Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23

by Dallas Willard

So I ask you, what would you trade for your soul? How much are you worth?

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, even to the point of dying for them.

“God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners”—that is, while we were still in rebellion against God—“Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).

People are valuable even if they’re doing nothing; we do not have to earn our value.

“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:16). That one verse encapsulates why there are people—to shine, doing good works and glorifying God—and it is an active process as we live out our lives in the world before God in such a way that peopl...

Human life is a process of transition and transformation. We go through life in a belt of time and space with one another, and we have the opportunity to be everything God intended us to be in relationship to him and to those around us.

We have the potential to create something incredibly precious and good, and God is going to bring it to pass.

He is going to create a community of loving, creative, intelligent, loyal, faithful, and powerful human beings, and they are going to rule the earth. It is going to come to pass. If you want to be a part of that, just get on board.

We are put here on earth and we are given bodies so we can work to bring more good into existence.

We are put here to work, for the image of God within us goes far beyond the grand use of our intellect.

The challenge for us in the creation of good is not usually some big religious issue as we commonly think of it, but in the ordinary stuff of life—our day-to-day living in families, at work, at play.

The obviously well-kept secret of the “ordinary” is that it is made to be a receptacle of the divine, a place where the life of God flows.

God chose for him his work, and meant for him to find his spiritual education there.

“The Christian finds the hand of Christ in everything, and by the faithful use of everything for Christ’s sake, he takes firm hold of that hand of Christ and is drawn nearer and nearer to Himself. That is, I think, the best method of promoting spiritual life.”

“I experienced the miracle that the highest potential of God’s love and power is available to us in the trivial things of everyday life.”

Our challenge is to fill our hours, minutes, and actions from day to day with the appropriate amount of love for God’s creation and creating, and then work to produce more of the good he has put in this world. This is every person’s calling.

But if we do not work, our lives are wasted because God designed work as a fundamental structure of love in the kingdom of God—something that is meant to bring people together in loving community for mutual benefit and support.

What’s more, work is a good thing, and it is a natural disposition of human beings from early childhood on. Work is simply human creativity, a special type of causation through which goodness and blessing can be promoted.

Simply put, work is the expending of energy to produce good in va...

If humanity were united under God in love and understanding, we could, with ease, achieve wondrous things far beyond what we can now achieve or imagine

Your work is the total amount of lasting good that you will accomplish in your lifetime.

That might include your job, but for many of us, our families will be the largest part of the lasting good we produce.

Today much that is called work is not the use of energy to produce good. In our fallen world we must distinguish between a job and work, because many “jobs” can produce evil. Your job is what you get paid to d...

Additionally, many people base their identity on their work and their job—that is, they think they are what they do. This is problematic because they will identify their jobs with their lives and their personal sense of worth.

But regardless of our specific work, the real challenge to every person’s faith is that we do everything to the glory of God, even in the smallest actions of our days.

Here is a truth you must never forget: God is more interested in your life than he is in any of the other things listed above. He’s more interested in the person you are becoming than in your work, or your ministry, or your job.

And the surest way to realize the full potential of your God-designed self is to live in eternity while you are in time, conscious of the loving gaze of your all-sufficient Shepherd, in whose care nothing of the good you do is lost. It is stored up in your own self and in the lives of others you have touched.

The threats of abandonment I just mentioned hover over most relationships, and people are so busy protecting themselves that they cannot love each other.

Please note that submission is not assigning our responsibility to others, abandoning our own judgment, or allowing others to simply dictate to us. It is setting aside our own ideas as supreme and our own will as ultimate, freeing us from the burden of having our own way and of being all-wise in our own eyes.

People exist to love as Jesus loved.

Indeed, the aim of God in human history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons with himself at the center of that community—as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.

There is nothing that makes God happier than human beings, redeemed by the grace of God, devoting their lives—the moments and hours of their days—to the good of others and of creation, to the glory of God.

Just God’s greatest treasure in all his created works.

We live in a world under the care of a wholly good God with unlimited power, who lacks nothing and intends only good for his creation.

the secret to a life without lack is faith in God and in God’s full capacity and willingness to meet all our needs—and more.

But what is faith? It is simply an understanding of how things are, wedded to a commitment to live one’s life in light of that understanding.

Part of the problem with our faith today is that we do not truly believe in the reality of the spiritual, either...

But we who do not worship Satan also need to have faith that he will do exactly what he is intent on doing. You’d better be ready for it.

Do you know where the devil is now? He’s in heaven, engaged in warfare right now.

The Bible speaks of three heavens: the heaven of the air around us, the heaven of the angels, and then the heaven of heavens,...

The only way the devil can hurt God is through humans, and so he focuses upon us.

His strategy is to try to frustrate God’s purpose for humanity, beginning at “the beginning” in the garden of Eden. Through deceit and temptation he succeeded in diverting the plan of God for Adam and Eve and their descendants.

Satan can do nothing about God’s unshakable kingdom directly, but only indirectly through human infirmity and rebellion. His way of doing that is to persu...

If we look at Satan’s work from beginning to end in the Bible, from the opening chapters of Genesis to the concluding chapter of Revelation, we see a clear pattern: Satan’s constant deception of human beings.

To save people from sin is to destroy sin, which in turn is to destroy the works of the devil.

The answer is, because Satan deceives and misleads people and thereby prevents them from making the kind of connection with God that would work against the effects of sin in the world.

if we are to succeed in walking in the way of Jesus and knowing the life without lack, it is essential that we understand and believe the devil is real and at work.

Prior to placing their faith in Christ and being given new life in him, people are “dead in trespasses and sins” and are, whether they know it or not, under the influence of Satan.

He cannot make us do anything we do not want to do. If it is true that a person can be the devil’s puppet, the strings are Satan’s lies.

This “world” is marked by three spiritual dynamics that John identifies as “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life”