Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23

by Dallas Willard

Next to the reality of God, which is the substance and source of a life without lack, there is nothing more important to the experience of that life than keeping our minds on God as much as possible. Dallas believed it was possible to keep our minds constantly on God and that this was the heart and soul of spiritual formation in the kingdom of God. This is a book about why this is so, and about how it can be so for us. Larry

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.

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. Memorizing this beautiful psalm will strengthen your concentration on the Good Shepherd by eliminating the distraction of trying to remember the words as you meditate. So, if you have not already done so, please make sure you have the Twenty-Third Psalm memorized.

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. The Lord is my shepherd. And what follows from that?

He restores my soul. The broken depths of my soul are healed and reintegrated in a life in union with God: the eternal kind of life.

For You are with me. The central truth of this book is that the complete sufficiency of the life without lack is based upon the presence of God, and he is most clearly and fully present to us in Jesus Christ, Immanuel, God with us.3

I believe that one of the reasons we resist fully surrendering our lives to God is the fear that he might allow desolation in our lives. This book will help if you are struggling with doubts about the plentiful provisions of God in circumstances that are anything but abundant. A life without lack is a life in which one is completely satisfied and sustained, no matter what happens. No matter what happens!

It’s not merely a matter of gritting your teeth and hanging on. It is a matter of real provisions directly from God to you.

The experience of a life without lack depends first and foremost upon the presence of God in our lives, because the source of this life is God himself.

In his goodness, God has arranged things so we are able to use our minds to understand and enter his glorious and plentiful kingdom.

I am going to rely on this truth as we wrestle with matters that require serious thought. I am not asking that you believe them just because I have written them; I want you to think about t...

Belief will come as you experience the tr...

We must come to an awareness in our own minds concerning the nature of God. That is, we must think about God in ways that match what God is like. Without harmony between our ideas about God and his true character, we will never be able to make the kind of contact with God that will give us confidence, ground...

we will focus on the most important thing about you: your mind.1 Not your brain, but your mind. You are, more than anything else, a mind.

And the most important thing about your mind is what it is fixed upon.

1 Chronicles 22:19 (NRSV), “Now set your mind and heart to seek the LORD your God.” The mind, thought about in this way, is the most significant aspect of our lives because it is through our minds that we make effective contact with reality.*

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.*

Thoughts are where we make our first movements toward God and where the divine Spirit begins to direct our will to God and his way. 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.

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.

These evil systems have been used to dominate humanity through fear and self-obsession, so that the uppermost thing filling our minds is likely to be our selves.

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).

It is a sad but true fact that many of our “rulers in Israel” today—those who have taken on the duties and responsibilities of teaching, preaching, and manifesting the Word of God—have a diminished concept of the nature of God. Their knowledge of God and his nature does not carry the weight of experience. Consequently, when they are faced with the need to help others live as those who “will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:17), they have no more experience of God and his kingdom than Nicodemus and simply have nothing helpful to offer. For all practical purposes, God might as well not exist.

I interact with all the sources of power in the universe through my mind.

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.

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.** A joyous God fills the universe. Joy is the ultimate word describing God and his world. Creation was an act of joy, of delight in the goodness of what was done. It is precisely because God is like this, and because we can know that he is like this, that a life of full contentment is possible.

Fasting is feasting upon God. This is how Jesus was able to fast for forty days and not die. This is something you only learn by experience, and he wanted us to fast with that expectation. The availability of this energy is the absolute source of absolute sufficiency.

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.

It is important to embrace that God’s moral absolutes as loving, beneficent, and generous flow out of the plenitude of his being.

Now please do not lose sight of the purpose of this book. I am pleading with you here to take upon yourself the task of making these realities about God a part of your mind, to understand that God is a certain kind of being; that he existed before the creation of the earth in all his plenitude. God is not now sitting off in some distant corner of the universe like a neglected senior citizen in the cosmos, waiting to see if someone will pay any attention to him. He is surrounded by unlimited glorious beings that he made, who worship him and praise him.

You see, the greatest thing you and I can imagine is the fellowship of other loving persons, to love and to be loved, to know, to enjoy, to be with, to adventure, to create. That’s what has been going on in heaven forever. There is an everlasting, eternal party that we cannot even begin to imagine. But God has begun to show it to us.

Recall the first words of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father who art in heaven” (Matt. 6:9 ASV). Next comes the first request: “Hallowed be thy name.” What are you praying for when you pray for that? You’re praying that God would be known for who he is. That his name would be cherished and loved. Why? Because once you begin to have an impression of who God truly is, everything else fades into insignificance. When the bountiful sufficiency of God in himself and the glorious realm of his kingdom are continually brought before the mind, it puts everything else in its proper place and opens us to a life in which we find God more than capable of supplying everything we need.

What kind of man is this? One who has had many lessons, in many different circumstances, that taught him the deep truths of sufficiency.

What did David and Paul share that gave them both this confidence? They both knew Jesus, who proclaimed, “I am the good shepherd” (John 10:11). David speaks of being strengthened by the Shepherd’s rod and staff; Paul speaks of being strengthened by Christ. It’s the same experience. And Paul was convinced that it was an experience that everyone can know. Out of that conviction he could promise the Philippians: “My God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus” (4:19). Notice Paul’s statement of how God will supply their need—in conformity with his riches in glory in Christ Jesus. God’s glory is where his riches are found.

In other words, the wine was a glimpse into the reality that Jesus was from another place—a beautiful place that shines with glorious splendor—the very presence of God.

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 loved the world that He gave . . .” (John 3:16).

As I have said, the secret to a life without lack is rooted in our knowledge of God. When that knowledge is absent from our minds, everything goes to pieces. Because of that fundamental fact, let me emphasize again the truth we began to look at in the last chapter: 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 might even die. Your mind loses contact with the right things, and your body follows.

Our minds are in the wrong place and they are contacting the wrong things. What we place our minds on brings that reality into our lives. If we place our minds on God, the reality of God comes into our lives. That is why there must be preachers and teachers, because until our minds are informed by the right view of God, we cannot put our minds on God in the right way. The problem is so severe that when Jesus came he essentially said to people, “Forget everything you think you know about God, and I’m going to tell you what he is really like.”*

The single most important thing to remember about God is his total unlikeness in his being from anything that we can see.

The great contrast that runs through the entire Bible is the difference between the visible and the invisible.

Being made in God’s image means, among other things, that you also are an eternal being and you can create. But, unlike God, you are not self-subsistent; you are dependent upon God for your being.

While you know that you are visible to others, you also know that part of you is invisible. It is in your thoughts and feelings (your mind) and, above all, in your ability to choose (your will). You can direct your actions, make plans, and carry them out—this is a function of the invisible part of you.

Another word the Old Testament uses for idols is vanity or vanities.* This is because idols are vain, empty, worthless things—things that have no spiritual reality or power.

God’s name is an expression of his nature, and from everything we can glean from Jesus’ entire life—his teachings, his healing ministry, how he treated people, and how he prayed—the only conclusion we can draw is that God is a being who is perfectly glorious and perfectly safe. This is what God’s name means and why it is “exalted above all blessing and praise” (Neh. 9:5).

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.

To take the name of God in vain, then, is simply to speak or think or imagine God as being less than he actually is.

God is the kind of being who, if you will place yourself in his hands, in trust, will ensure that nothing can ever happen to you that will make you say, “I’m afraid” or “I don’t have enough.”

Let me say it again: no matter what you fear, you can live without that fear.

Because God is with you, you can live without fear. This is precisely what the Shepherd Psalm is talking about.

If you are frightened or afraid, there is no use feeling guilty about it. What you need to do is fix your mind upon God and ask him to fill your mind with himself. And as your mind is transformed, your whole personality will be transformed, including your body and your feelings. The transformation of the self away from a life of fear and insufficiency takes place as we fix our minds upon God as he truly is.

Paul is not primarily giving instructions on how Christians should live, but describing what God is like. First and foremost, these words describe God’s love, a love that is the fruit of God’s absolute self-sufficiency. The key to loving like this is to be “filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19). God can love like this because of who he is, and if we are to love like this we need to be fully immersed in who he is.