God Will Never Give You More Than You Can Handle

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. All right. Bring it. Yeah. So we're in this series, as you know. This is our second week, and let's pray. Lord God, thank you so much for your promises, your real promises, and your real presence in our lives through the ups and downs, the highs and lows. And Lord, we're just glad you are here this morning. Whether we are at a mountain peak or in a valley, you are with us, and you are there, and you are here. And we pray, Lord, you bring your healing presence, your merciful compassion, your grace, your spirit, to minister to each one of us today. We pray, Lord, too, for your church throughout this area. We thank you for so many other expressions of your church and how you are working through them all. We pray, Lord, for your gospel to be proclaimed, your good news to be celebrated, you to be glorified, and your power to be manifest through, even in our weaknesses, that you are strong. So into your care we place this message and pray that you just have your way with us now. Open our ears. Holy Spirit, do the work. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Our text today is going to be, we're going to be looking at 2 Corinthians chapter 12. You can kind of follow with the notes in the Bible app if you want as well, but it will be up on the screen momentarily. And this is from Paul when he talked about what is called the thorn in the flesh. So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me, but he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 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. So last week we started this series with that wonderful phrase that God just wants you to be happy. And said you were going through these different cultural assumptions that many people in the United States, probably in Western Christianity specifically, that have kind of crept into our thinking, where we think these things are in the Bible that God actually said, and he never said it. He never said he just wants you to be happy. Yeah, joy is great, but he has so much more than happiness for you. We went through that last week. Next week it's going to be kind of fun too, because I think this is one of the more profound cultural things that you hear people say, that it doesn't really matter what you do, so long as you don't hurt anybody. Anybody ever say that before? Yeah, and God never said that either. Your actions really do matter. They impact you, they impact others, and we're going to be talking about that. And then week number four, two weeks from today, is probably the most important one of all in some ways. And that is where people say, and they think God has said, it doesn't matter what you believe, so long as you're sincere about it. God never said that one either. And that might hit close to home to us. Oh, sincerity is important. Authenticity is great, but it does matter what you, boy, does it have a powerful impact on you, whether you're aligned with God's truth and on others. And we're going to look at that. But today, we're covering the one, well, that you just saw in that video. And I'm going to kind of back into it just a little with a story. A couple weeks ago, I was talking to my brother, Paul, over the phone. He lives out in California, and he's lived overseas many years, and I used to think he had the golden life. He was an accountant to CPA, and he got to live in Budapest and Hong Kong and Shanghai and Singapore and Beijing. I think that's about it. And then he's traveled almost every, all this stuff. He got married to Wan Ling. They have, you know, and about 12, 14 years ago or so, exciting life, world travelers. But now they're settled in Los Angeles area, and they have a son. He's 11 years old, Silas. And I think they really have had a very difficult road with him. Silas was born with a severe form of nonverbal autism. And so he also has apraxia and, I think, multifocal seizures and all sorts of things. He's a beautiful child. And he's 11 years old now. He's very smart, very intelligent, but he's kind of trapped inside of this body that just doesn't work for him. And he has very few ways to communicate. What's cool is Paul's planning on sending me a lot of the things that Silas types with some assistance on an iPad. And he asks questions. He wants to be a servant of God and a teacher of God, he says, and all sorts of things. He goes to a Christian school. Lots of good things. Paul says he has grown so much, and hi...