54. When God Feels Distant

Why God Sometimes Feels Distant

Welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 54, when God feels distant. Why does God sometimes feel distant? Why are there times and seasons when it seems like God is either aloof or further away from us than at other times?

As a pastor, I've received various versions of this question over the years. Questions like, why does God feel distant from me? I know that I'm saved. I have assurance of that from the scriptures, but why do I go through periods of deadness and dryness?

How is this true and why does this happen? I am not really changing anything about my routine. I have the same Bible plan that I've always had. I dedicate the same time every morning to prayer. I'm repenting and I'm doing everything that I know to do, pastor.

So yet why? Why is it that sometimes God feels nearer to me, while at other times I feel like that he has left me and I am all alone? Why is that? Now, there is undoubtedly many reasons why this phenomenon may occur, such as our own sinfulness, our rebellion, the quenching of the spirit of God, or even God's chastening of his children.

When those things happen, God will often withdraw the experience of his presence from us, which is meant to lead us to repentance. He does not, however, remove his presence entirely from us since the Bible tells us that there's now, therefore, no condemnation for those who are in Christ.

His spirit remains in us. Yet, at the same time, while God is fully present with us through the spirit's indwelling, he's fully present in all places through his omnipresence, there are times when he veils our capacity to comprehend his presence, allowing us to experience distance from him, darkness even, and shadows.

Now, as we said before, this occurs often because of habitual, indwelling, and unrepentant sin. But what happens when that's not the case? Do we have any examples of that in Scripture? How do we explain the other occasions when we are in the Word, when we're repenting, fasting, praying, singing, mortifying the flesh?

We're doing everything that we've always done that seemed to bring us closer to God, and yet, for some reason, we're now feeling the absence of God. His distance is more palpable even than his presence.

Why? How do we explain that? Well, these are questions that I've also asked myself countless times before, and unfortunately, I've not been really given a biblical reason from Scripture to account for such occasions.

Instead, I've been taught that my relationship with God is sort of based upon this quid pro quo relationship and rule where if I repent of my sins and I do all of the right things, then God is going to automagically reward me with the gift of his presence.

Now, this actually caused a lot of dysfunction in my relationship with God because it encouraged me to have a performance oriented faith where I believe that my experience of God, the nearness of God was wholly dependent upon me, and yet I did not have someone come alongside me and tell me that this is not what we see in Scripture.

Now, take Job, for example. The Bible tells us that he was a righteous man, that he was exemplary among the men of his time, and yet God allowed him to experience awful suffering and the diminishing of his presence.

Take David, for instance. There's another one. His Psalms are riddled with pleadings and beggings of God that God would draw near to him, that God would allow him to experience the joy of his nearness once again.

You think about another example in Jesus who never sinned and yet in the garden felt such agony and distance from God that he wept tears of blood. How do we account for those situations? Now, to answer that question today, I would like to share 13 things that I wish someone would have shared with me along the way that I've now, praise the Lord, been able to learn.

And some of those things I've been learning over the years, some of those things I've learned just even this week. Now, what I'm not gonna do is I'm not gonna be diving too deeply into the question of why God is distant from us at times.

There's a lot of mystery in the scripture on that. And frankly, we can't know the decreative secret will of God. We can only know what's revealed in the text. So what I would like to do, instead of answering the question of why is God distant?

I think that's a great question, but instead I would like to answer how are we to think about the distance of God? And then what can we do about this reality? So I wanna think about those two things. Actually, I think that that will help soften the tension that we feel from the why question.

Why is God distant? Well, I think that's the wrong question. How are you to think about His distance? And what are you to do about His distance? Those are the two things that I'd like for us to wrestle with today.

Now, in the rest of this episode, I wanna offer six reflections to consider when you feel distance from God. And I'd also like to provide seven, that's 13 total things, seven biblical remedies for you to employ should you ever experience distance from God.

God's Rights in Withholding the Experience of His Presence

So part one, how are we to reflect upon the distance of God? Number one, I want you to reflect upon God's rights. Here's the principle. God has every right and ability to give and take away the experience of His presence as He deems appropriate.

One of the greatest doctrines that we often recoil from is the doctrine of the sovereignty of God. Sovereignty entails that God has every right, ability and power to accomplish whatever it is that He wills and since everything that occurs is under the canopy of God's will, then every pain, displeasure and discomfort comes about first by divine knowledge and by divine permission.

Therefore, nothing happens outside of the will of God, nothing. Job says this fact poignantly in chapter 23, verse 16, he says, it is God who has made my heart faint and it is the Almighty who has dismayed me.

You see what he's saying here? He's saying this is not accidental, my heart is not faint by happenstance, it's God who willed it to be so. Jeremiah is a man who's also acquainted with great grief and he's heartily concurring with Job in Lamentations three, two and eight, this is what he says, God, He has driven me and made me walk in the darkness and not in light.

Even when I cry out and call for help, God shuts out my prayer. Now, while these verses may rub the inner drama queen inside of us the wrong way, do we really, truly have a cause to be angry about it?

All of us at some point or another have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, most of us have sinned this very minute. Well, that includes Job and Jeremiah, but it also includes us. God said to all of us who have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God that the punishment for that sin would be death.

He says that in the day you eat of the tree, you shall die and yet look at how long we live. The very fact that you and I are alive today means that God has been exceedingly generous to us. It means that He's not given us what we're owed, but it's instead offered to us unmerited mercy beyond comprehension, beyond this.

If you're a Christian and you're listening to this, you've received unfathomable grace. Now remember, grace is not just being spared from the punishment that you earned, that's mercy, but grace is receiving blessings, comforts, and joys that don't belong to you, that you couldn't pay for.

In your sin, you and I should have suffered eternal torment and terror forever, and yet God sacrificed His Son to rescue you. Instead of us suffering, He watched His baby boy undergo emotional, spiritual, and physical anguish to offer to you and I grace.

Our salvation, even if it were the only good thing that ever happened to us, would be infinitely more than we could ever ask for or expect, and yet it's not the only good thing that's ever happened to us.

Tell me, can you count the blessings and the graces that God has given you? Can you count them? Are you gonna forget some of them? Of course. All of the joys that He's imparted to you and I through family and friends and children, through a lineage and a heritage.

He's given us wealth, being in one of the richest nations, the richest nation probably in the history of the world. He's given us food, wine, safety, security, vehicles, means. Think about it like this.

Has He ever answered any one of your prayers? Has He given you oxygen to breathe or organs that work without your direct involvement or management? Has He given you a physical copy of the Bible, which if you think about it from a historical standpoint, you are blessed.

What about other blessings that are stacked up as high as heaven? Blessings upon blessings, gifts upon gifts that you and I overlook and forget. You see, when we add up the mountain of kindnesses that we have received from God, and we compare that to the eternal torment and suffering that we deserve, it is shocking how much we actually complain to God.

I want you to think about this clearly. If we've received nothing but our salvation from God, and if our temporal lives were filled with nothing but heartache and misery and unimaginable suffering, and if we never once felt the comfort and the nearness of God's presence, then we would be inconceivably and unreservedly blessed.

Remembering that, we should not be surprised whenever God feels distant from us. We should actually be surprised that so frequently He feels near. We should be shocked that such an immense and pure being would persist for so long with such petulant peasants.

And if we should ever walk through a period like this where we feel that God is distant, our first reaction ought to be gratitude. We shouldn't feel like we've been slighted. What have we been slighted from?

This same God who is working out our salvation is also working out this situation that you're going through right now for good. Whether right now you're in a season of blessings or whether you're in a season of discomfort, depression, and pain, God has given you that for your good and for His glory.

And because He is sovereign over all things, and we know that He's perfectly good in all things, we can trust Him in all things. No matter what you go through, every conceivable nanosecond of your life is a gift from God that you ought to praise Him for.

There is simply no reason for us to ever complain and to ever feel sorry for ourselves and to ever feel bitter when we think about these things rightly. We can rest knowing that we are more blessed than our minds could ever conceive, which I believe will help us patiently endure the hard times that we walk through until our situation or experience improves.

Righteousness Does Not Obligate God to Feel Near

Now, number two, we need to also not just reflect upon God's rights, which is, I think if you get that point, if you understand the first point in this, then you really kind of the whole thing opens up for you.

It's like 80 of the point. If you can get point one, then all of the rest of this is sort of application on that. But the second thing, beyond the sovereignty and the providence peace of God's right to do with His presence as He wills, the second thing that I want us to reflect on is we need to reflect upon our understanding of righteousness.

Here's the principle. Our righteousness, our obedience, and our sanctification in Christ do not obligate God to give us an experience of His nearness. They just don't. The book of Job proves this. The book of Job is predicated upon the fact that Job is a righteous man, Job 1 .1.

Throughout the pages of the book, Job himself announces the fact that he's blameless, that he's guiltless, that he's righteous. Look at Job 27 .6 for another example. And God himself doesn't disagree with this.

He actually says that Job is blameless in the beginning of the book in chapter one, verse eight. This book then is a fascinating thought experiment and a case study on what happens, why and how do the righteous suffer and experience distance from God?

And according to the book of Job, sometimes righteous people experience distance from God, not because they lack righteousness. Job certainly didn't, God admits this, but because they have it, which was an entirely foreign concept to Job and his friends at that time.

You see, at that time, the prevailing wisdom, especially among Job's shoddy friends, was that good people obtain blessings and favors because of their goodness. At the same time, they believe that the wicked were going to suffer because of their wickedness.

To that culture, the world operated along strict rules of reciprocity. Good people were rewarded and bad people were punished. The obvious conclusion from such a philosophy was, if you are suffering, then you must be wicked, which contradicts God's own words at the beginning of this book.

With that, the book is not about how good people are blessed and bad people are cursed, that's wrong. The book invites us to explore why God sometimes causes blameless, righteous, and even people that he has commended to undergo the loss of intimacy with their creator.

Notice how Job recounts his sufferings. He doesn't describe it entirely as the loss of material and physical wealth and health and all of that. He does describe that, but his most poignant remarks are not about his material losses and his mental losses or any, they're all spiritual.

Listen to what he says. This is chapter 23, verse three, and then verses eight and nine. Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that's God, that I might come to his seat, behold. I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I cannot perceive him.

When he acts on the left, I cannot behold him. He turns on the right and I cannot see him. In addition to Job's constant declaration of his rightness and fairness, he is also describing what he considers to be the brunt of his problem.

His righteousness did not secure for him intimacy and fellowship with God. He thought it would. He thought that because he was good, then God would bless him. You see, Job is far less vexed, actually, over the loss of physical material blessings.

Instead, he's brokenhearted that God feels like a million miles away from him. Job can't conceive of a world where a man like him is actively pursuing righteous living, who is doing all the right things, and God knows everything, so God knows that he's doing these things, and yet God still withholds his presence from him.

Job can't conceive of that. That's really the complaint that Job has all throughout the book. How is this possible, God, that I'm righteous and you are treating me this way? That is what Job is saying.

Now, just like Job had to learn his lessons and get his licks in the end, we, too, need to expand our view of God. Like Job, we must understand that works of personal righteousness, individual obedience, and dedicated work in holiness by the Spirit of God cannot guarantee the experience of feeling near him.

God doesn't operate under the terms of reciprocity or quid pro quo or vending machine spirituality. He grants the awareness of nearness as he deems fit. This is not based upon our schemes. This is not based upon our effort or machinations.

There will be times in our life when God graciously allows you and I to experience an abundance of his presence, and yet there's gonna be times when he doesn't, and we need to become familiar with that and comfortable with that.

Remember, God is sovereign over all things. Recall that our sanctification and our growth and righteous living do not indebt God to us. And then rest in the fact that God is using everything, even periods of perceived distance, deadness, dryness, and spiritual lack of intimacy.

He's using all of that for his good and for his glory. Job says in chapter 13, verse 15, though God slays me, yet I will hope in him. It's a great verse to memorize. Number three, beyond looking at the rights that God has and beyond looking at our own righteousness, we also need to reflect upon our past record.

God’s Past Graces Are Not Repeatable on Demand

Here's the principle. Just because God has given tremendous experiences of his presence in the past does not mean that he's obligated to repeat them in the present. Psalm 44 begins this way. Oh God, we have heard with our ears, our fathers have told us of the work that you did in their day, in the days of old.

For by their own sword, they did not possess the land and by their own arm, they did not save them. But your right hand and your arm and the light of your presence has favored them. The psalmist is seeking to remind God of the days of old.

Those days when his presence was powerfully with his people and it went ahead of them and delivered them safely into the land that God had promised. The reason that the psalmist is issuing this reminder is telling because he's saying that this current generation is not experiencing those same things.

Even though they had not violated the terms of the covenant, the psalmist tells us in verse 17, even though they have not turned aside into idolatry, verse 18 and 20, he's telling us that God's heavy hand was against them.

Their enemies were defeating them and making a mockery of them among the nations, which led to incredible confusion. They were wondering to themselves, if God's people of old experienced him in such and such a way, then why aren't we having the same experience?

They believe that the experience of nearness with God was a repeatable phenomenon. The psalmist cries out in verse nine and then in verse 19, you have rejected us and you've brought us to dishonor and you do not go out with our armies, yet you have crushed us in the place of jackals and you've covered us with the shadow of death.

Do you feel the weight of their confusion there? They essentially say, God, we're doing the same things that our forefathers did. We're not dishonoring you, which warrants the question that they're asking, God, why are we not getting the same results that they did?

And surprisingly, God does not answer that question. He leaves it hanging. But what this psalm does teach us is profound. While the psalm offers no insight into why this generation was suffering at the hands of their enemies, that's verses nine through 16.

And while it offers no reason as to why God was pulling back his presence, it's verses 21 through 25, it does, however, clarify and it confirms that God's past record of graces that he gave to one people does not guarantee that he's gonna act in the same way at a different time with a different people.

It just doesn't. Graces are non-repeatable events. His presence and how he allows us to experience him are deeply personal and they're intimate and they're peculiar and particular to different people at different times and at different seasons.

If God dispensed an experience of his presence, and I'm not talking about the truth that's revealed in scripture here, because truth is truth, it never changes. But how God impresses his spirit upon unique individuals, if we were to look at that and say, God, if you dispensed your presence because I followed step A, B, C, and D, and if I did that, then I would feel near to you.

And if I did not do that, then I would not feel near to you. What we've done is we've reduced experiencing God down to a formula that you can complete like a checklist. In your life, you may have had moments of blissful intimacy with God, but those weren't formulaic.

There may have been a season when he was especially near to you, pressing his love down upon you, enlivening your eyes, giving life to your bones, but it wasn't because you did step A, B, C, and D, it was because of his grace.

There's also times, you know them, you've heard about them from other people where they've experienced God in ways that you can only dream of. Maybe they have stories that you don't have where God moved and did things in the past in their life, or maybe he's doing that in their lives right now in the present and you're like, God, why is that not happened to me?

What am I doing wrong? This is what the generation in Psalm 44 was asking. Beloved, remember this, past records of God's grace do not guarantee that he will repeat them in the same way in the present.

God is personal. He's not a robot, which means that he gets to decide how near and how far you get to perceive him to be. That is what makes a relationship with God so dynamic and so wonderful and allows us an occasion to praise him since we would never ultimately adore a God who acts like a vending machine.

We know this is true. We don't treat our wives or our husbands that way. We don't treat them like if I do these things, then you have to show affection to me. We're dynamic beings. Nobody loves a vending machine.

Nobody would ultimately love God if he were like that. We would find him useful, but we would not find him beautiful, which I think is a quote from Tim Keller. Number four, we need to reflect upon the way that we think.

Finite Reasoning Cannot Explain God’s Hiddenness

We need to reflect upon our reasoning. The principle goes like this. Our perspective on experiencing God is finite and lacking. We fail to account for the myriad of ways that God can use distance, dryness, and deadness in our soul to sanctify and bless us.

In Job's opinion, God had slighted him. You can hear the tone in his bombastic appeal. Let's look at Job 13. We're going to read verse 15, 17, 19, 23 through 24. Job says this, nevertheless, I will argue my ways before him.

Listen carefully to my speech. He's talking to God. Listen carefully to my speech. And let me declare, let my declaration fill your ears, God. Behold, now I have prepared my case and I know that I will be vindicated.

Who will contend with me? How many are my iniquities and sin, God? Make known to me my rebellion and my sin. Why then do you hide your face and you consider me your enemy? You see, Job is appealing to God.

He's basically saying, Lord, if I really am this righteous man and there's no sin that I can remember, then why are you treating me like I am your enemy? What gives, God? Job is assuming that the only thing that can separate him from God is an experience of God's nearness is unrepented sin.

And he's saying that doesn't apply to me. He has no memory of a time where he has an unconfessed sin. His entire paradigm for how to be near to God has been blown. And he's saying, God, you must submit to my judgments.

You're not being fair. That's what Job was saying. Job obviously failed in many ways here. He finds that out later. But the main way that he failed is that he failed to account for the complexity of what he was talking about.

He had a very simple view of the world. If I do good, God gives me him. If I do bad, God withdraws. That is far too simple. And the world is far too complex and beautiful for such simplicity. God has a myriad of reasons for allowing distance in a relationship to occur.

Job, in fact, his view was far too simple. In the same way, there are countless reasons why God may allow you and may allow I to experience distance in our relationship with him. It's not a simple topic.

See, like Job, you don't need to have all the answers and know all the reasons why, because our brains, our finite capabilities and understandings just can't go there. If God has not revealed to you why he has pulled back from you, then you don't need to know why.

Now, if it's obvious, you have habitual, indwelling, unrepentant sin, repent. But if it's not obvious to you and God has not revealed it to you, then the question of why is God pulling back from you is not yours to judge.

That's what got Job in trouble is he thought his judgments were somehow more sophisticated and more fair and more right than God. Remember, we are not required to have an infinite knowledge of God's secret will on things.

Our reasoning like Job is flawed. We're incapable of understanding the mysteries that God has revealed. That's Deuteronomy 29, 29. All you and I can know is what scripture tells us. Scripture tells us that God is sovereign, that God is good, and that whatever happens to us, whether it be good or whether it be perceived by us as ill, it comes from his loving and kind hand so that we can trust him.

Brothers and sisters, rest in that. Receive that. Lay down your human opinions and reasoning and remember what the psalmist says. He says this to himself. Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why have you become disturbed within me?

Hope in God. For I shall again praise him for the help of his presence. Number five, we need to learn how to reflect upon the ruins. We need to learn how to reflect upon God's rights, our righteousness, our record of the past, our reasoning.

We also need to be able to reflect upon the ruins. Here's the principle. Our problems, pain, and experiences of trouble do not obligate God to relieve us in any way. One of the most consistent cries that you see in the Psalms is for God to arise and to aid his people when they are suffering.

Now, as we've mentioned before, when we are living righteously, when we see other people getting a different experience than we're getting, and when all the powers of our reasoning would say that God owes us his presence, sometimes God will surprise us and he'll allow us to feel distance.

This isn't because God is capricious. On the contrary, whatever God does, he does because at that moment, it was the very best thing that he could do. There is never a moment where God doesn't do absolute perfection, where something is less than.

God does not sit up in heaven grieved that he made a wrong decision. Sometimes, and I say that sort of tongue in cheek, every time, even though we can't explain it, the distance that God sometimes causes us to go through is the very best thing for us.

If that were not true, then God would not have chosen for you to go through it. Again, God doesn't make mistakes. Nowhere in the Bible is that tension more perplexing and more poignant than in times when people are going through suffering.

See, we expect God to come to our aid when we're in pain. Unexpectedly, those are the moments sometimes God seems the most distant. Here's a few examples from the scripture on how this, on how other people in the Psalms or other people in the Bible have experienced this.

Psalm 10 verse one. Why do you stand far off, O Lord? Why do you hide your face in times of trouble? God, right now is the time I need you. Why are you distant? Look at Psalm 13 one. How long, O Lord?

Are you gonna forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? Especially poignant is Psalm 42. It's one of my favorite Psalms. It's by the sons of Korah. They say this in verses one through three.

As the deer pants for water, so my soul pants for you. Oh God, my soul thirst for you, God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? My tears have been my food day and night while they say to me all day long, where is your God?

Do you see the picture that the writer here is painting for us? He's casting himself as the character of a deer that is on the verge of death, panting frantically for water before she falls under the crippling weight of dehydration.

In this Psalm, you have a deer that has gone a long time without a refreshment, even a drop of water upon her tongue. In the same way, the Psalmist is saying to God, God, it has been a long time since I've seen you.

It's been a long time since I've heard you. It's been a long time since I've experienced you and I am dying here. The salty tears that I lick off my glisten cheeks are the only drink and food that I have.

Where are you, God? Where are you? Now, like the Psalmist, there's going to be times when you and I walk through tragedy and disaster, but that's not what the Psalmist is talking about. There's going to be times where we're going to feel like Count Rugen in the Princess Bride, where we've been locked away in the pit of despair.

But again, that's not really what he's talking about. He's talking about aching because he's not near God, because the experience of God has been taken from him. In those times, and if you've experienced them, if you've experienced the weight of the departure, the distance, if you've experienced that, especially in juxtaposition to a time that you had before where God felt especially near, maybe right when you became a Christian and God felt near to you and every part about the relationship was fresh and it was good.

And now it feels like you're walking through through the pits of despair. If that, if you can feel that and what I want you to do is for a moment, I want you to allow your heart to settle. I want you to allow yourself to rest before your mind goes on reeling.

And I want you to understand that these moments of distance do not prove that God doesn't care for you. They do not invalidate his existence. In fact, they actually reinforce it. You see, like a wise parent, God does not always give you what you want.

If a mother did that, she would soon have a miniature monster on her hands instead of a child. Much the same way, dear ones. Sometimes God brings relief when we ask. And yet sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he allows us to knock and then the door flings wide open.

And then there's other times where we're outside standing for a little while knocking. When Jesus says in the New Testament, the door will be open. That verb actually is not like a one-time event, like where you knock and then it's over.

That verb is what in Greek you call continuous aspect. And it says knock and knock and knock. That's what it means. If you continue to knock, God's going to let you in. But sometimes you're going to stand there a little while.

Not forever. Not eternally, because you're his, you're his child. But temporally, there's going to be times when that door doesn't open. As quickly as you were hoping it would. And there's going to be times where you're going to stand there a lot longer than your flesh can endure.

Where despair and complaining is going to rise up inside of you. I want you to remember that God is in control. The situation you're walking through is challenging. I don't want to diminish it. And it is stretching you beyond your ability to handle it gracefully.

That's okay. God's allowing it for a much better purpose. God is allowing it because he wants to accomplish more in your life than if he gave you what you want. Remember, God often uses our pain to sanctify us and grow us.

Thank God for that. And trust God in that. Number six, the last reflection that we're going to give is, we need to also reflect upon resilience. We need to reflect upon what resilience actually means.

Endurance When You Reach the End of Your Rope

Here's the principle. Just because we have reached the end of our rope does not mean that we have reached the end of God's. The psalmist says in Psalm 88, one through three, Oh Lord, the God of my salvation, I have cried out by day and in the night before you, let my prayer come before you incline your ear to my cry.

For my soul has had enough of trouble and my life is drawn near to shield. The psalmist is saying I've had enough. I'm ready to tap out, God. Wish everybody's had that moment, right? We've all had a moment where we thought we've reached our breaking point.

Where all of us, we've went so far, maybe some have gone further than others, but there comes a point when everyone breaks and everyone taps out and everyone gives up. We see this in sports when the body breaks down and the athlete just can't go anymore.

We see this in mental health when one too many tragedies, one right after the another eventually causes pretty stable and normal people to have full blown panic attacks. We all reach a breaking point.

But what we do not see in scripture is when we reach that breaking point that God is somehow obligated to relieve us. We don't see that. Scripture says, actually, God is faithful and he will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you were able.

That's the closest verse you've got if you think that when I tap out, when I'm done, when I throw in the towel, then God has to do something for me. Then God has to respond. If you have that expectation, you're going to be frustrated in your relationship with God because God often doesn't do that.

The passage doesn't say what you think it says. It doesn't say God will never give you more than you can handle. It doesn't say that. Instead, it simply promises you that God will be with you and that he will aid you and that he is faithful in helping you defeat your temptations when they come.

But that is not at all the same thing is that God will never give you more than you can handle. There are going to be times in your life when God gives you more than you think you can handle. I don't know about you, but every day that I serve as a pastor, I have more on me than I think I can handle in my flesh or ability.

Praise God for that because I shouldn't be serving in my flesh or my ability. My life, and I'm assuming yours is the same way, is one event after another where I have to depend upon God because the task is too big for me.

And that's consistent all throughout the scriptures of how God interacts with his people. He doesn't allow them to have a comfortable, squishy road. Actually, he causes them to walk in the valley of the shadow of death.

As far as I can tell from scripture, God never allows you and I to define what we think we can handle. If that were the case, then we would never grow because we're pain averse and avoidant people. If we got to decide whenever we could throw out the stress card, if we got to decide whenever we could say no to something that, oh, we can't handle that, we can't face that, we would become fat, sick, spiritually lazy, weak and miserable creatures with no strength, no grit and no backbone because we'd never face anything.

We would opt out of everything. Praise God that he forces us into pain. Thank the Lord that he doesn't accept our excuses. Glory be to God that he doesn't allow us to walk through pleasures every day, but he causes us to go through the deepest aches and to pant like a deer through the most expansive wildernesses because we wouldn't go there on our own.

And as a result, we would not become the kind of people that he wants us to become. Again, our opinion on how much we can handle is irrelevant. Our opinion on how much and on how near or on how far God feels to us is not God's primary concern for your life.