar and Tut, out for some fresh air. She was in their truck to avoid the Alaskan subzero temperatures watching her husband collected the dogs.

That's when George noticed a massive moose of in the distance. “He was way off. He spotted me, and he started to come right after me. So I was trying to get to the truck. But I didn't make it,” George, a bush pilot from Willow, Alaska, told the Anchorage Daily News.

The moose caught George and began stomping on him in the snow. Fortunately, his 5-foot-tall wife grabbed a shovel from the truck and attacked the moose, taking swing after swing at the animal.

“When it turned and started to go off slowly, I hit it with everything I had,” she said. Finally, the moose retreated, and Tut, one of their dogs, chased it off. Taylor made it out of the fight unscathed, but her husband had seven broken ribs and a 6-inch cut on his forehead. “Well, we've helped each other out of problems before. This just happened to be the latest,” Dorothea said.

Sometimes life happens and situations hit that we're unprepared to face. It's during those times that we desperately need the help and community of other people. 
When the Moose attacked, George didn't need someone to pray for him. He didn't need to read a book titled Ten Ways To Escape A Charging Moose. He didn't need advice or some sort of cute jewelry with a cross on it to remind him that Jesus is always with him.


He needed someone to come alongside him and beat of the Moose! George would have been in serious trouble if Dorothea hadn't been close enough to help him out.


I'm sure George didn’t set out walking his dogs expecting to face death. But life didn't turn out quite like he'd anticipated. Before he knew it, he was in trouble, and quite unable to get himself out of the situation on his own.


There's no way he could have rescued himself. He needed help! And so do we all.

Life Is Tough

It is important to remember that David did not set out to fight a giant on the day he faced Goliath. I mean, he didn't get up one day and say, "I think I'll go pick a fight with a nine-foot tall warrior." He was simply doing what he was asked to do and the giant-sized opportunity presented itself.

Isn't that the way life happens? We are going along and everything is great and then something takes us by surprise. Something that leaves us overwhelmed and feeling like we can't handle it. If we have bought into the error that God will never give you more than you can handle, we will get frustrated and possibly bitter. Or we may assume that we don't have enough faith, or aren't godly enough.

Going along side the error of God won't give you more than you can handle, is the error that if you do everything right, you won't have any problems and nothing bad will never happen to us. Scripture clearly teaches otherwise. Joseph did the "right" thing and ran from temptation and consequently wound up in jail. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego did the "right" thing and refused to bow before an idol, and as a result they were thrown into the furnace. Job was doing absolutely nothing wrong; in fact, he was called "blameless" and "upright" by God
 Himself. And yet you know what happened. Paul and Silas were told to go to a certain region and preach the gospel, and before the chapter is over, we find them beaten and thrown into prison. Jesus never sinned, yet He was crucified.

Bad things happen to us not because of bad things we've done but because we live in a fallen world. Also, when bad things happen to us we are reminded how utterly dependent we are on and for God.

As one of the members of our congregation often says, "Life is tough, then you die." Begging his apologies, I might change that last phrase in his quip: "Life is touch, but God is greater."

More Than You Can Handle

This week, it is my hope to debunk a Christian fable that is often quoted when we experience difficulties in life. This fable has a lot of different versions, but they all basically boil down to this: "God will never give you more than you can handle.”I suspect we have all been told that at some point in our lives. I suspect most of us have told someone else that when they were going through a difficulty. The truth is, I've probably preached it before.

But it simply is not true. God often allows us to face more than we can handle. But it's not because He's cruel or heartless. It's so we'll stop trying to live life on our own strength and learn to depend on His! The idea that God won't give us more than we can handle might have originated from the words the Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 10:13: “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. 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 stand up under it.”
 Notice this verse doesn't say anything about God never giving us more than we can handle. It fact, it is not about circumstances at all, but temptations.


Read Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 1:8-10, and you will discover that he readily admits that he experienced situations that he couldn't handle: “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, FAR BEYOND OUR ABILITY TO ENDURE (emphasis mine), so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us,”


You see it, don't you? This week we are going to debunk the myth that "God will never give you more than you can handle" and hopefully replace it with the truth: "God will never give you more than He can handle." The difference is more than schematics. It is an entirely different paradigm of how you face life.