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August 31 - October 27, 2020
with Jesus had convinced him that the Twenty-Third Psalm was not merely a pretty poem with charming sentiments but an accurate description of the kind of life that is available to anyone who will allow God to be their Shepherd.
he placed particular emphasis upon our choices and habits and practices, on how we live our daily lives, and above all, on what we do with our minds.
One of our greatest needs today is for people to really see and really believe the things they already profess to see and believe. Knowing about things—knowing what they are, being able to identify them and say them—does not mean we actually believe them. When we truly believe what we profess, we are set to act as if it were true. Acting as if things are true means, in turn, that we live as if they were so.
Memorizing Scripture is even more important than a daily quiet time, for as we fill our minds with great passages and have them readily available for our meditation, “quiet time” takes over the entirety of our lives.
It is worth noting that the only definition of eternal life found in Scripture is John 17:3: “And this is eternal life, that they might know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”
The body is important, but the mind is all-important. And the most important thing about your mind is what it is fixed upon.
The ultimate freedom we have as individuals is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon and think about. By think we mean all the ways in which we are aware of things, including our memories, perceptions, and beliefs. The focus of your thoughts significantly affects everything else that happens in your life and evokes the feelings that frame your world and motivate your actions.*
Living a life without lack involves recognizing the idea systems that govern the present age and its respective cultures—as well as those that constitute life away from God—and replacing them with the idea system that was embodied and taught by Jesus Christ.
There is so much more to our relationship with God than just his dealing with our guilt and sin. Once we have been forgiven, we are meant to live in the fullness of the life that Jesus came to give us (John 10:10).
have allowed God to remain an impersonal, distant mystery. Our own minds are often darkened, blind to the truth. We have no graspable conception of God—no realistic idea of what God is actually like.
We grow in our knowledge of God in the same way. We bring the reality of God into our lives by making contact with him through our minds, and our actions are based on the understanding that results from the fullness of that contact. There is nothing mysterious here. This is why the mind, and what we turn our minds to, is the key to our lives.
We can know important truths about God—his eternal power and divine nature—by paying attention to the things he has made. God has shown these things to all of us.
God is not worried that he is going to run out of something. God is beyond rich. He is overflowing with everything that is good and everything we need. He has so much that he will never run out of any of it. It is so very important to remember this when we are fretting over a perceived need. In such a time we may be tempted to think that maybe, just maybe, God is as stingy and small as we are. He is not. God loves to give. God loves to forgive. God loves to just gush forth with his goodness (John 4:14). Nothing so delights him as giving to anyone and everyone who will receive. “For God so
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your primary contact with God is through your mind, and what you do with your mind is the most important choice you have to make. Wherever your mind goes, the rest of your life goes with it. When your mind loses its integrity–through disease, damage, or sin–your actions follow, becoming chaotic and disconnected.1 They don’t make the right kinds of connections with reality.
You, then, are the best clue to the nature of God, understanding that while your powers and being are limited and dependent, God’s are not. Everything that exists outside of God exists because of God.
Rather it is dealing with any way of using God’s real name, Yahweh, that is not in accord with God’s real nature. Remember, God’s name is a reflection of his nature, and the most common way of using it “in vain” is to degrade God to the level of a created being. This is what you have in an idol.
There is absolutely nothing that God lacks. We must understand this, because the overflowing sufficiency that we will experience when Yahweh is our Shepherd lies in the all-sufficiency of the Shepherd himself. If we do not understand the all-sufficiency of the Shepherd, we will never experience that sufficiency in relationship to him. What we need, God has—in infinite supply.
If you will take the time required to come to know and trust God as he is, asking the Lord to give light to your mind, you can come to a place of perfect peace and fearlessness. Because God is with you, you can live without fear. This is precisely what the Shepherd Psalm is talking about.
There are so very many things to frighten us. What is the answer to all our fears? Love. The love that comes out of plenitude—out of the fullness of God’s sufficiency. We read in 1 John 4:18 that “there is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear.”
Even severe fears can be faced when we are confident in the strength and generosity of God—and in the fact that his kingdom isn’t shaken, and he is not undone by these things.
But, if you weigh all the pain and the suffering against all the joy and the strength you find in human life, it is still good.
find it curious that we often speak about people thinking too highly of themselves. I don’t think that I have ever met a person who thought highly enough of himself. One bit of fallen wisdom claims that we can help people by “keeping them humble,” which often means humiliating them. If you watch what happens, you learn that humiliating someone is a sure way not to make him humble, in the same way that you cannot make people lovable by hating them, or kind by being cruel to them.
Once we understand the greatness of the human soul, we can embrace God’s love for us in the giving of his Son. As the apostle Paul put it, “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners”—that is, while we were still in rebellion against God—“Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). People are valuable even if they’re doing nothing; we do not have to earn our value. Nevertheless, God put us here to make a difference. Jesus confirmed this with these words, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:16).
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God created us very like himself (in his image), but every one of us is unique. An original, not a copy. We each are made to assume the role of a particular child of God, and our uniqueness ties in with our unique purpose. God has ensured us a special place and purpose, giving us tasks that he specifically wants us to accomplish in our time and in our place. To this end, God also intended that we should have the freedom to love and serve him—the independent power by which we can choose to give ourselves to him, even, as I have said, to the point of death.
Your work is the total amount of lasting good that you will accomplish in your lifetime. That might include your job, but for many of us, our families will be the largest part of the lasting good we produce.
Here is a truth you must never forget: God is more interested in your life than he is in any of the other things listed above. He’s more interested in the person you are becoming than in your work, or your ministry, or your job. And the surest way to realize the full potential of your God-designed self is to live in eternity while you are in time, conscious of the loving gaze of your all-sufficient Shepherd, in whose care nothing of the good you do is lost. It is stored up in your own self and in the lives of others you have touched.
Even among those of us who have experienced the grace of God, it is rare to find any man and woman who are bound together in marriage who are truly trustful in every respect, and confident, pleased, and satisfied with each other. Rather, there is a constant testing that goes on, and it is a very serious problem.
I just mentioned hover over most relationships, and people are so busy protecting themselves that they cannot love each other.
Do you know where the devil is now? He’s in heaven, engaged in warfare right now. The Bible speaks of three heavens: the heaven of the air around us, the heaven of the angels, and then the heaven of heavens, the place where God himself dwells.1 According to Paul, Satan’s realm is that first heaven where he is “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). John also called him “the prince of this world.”*
This “world” is marked by three spiritual dynamics that John identifies as “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16). We often associate the word lust primarily with sexual temptation, and that certainly is a powerful one. But there are many other kinds of lust, so a better word is probably desire—wanting something that appears to be good for some purpose or pleasure.
Notice there are three things about the tree that caught Eve’s attention. It was (1) good for food, (2) pleasant to the eyes, and (3) desirable to make one wise. Look how these line up precisely with John’s three characteristics of “the world”:
When God looks at human wickedness, he is not looking exclusively at our actions, but at our minds and hearts, our thoughts and intentions.* God looks on the heart for two reasons: (1) our heart is the source of our actions and life,** but more important here, (2) our thoughts are where Satan plies his trade.*** He governs through images, through ideas, through feelings and fears. From this complex arena of our minds and hearts come most of our actions, so this is the arena where Satan focuses his work.
As Solomon warns us to “keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life” (Prov. 4:23), our first concern must be for our hearts. The heart is our point of contact with God’s unlimited capacity to protect and provide, which flows to those who choose to keep their minds fixed on him.
When we get up out of bed in the morning, among our first thoughts should be this: Lord, speak to me. I’m listening. I want to hear your voice. This is not because it’s a nice way to start the day, but because the only thing that can keep us straight is being full of God and full of his Word. If you don’t do something like this, you do not have the option of having a neutral mind. Your thoughts cannot be empty. As the old saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum. If you are not entertaining God’s truth, you will be entertaining Satan’s lies. This is what happened to each one living in the days of
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There is no indication anywhere in the Scriptures that Jesus was afraid to suffer and die. He was not trying to avoid the cross. He was overcoming Satan. Once this was accomplished and the way to the cross was clear, Jesus was as serene as anyone you can imagine.
When looking good takes precedence over knowing the good, Satan wins the battle, if not the war.
It is, indeed, a battle of hearts and minds, and you cannot overcome the citadel of false beliefs and images and feelings—the very things that rob us of knowing the life without lack—except by the power of God. This power comes to those who have been trained to keep their minds on God—in Paul’s words, “bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). This involves coming to think about God as Jesus thought about him, and to trust God as Jesus trusted him—moving from having faith in Jesus to having the faith of Jesus. To do so is to know the life without lack.
three things that must be working within us before we can truly experience the sufficiency of God: faith, death to self, and agape love.
A great part of faith lies in the intensity with which we want something, and the father’s tears expressed his deepest heart.
The person who only acts in a loving way, but does not actually love, is deficient in character. He needs to get the love into his heart, into the very fibers of his being. From Jesus’ perspective, the person who merely acts righteously falls into the category of being pharisaical or legalistically righteous. The righteousness of the kingdom of God, however, is righteousness of the heart (Mark 7:6). It is an attitude,
There is a family of words in the New Testament that are variously translated as belief, faith, and hope, and what they all have in common is the notion of reliance, confidence, and trust. It is trust that puts you in contact with God so you can draw upon his unlimited and inexhaustible resources. Unfortunately, many folks have their faith lined up in such a way that they do not need to rely on God. They do not need to trust God. They have a proper faith in terms of what they need to believe to go to heaven when they die, but they hope that God is never going to put them in a position of
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Often God allows us to reach the point of desperation so we can learn how to trust. It is a hard lesson, but an essential one. The life without lack is known by those who have learned how to trust God in the moment of their need. In the moment of need. Not before the moment of need, not after the moment of need when the storm has passed, but in the moment of need. For it is in that moment, when everything else is gone, that you know the reality of God.
We must beware of pretense. It is crucial that we do what we can to avoid acting as if everything is fine, when in fact we are suffering. Faith and complaining are not mutually exclusive. Even if you have strong faith, you may still complain to God. While Job never cursed God or accused him falsely, he did complain.
For faith to serve as a channel of God’s provision to our needs, two more conditions are necessary: the first has to do with our relationship to ourselves, and the second with our relationship to others.
The problem with the flesh lies in its weakness and lostness when uncoupled from God’s Spirit, which is precisely the condition of humanity apart from Christ. To live in the flesh, to live with uncrucified affections and desires, is simply a matter of putting them in the ultimate position in our lives. Whatever we want becomes the most important thing. This is what happens when we are living apart from God; we make our desires
Desire is a fine thing, and it is one of the things that keeps us alive, but desires are terrible masters.
The desire embedded in both anger and sexual lust is not at all concerned with the good of the object, but only with its own satisfaction.
An individual can have only a very small amount of faith until he has come to a very clear resolution of the place of his desires, his glory, or his power to dominate. Until these are settled, he is not going to have much faith.
Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting things or with having things, but we should attempt to receive whatever God wishes to give us so we might use it to his glory.2
It is not uncommon for people to hear this message and think, The Christian life is going to be a long, dry haul. So much for a life without lack! Not at all. The reality is that the long, dry haul is when you are trying to manage your life by always getting what you want. This is what Jesus was teaching when he said, “If you try to save your life, you’ll lose it” (Luke 17:33 PAR). Why will you lose it? Because you will miss out on the provision of God.
