Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23

by Dallas Willard

We have this promise from Jesus: “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him” (John 14:23). Jesus means that he and the Father will be moving through and about us in our lives. He will speak to us. He ...

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.

David seems to have been blessed with that kind of faith. He trusted God deeply, even though he did not receive everything he asked God for. This shows up powerfully in the death of his child in 2 Samuel 12. He prayed for a week, lying prostrate on the ground, fasting and weeping. He really bent God’s ear. But when the child died, David arose, cleaned himself up, went to the tabernacle to worship God, and then had a meal.

Faith is a gift that is yours for the asking. Striving or pretending is not the way to faith.

When you have faith that you will have something you are hoping for, it is because God has created that confidence in your heart, and he is going to bring it to pass in partnership with you.

Where we do not believe something, we should not act as if we do. Acknowledge your doubts openly and honestly and wait until faith comes. Seek God and ask him to give you the gift of faith.

The positive aspect of “if it dies” is that it “produces much grain.” The death he chose was for the sins of the world. It was not just to lose life, but also to give life.

2). If we miss this truth and fail to incorporate it into our own experience, we will miss the route to life without lack.

The nature of the death-to-self experience is that, if we have had the kind of revelation of God that Job had, it happens naturally.

The human heart is very complex, and the fact that someone trusts God at one level does not mean they have fully surrendered their life to him.

The gospel is presented today with very little connection to the complete surrender of our lives to God. This leads to the real possibility that we will miss the central necessity of dying to self.

Simply stated, the flesh is merely the natural powers of the human being, based in the human body—our capabilities, wants, and desires as they are in themselves, unaided by divine assistance or guidance.

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.

The conflict between the flesh and the human spirit is the conflict between desire—what I want—and the will for what is best. It is, in fact, the conflict between desire and love, for love is always directed toward what is good,

Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:21–30). 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. In the case of anger, it is the desire to have the object suffer in some way.* In the case of sexual lust, it is the desire that the object provide sensual pleasure.

The basic nature of sin is to trust only oneself. When you turn from God, your will becomes blind and helpless before the hammerings of desire.

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.

As long as people are hung up on honor from other people—reputation, appearing well—they cannot truly believe and trust God.

Human desire is infinite by its nature; it cannot be satisfied. You must take your stand against it because you cannot satisfy it.

The cross means the acceptance of limitation on desire.

As Solomon wrote, “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing” (Eccl. 1:8). This is a fundamental truth that Satan twists and uses to trap people. Surely it is true of sexual desire, as its many perversions reveal.

But the object of desire may be comfort, possessions, talent, money, or reputation in a profession. If you watch people in the sports or entertainment industries, you will see a magnificent display of vanity. It is likewise in literature and in many of the arts. There is incredible vanity that can never be satisfied: an itch that simply cannot be sufficiently scratched.

Desire is infinite partly because we were made by God, made for God, made to need God, and made to run on God. We can be satisfied only by the one who is infinite, eternal, and able to supply all our needs; we are only at home in God.

God can make the condition of our own hearts known to us, and he can give us new hearts marked by the wisdom from above. The requirement on our part is to die to self.

What is wrong is when not getting what we want propels us into a state of bitterness, irritation, impatience, and anger,

The right thing would be simply releasing it all and saying, “All right. God knows. I’m living in his world. He can give me what he wants. I will not put these things in the place of God.”

A covetous person is an idolater precisely because he has put his desires, rather than God, in the ultimate place in his life. Right or wrong, there is no limit to what he will do to get what he wants.

If you wonder what qualifies as a “deceitful lust,” think about how addictions operate. Desire whispers in your ear: “Just once more. That’s all you need.” The corruption of human lives that has come from listening to that sinister voice is beyond telling.

Someone’s will gets crossed. That someone becomes angry, which is the normal “fleshly” response toward those who have interfered with our will.

people are caught in a system where what they want—and what they are willing to do to people who do not give them what they want—is the focal point of their lives.

When the self has been put to death—that is, when our wants have been placed in their proper relationship to God—it is not a matter of a mere “grin and bear it” existence. That is not what the Shepherd Psalm tells us. It speaks not of lack, but of abundance, of a cup overflowing with sufficiency

Jesus made it clear that to pursue these things in reliance upon ourselves is the surest way to lose our souls. It is more than we can possibly manage on our own; we end up compromising our health and our relationships, all that is truly good in life, and we find ourselves crushed rather than conquering.

Too often our “love” for family members is domination in disguise.

But death to self includes our desires about our husbands, our wives, our children, our parents—any whom we love. We must put those desires on the cross as well and take our hands off them.

we do not confuse their well-being with our own sense of self-worth.

We must put all our desires on the cross.

Crucifixion is an interesting thing. It is hard to do by yourself. In fact, it is impossible. You might be able to nail one hand to the cross, but what are you going to do when you get to the next hand? The crucifixion of the self is a cooperative affair between us and the Lord. We cannot die to self without the help of God’s grace,

Death to self means releasing all our desires, our reputation, our glory, and having our way with other people. Everything.

Our task is to understand what death to self is and to understand that we cannot live in the Shepherd Psalm—a life without lack in the kingdom of God—until we have accepted it, recognized it, and said, “Lord, give this gift to me.”

Christ was not crucified so that we wouldn’t have to be. He was crucified so we could be crucified with him. He did not die so that we wouldn’t have to die; he died so we could die with him. In death to self you are crucified with Christ (Gal. 2:20).

Anyone who is attempting to help others in the way of Christ needs to have the life they are describing. They must have peace, purity, patience, and the other fruit produced by following Jesus. They must have a willingness to see others praised, while they are overlooked. They must die to the idea that what they want has any importance at all.

When we see people dominated by their lust for glory or insisting that their will be done, we will be in a position where we can be very firm in not cooperating with them, even if they’re our loved ones. When we live in the Shepherd’s sufficiency and die to our selves, we become the most firmly established people in this world.

Jesus was no doormat; he was simply dead to self, and fully alive to God.

Dignity—real dignity—comes to the person who, by the grace of God, has embraced death to self. Such people are the only ones who can stand up to other selves, which, of course, includes serving them in ways that are good and right.

Death to self gives us the place to stand in real dignity, in the yoke of Jesus, and not cooperate with the efforts of other people to live out their...

If we find that our need for recognition is consuming our thoughts and determining our behavior, then we need to move to a higher source for our sense of our personal worth. That source is, of course, God’s love for us.

it. We may need to say to ourselves, “Jesus died for me!” and ask God to bring this truth home to our hearts. We must take time with this in prayer and meditate on passages about God’s love for us. Set aside days to spend alone with God to seek his face and to imagine that face shining with joy as it looks at you.

It is the experience of having God look you right in the eye and saying, “I love you! I approve of you!” that is the unshakable ground of our self-worth.

The child who lives under the shining face of a mother and father has no problem of self-worth. But when the faces of the parents turn away and withdraw, they become troubled. God does not withdraw his affection and approval from us; indeed, as Paul reminded us when he declared that nothing is able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 8:38–39), therein lies the true and sure basis of self-worth.

Humility is the beautiful condition of people who have learned to surrender their desires, their glory, and their power. Such people are in the process of becoming who they were meant to be in God’s kingdom by giving up the life of the self.