Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23

by Dallas Willard

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.

One of our greatest needs today is for people to really see and really believe the things they already profess to see and believe.

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.

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.*

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.

When we fill our minds with the gospel, it must be in its fullness as Jesus presented and embodies it.* If we limit the gospel to what Jesus did during a few days at the end of his earthly existence, we miss most of the picture. We shouldn’t reduce the saving work of Christ to his death on the cross or we will miss the fullness of God as he is in himself and as he provides for us and all his creation. 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).

What we place our minds on brings that reality into our lives.

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.