We hear it all the time when people are trying to encourage others, "God doesn't give us more than we can handle." People can interpret Paul's passage in 1 Corinthians that way when he writes that "God does not test you beyond your strength." But it isn't really about individuals, and it isn't really what Paul is up to here.
Excerpt from Sunday's sermon:
Perhaps as the community of faith that follows Jesus, we are called not merely to provide platitudes that weigh people down when life seems hard, urging them to follow the cult of the individual, telling them to be strong so if they fail, it will be their fault, rather than the avalanche of societal pressures that pushed them down the hill. The community’s testing is to remain faithful in all of the pressures of life. Our testing is how to respond to those who suffer, whether poverty, anxieties, illness, addiction, grief, or any other of a million or billion ways that our world’s brokenness makes itself known.
The full sermon text is here.
Listen or download the sermon:
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