Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23

by Dallas Willard

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. The Lord is my shepherd. And what follows from that? I shall not want.

He makes me to lie down in green pastures. What kind of a sheep lies down in a green pasture? A sheep that has eaten its fill.

He leads me beside the still waters. A sheep that is being led beside still water is a sheep that is not thirsty.

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.

He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. The effect of the restoration of my soul is that I walk in paths of righteousness on his behalf

For You are with me. The central truth of this book

life without lack is based upon the presence of God,

the rod and staff represent the Shepherd’s strength and protective care.

He is not only interested in my having something wonderful to eat, but also in blessing me with a life that is full and free and powerful in him—including

“My cup runs over.” I have more than my cup will hold. So much that I can be as generous as my Shepherd without fear of ever running out.

A life without lack is a life in which one is completely satisfied and sustained, no matter what happens.

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.

Jesus replied, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4 NRSV). What is the difference between the bread and the word that comes from the mouth of God? Simply put, one of them is matter and the other is energy. We must understand this: God is energy in a form that is so incomprehensible to us because it is so great!

when you think clearly and carefully about the things that are created, you are led directly to God, a glorious, self-sustaining, eternal being. Everything else in this universe is created and is perishing.

This points to a being who is both the source of everything else that exists and is totally self-sufficient.*

Faith that interacts with God draws directly from God and the power that is in the word of God. When we make contact with God a flow of energy comes to us. That energy is directly the source from which Jesus worked, and we can know it by our experience.

Jesus understood that when we fast before God we are nourished directly by the word of God, whether spoken or written. 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.

When God created us in his image, he created us with the power to act and to create.

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

Wrong ideas about God make it impossible for us to function in relationship to one another. We are not able to love one another because we do not have our minds filled with an accurate vision of God.

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). Take a moment right now and think of the most wonderful thing you could say about anyone. Consider what characteristics someone might have that would deserve your highest blessing and praise. Whatever you thought of, God’s true blessedness is far above that. God’s glory and power and goodness are deserving of infinitely more praise.

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. And like Israel, we, too, require a long, steady education in this direction. Those who take time to increasingly come to know and trust God as he truly is, are laying the sure foundation of a life without lack.

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.

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.

Jesus is the first person who ever fully lived Psalm 23:1—“The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.” His union with his Father was such that he never knew lack or fear. The Father was Jesus’ Shepherd, just as Jesus is ours.

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).

It is important to realize that God’s power is meant to be at the disposal of human beings. This is what we see in the life and ministry of Jesus, and a good deal of his training of the disciples was intended to show how this is done.

innumerable company of angels,

general assembly and church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven,

spirits of just men mad...

there is a life in which there is no lack. Jesus is the example that proves this claim to be true.

If, by faith, you can now declare, “I have no lack,” you will increasingly experience the Shepherd’s sufficiency in your life.

in these first two chapters we have been talking about getting new minds. Minds that are “on God.”

This is the key to a life without lack, that we would have the mind of Christ—our Shepherd, who knew firsthand the complete and perfect sufficiency of our magnificent God.

One of the hardest things for us to do—and this is true even for Christians—is to keep this preciousness and wonder in our minds as we approach every human being we deal with.

She put out her hand to a man, and just as he was going to take it, her hand turned into a cactus. All too often we are like that, prickly to one another, guarding against one another, so much that even a little child can be perceived as a great threat and danger to us.

Here is my point: just as we have a tremendously difficult time conceiving of or imagining what God is like, so we have a tremendously difficult time imagining what people are really like.

What is it that makes human beings so precious? It is this: they are capable of being faithful to God and committed to the promotion of good in the world. They are capable of giving their lives for these things,

Once we understand the greatness of the human soul, we can embrace God’s love for us in the giving of his Son.

The greatest challenge to creating good and living as God has appointed us to live lies primarily within our most intimate personal relationships.

This is very difficult to talk about because this is the primary area of human failure.

The effect of the rupture that sin created in the relationship between the man and the woman is this: mistrust, anger, and disappointment became the standard quality of human life.

people are so busy protecting themselves that they cannot love each other. That violation then spreads down to their children, who also struggle with attacks and withdrawals, doubts and questions that are always there.

The apostle Paul believed that the grace of God, as it came in Jesus Christ, was sufficient to heal the relationship between men and women. Yet it was still necessary for him to teach about it; the healing does not happen automatically without effort on both parts.

the human desire to look good in other people’s eyes, to be well thought of. We all know the tug.

wanting to look good to others is also a form of the desire of the eyes.

The pull can be nearly irresistible. As you admire some wonderful thing, Satan comes along to provide you with an armload of reasonable explanations of why you are justified in having it, and how it would be quite all right after all, moral qualms aside.

There is nothing wrong in itself with looking good. Jesus said, “Consider the lilies of the field,

Likewise, there is nothing wrong with eating, but if you are living to eat, then your god is your belly.

At times we need to guide others, to direct them, or to tell them what to do. We may even need to lean on them a little bit to do something. That’s all right if it isn’t our egos trying to manipulate them for our own purposes.