Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23

by Dallas Willard

When you compare the three main sources of temptation—desires of the flesh, desires of our eyes, and the pride of life—with the things we fear, you will find that nearly all our fears are grounded in our desires.

Depending upon our circumstances, we are frightened that our needs for physical things will not be met. But truth be told, most of us would rather die of starvation than look bad. And we are also afraid of what other people will do to us—that they will either hurt us physically or hurt us in other ways,

if we are to experience a life without lack as we go out into the world every day, we must, by the grace of God, deal with these fears—or we will be in bondage to Satan.

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.

Deciding to fill our minds with God is how we keep our hearts.

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.

All good ideas—true ideas—that have been in the stream of human history for a while become perverted.

mission or missions that have been set afoot begin a subtle divergence from the vision that gripped the founder, and before too long the institution and its mission has become the vision.

someone in control of ideas is pursuing this result. And it happens—surprise, surprise!—primarily through the desire to look good and the desire to be wise.

at our belief in God’s goodness and power, that God will supply all our needs, and that we can trust God to be sufficient in all ways. When our minds are on God, and our thoughts are formed by our knowledge of God, such sufficiency will flow to us. Thus Satan’s main task is to keep our minds elsewhere, anywhere but on God.

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

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.

We have now come to the important matter of how we embrace God, who is the holy center and wellspring of a life under the Shepherd’s care.

When faith, death to self, and love are alive in you, you will find that hope and joy pervade your entire life as a natural result. Each one is a gift from God, and our privilege and calling is to become the kind of people who can receive these gifts

Faith—trust—is the key that unlocks our readiness to receive God’s sufficiency in our lives.

When we have faith, that is sure evidence that the word of the unseen God is active in us.

The nature of faith involves love and the desire for good. When the father begged Jesus to heal his son, that was faith—love and desire—in action. When with tears he cried out, “Lord, I believe,” he did believe. He had just enough faith to make a fool of himself by coming there in the first place.

With a great deal of desperation and tears he cried out, “I believe. Help my unbelief.” And Jesus did help, by healing his boy. The cup of the man’s faith only had a few drops in it, but you can be sure he left with a whole lot more. All things are possible to him who believes.

If you have enough faith to speak it, then you may have enough faith to do it. That’s why praise is so important. Praise the Lord in every situation; speak it out even if it is a struggle because things are so bad.

Try to think of even one thing you can say. And if you try, God will meet you where you are.

You are primarily a mind with a will in a body, and that will is the center of your being. So if you will remember the cry of this desperate father, and follow his example in words and action, you will know the all-sufficient love and power of God.

faith is simply reliance upon something in both attitude and action.

We need to love in attitude as well as in action. The person who only acts in a loving way, but does not actually love, is deficient in character.

Now faith has two main parts: one is vision and one is desire, or will. Vision is seeing reality as it is, or in the case of the future, as it could be for us. Desire is wanting reality to be as it is, or as we hope it could be.

Sometimes we speak of someone being “under conviction.” When this happens, it means that a person has a vision of how things could be different, but is resisting it. She sees that she should change something in her life; that is her vision. At the same time, she lacks the desire for her life to be different than it is. She desires—wills—something other than what she sees would be best, and thereby lives in denial of her vision.

The vision or perception of reality upon which we base our faith may often come to us by means of a spoken or written word.

It is important to recognize that Job maintained his faith throughout his excruciatingly difficult trials, yet that faith was transformed.

He began with what we may call the faith of propriety, moved through the faith of desperation, and finally arrived at the faith of sufficiency—the faith that says, regardless of what happens, “It doesn’t matter. I have God, and that is all I need.”

I am not saying that there is something wrong with you if you are not at the third stage yet.

faith is a gift from God, and we need to understand both its nature and how God transforms it.

a man of the faith of propriety. Yet, while it is genuine, this kind of faith is essentially superstitious and relies heavily on ritual, for it believes that it must get everything just right to reap the benefits. It involves a vision of God that has him up in heaven looking down to see if you are going to make any mistakes.

Pharisees have the faith of propriety, believing that if you get it just right, all will go well. So, like Job rising early every morning to offer burnt offerings on behalf of his sons, the faith of propriety is intent on living life, as we say, “religiously.” Job got out there and did it just right, and the Lord was pleased with that and blessed him for it. God will bless that kind of faith because God likes to bless people.

Then, at the end of his inconsolable groaning, we see it: “The thing I greatly feared has come upon me, and what I dreaded has happened to me” (v. 25). What was it that Job dreaded and feared? Just this: that God was going to take down the hedge of protection. That God would take away his blessings.

His faith, as sincere and genuine and good as it was, was mixed with great fear. Why? Because he was trusting in his own propriety rather than trusting in God.

They went through a painful process and came to understand how the blessing of God goes well beyond failure, disappointment, and tragedy.

God knew Job had faith, and it was now maturing from the faith of propriety to the faith of desperation. Like the faith of propriety, the faith of desperation is a wonderful thing.

they say with Job, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).

Desperate faith is all about trusting God when the shaking begins and everything crumbles around you.

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.

when you have nowhere else to turn except to God, and you turn to him, your faith of desperation will meet the fullness of God, and you will taste the life without lack as you discover the depths of the faith of sufficiency.

God, in fact, led Job into his troubles. Does that bother you to read? If so, remember that Jesus teaches us to pray that God would not “lead us into temptation” (Matt. 6:13). Jesus is not talking about temptation to sin. God will not do that.* We are to pray that God would not put us to the test and that he would deliver us from bad things.

If you want to talk to God and you pursue that desire, God will grant you that talk. He will decide when it’s appropriate and under what circumstances, and if you persist, you will see God.

We must live through things like Job did, and become desperate as Job was. What made the difference for Job was that he hung in there and his faith of desperation carried him to the point where God showed up and Job could say, “I’ve heard about you, but now I’ve seen you.”

His vision of God was now so great that he realized what had happened to him didn’t matter. That is the deep faith of sufficiency.

How did he repent? He stopped pressing his case with God. He stopped trying to get God to make everything right.

Job saw the greatness of God, and in that vision he was able to rest in the all-sufficiency of Yahweh.

When we look at what Christ did for us on the cross and keep that at the center of our vision, there are not many things that will bother us, or even matter at all.

Such experiences are for everyone. God will reveal himself to you.

You should not try to do this in your own power. Seek the Lord and wait for him to show up. Set time aside to devote yourself to prayer and other spiritual disciplines that will strengthen your faith and prepare you to receive from him. Listen for God when you pray. Watch for him and wait on him throughout the day. If the Lord does not show up when and how you think he should, you must not be upset with him or with yourself. Just keep seeking.

When we begin to seek the Lord, some things must change—some outside of us and some inside of us—before we can bear the vision of God. These changes can take time, and God, in his mercy, gives them time.