Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23

by Dallas Willard

Memorization is an essential element of a life without lack. It is a primary way we fill our minds with the Word of God and have our thoughts formed by God’s thoughts. 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. Memorization enables us to keep God and his truth constantly before our minds, allowing his Word and wisdom to help us.

The Lord is my shepherd. In other words, I’m in the care of someone else. I’m not the one in charge. I’ve taken my kingdom and surrendered it to the kingdom of God. I am living the with-God life.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. A life without lack is one that carries no fear of evil. Our confidence in God soars far above wants and fears. Would you like to have a life without fear, a life of soaring faith? It seems like Jesus was constantly saying to his friends, “Fear not! Fear not!” Imagine what that would be like. No fear of life, aging or death, disease or hunger, no fear of any person or creature, not even the loss of all your possessions. You can live without fear even in the midst of a world dominated by fear.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever. This is a description of the eternal life available to us now in the kingdom of the heavens; the abundant with-God life that comes from following the Shepherd, where we dwell and abide with God in the fullness of his life—a life in which all the promises of Christ’s gospel are realized. Because of this we have no reason to be anxious (Phil. 4:6–7); the world is a perfectly safe place for us to be.

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.”

You are, more than anything else, a mind. That is what makes you precious in a special way. Categorizing people and treating them in specific ways just because of their bodily features violates the central worth of the person as a mind.

We have the ability and responsibility to keep God present in our minds, and those who do so will make steady progress toward him, for he will respond by making himself known to us.

The gospel that Jesus himself proclaimed, manifested, and taught was about more than his death for the forgiveness of our sins, as important as that is. It was about the kingdom of God—God’s immediate availability, his “with-us-ness” that makes a life without lack possible. 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).

keep in mind two fundamentally important things we have covered so far: • God is an invisible being who has great power and dominion over everything he created.* • God is personal. He has personality. He thinks. He wills. He feels. He values.**

Often when you hear people talking about God creating the world they say that God created it “out of nothing.” That is actually not what the Bible teaches. The biblical doctrine is that all creation came “out of” the person of God himself, that he spoke and created matter.* God speaking is a form of energy that became matter. While it is true that there was no preexisting matter involved in creation, there was energy. And matter is energy in a certain form.

As C. S. Lewis said, “In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.”

God’s essential nature can be characterized in this way: God is an immaterial, intelligent, and free personal being, of perfect goodness, wisdom and power, who made the universe and continues to sustain it, as well as to govern and direct it in his providence.3