Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23

by Dallas Willard

Faith that interacts with God draws directly from God and the power that is in the word of God.

Fasting is feasting upon God.

God gave you a body to supply you with an extra amount of power in addition to the power in your mind. Your body is your own personal power pack that allows you to exercise your willed actions. God desires that each of us would use our bodies and our minds to rule the earth, together with one another, in love.

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

So God’s essential nature can be characterized in this way: 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.3 Or consider carefully this description of God by the nineteenth-century Methodist theologian and biblical scholar Adam Clarke: The eternal, independent, and self-existent Being: The Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence: He who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely benevolent, beneficent, true and holy: The cause of all being, the upholder of all things; infinitely happy, because infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only by himself, because an infinite mind can only be comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived; and, from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, right, and kind.

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

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.

He would respond, “Well, sure, I’ll take a boat, but I don’t really have to have it, you understand.”

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).

Again, Paul promised the Philippian believers that God would supply all their needs. This is true for you as well. He will supply all your needs. All of them. No need left unmet. And you will find yourself exclaiming, in the words of the Twenty-Third Psalm, “My cup runs over” (v. 5). You will have more than enough!

God does not have a shortage of anything you can think of. His “riches in glory” are endless. We see it when Jesus multiplied the bread and the fishes. How much did they have left over? Twelve baskets! God is not stingy. He dwells in magnificent abundance, and lovingly provides for our needs out of that abundance.

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 importan...

First of all, my child, think magnificently of God. Magnify His providence; adore His power, pray to Him frequently and incessantly. Bear Him always in your mind. Teach your thoughts to reverence Him in every place for there is no place where He is not. Therefore, my child, fear and worship and love God; first and last, think magnificently of Him! —PATERNUS, ADVICE TO A S

the secret to a life without lack is rooted in our knowledge of God.

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.

Your mind loses contact with the right things, and your body follows.

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.

“It ain’t what we know that hurts us. It’s what we know that ain’t so.”

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.

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

You are never going to cease to exist. If you are afraid of going out of existence, fear no more. Why? Because God, in creation, has imparted an aspect of himself into you.

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 upo...

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.

You know, by experience, that your will is the source of the visible things that come to be a...

The important point here is that you have in yourself the Romans 1:20 experience of the invisible originating the visible. That is why, when you look around at the things that are visible, you can know two things they share in common. First, they came into existence and, sooner or later, will pass out of existence. Second, each of them was created from an invisible source. Again, you know this from your own experience, and you confirm it in others who have the same experience.

Remember, God’s name is a reflection of his nature, and the most common way of using it “in vain” is to degrade God to the level of a created being. This is what you have in an idol.

We transgress this commandment any time we refer to God in ways that are not appropriate to the greatness of his being, especially ways that do not take into consideration that God is an invisible and eternal power who has a personality. This is precisely what takes place when people carve a figure out of wood or stone and treat it as if it had Godlike characteristics, when in fact it is nothing but a lifeless, soulless piece of matter.

But that is not the only way of being an idolater. Anything that occupies a greater concern in our lives than God qualifies—position, in...

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.

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.”

What do you fear? Whatever came to mind, I want you to know that you have nothing to fear. If you doubt this, I urge you to ask God to give you a peace about this. Let me say it again: no matter what you fear, you can live without that fear.

My intention is to help you realize that fear and worry are worthless—indeed, vain—emotions.

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.

He said, “I lay down My life that I may take it again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again” (John 10:17–18).

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.

At the center of so many of our difficulties is fear—fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of death, fear of sickness, fear of not being able to take care of ourselves in old age, fear of what may happen to our loved ones.

There are so very many things to frighten us. What is the answer to all our fears? Love.

“there is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear.”

Even severe fears can be faced when we are confident in the strength and generosity of God—and in the fact that his kingdom isn’t shaken, and he is not undone by these things.

There actually is a direct relationship between weird things and holy things.

God is not something to be toyed around with. He will not fit into our plans. But we can fit into his, and they are glorious plans indeed.

If you go to work tomorrow and declare, “I don’t need anything,” people will probably think you are weird . . . very weird. You are supposed to be in need. You are supposed to lack. That’s one of the things that people can use to manage you.

The more we place our minds on God’s greatness and self-sufficiency (“beholding . . . the glory of the Lord”), the more we will be transformed from one degree of glory to another.

The boy who went out and slew Goliath still knew times of great testing afterward.

And from the human side, the life without lack is simply a matter of having one’s mind fully and constantly fixed upon God as he is, confident that he will provide everything that we need.

We are blessed to live in a world where there is a fully self-sufficient, generous God who wants to provide what is best for us and loves us more than we could ever imagine.

Every human being is a special creation of spirit, living in the hands of God.