Objection: God ALLOWS Sickness, But Never More Than He Gives You Grace to Endure

This objection can vary slightly, but it all comes down to the idea that God allows sickness to come your way, but He lovingly gives you grace to endure it.  People try to cheer up the sick, in person and through ignorant literature, by assuring them, “God never gives (or allows) more than He knows you can handle with His help.”

One would think from this argument that God is a master torturer who will take you to the limit of your ability to endure things without killing you.  That is certainly NOT the character of God in the Bible.  It is not a picture of Jesus, who said that if you’ve seen Him, you’ve seen the Father (John 14:9).  Jesus emphatically did NOT visit multitudes of sick people and bless them with the “grace to endure” their afflictions.  He REMOVED their afflictions!  If God was lovingly “allowing” these sicknesses and granting the grace to deal with them, Jesus should have said, “If you have seen Me, you have seen someone nicer than the Father.  The Father was willing to ALLOW you to suffer this illness, but I’m not.”  How crazy is that?

Abundant life does not consist of God seeing how much misery you can take.  The devil, not God, is the one out to make people miserable.  It is hard to see how any sane person could describe wasting away in a hospice facility, in unspeakable distress, as abundant life.

What about the millions of people who have died HORRIBLE, PAINFUL deaths from illnesses?  Where was the “grace” to deal with them?  Have you ever ministered in a nursing home where there are seriously ill people?  I have.  You will encounter various previously normal, nice people who SCREAM all the time.  They’re MISERABLE.  Where is the “grace” to endure their conditions?

The “grace” in Scripture is the free offer of healing for conditions, not the ability to endure horrific conditions.  Unfortunately, those who agree with this objection buy into a lie that saps their faith for real relief.  Rather than look to the Lord for healing, they look to Him for grace to endure their illness, because that is what this teaching trained them to do.  If that’s the extent of your faith, you’ll never enjoy the blessing of divine healing that Jesus paid for.  I, for one, would NEVER allow someone to “minister” to me in a hospital by praying for me to tap into the “grace” to endure an ailment.  If you’re wise, you won’t allow it either.  You’ll obey James 5:14-15 instead!  The elders will pray the prayer of faith to RAISE YOU UP, not give you GRACE TO ENDURE the condition and leave you sick!

“Yes, but Paul wanted to be free from discomfort, and God told him that His grace was sufficient for him.  So God’s answer to us sometimes is that His grace is sufficient for us rather than that He will heal us.”  This variant of the objection in this topic is covered in the section about Paul’s Thorn, where it is proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Paul did NOT have a sickness that God wouldn’t heal (but supposedly told him instead that His grace was sufficient to endure the sickness).