Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23

by Dallas Willard

“It doesn’t matter. I have God, and that is all I need.”

One thing we must always keep in mind is that faith is a gift from God, and we need to understand both its nature and how God transforms it.

God is more concerned with who you are becoming than in what you can accomplish with your faith.

He desires that you become the kind of person who can joyfully and easily receive an abundance of faith and power—the gift of great faith from God, who knows when, what kind, and how much to give us.

God will bless that kind of faith because God likes to bless people.

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

“I don’t care what’s going to happen, I am holding on to God!”

What remains is the kingdom of God that cannot be moved, and by trust, and trust alone, we enter it.

Often God allows us to reach the point of desperation so we can learn how to trust. It is a hard lesson, but an essential one.

The life without lack is known by those who have learned how to trust God in the moment of their need.

When you’re betrayed, abandoned, lied about, and scandalized; when you are sick with a fatal disease; when your finances are going down the drain; when you see your loved one walk through the doorway of hell; that is the moment to trust. And in trusting you will know God.

One of the fundamental changes that takes place as we move from the faith of desperation to the faith of sufficiency is that we take our minds off ourselves and place them on God.

He simply said, “I’ve seen God, and I’ve seen myself.” We cannot truly see ourselves until we see God, but as long as our eyes are fixed on ourselves, we cannot see God. We must focus on God if we are to know the sufficiency of God.

Such experiences are for everyone. God will reveal himself to you. All of us can come to trust God as Job did, if we want it and if we seek it.

In this regard, it is important to recognize that Job, Jacob, and the Syro-Phoenician woman did not arrive at their relentless faith in God’s all-sufficiency simply by trying to trust in the greatness of God. It was the result of two things: they sought the Lord and the Lord showed up.

You should not try to do this in your own power. Seek the Lord and wa...

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 s...

When we begin to seek the Lord, some things must change—some outside of us and some inside of us—before ...

Who do you think he is? God will not try to fit within your expectations, but he will reveal something precious to you.

If you want to have a deeper, more trusting faith, seek God and be prepared to go with him. He will bring you into a faith of sufficiency as he reveals himself uniquely to you.

Faith based on what we hear or read is central and necessary; the beginning of faith does come by hearing.

The important thing is to be in the presence of God, for that is the birthplace of the life without lack.

We must beware of pretense. 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.

One lesson Job teaches us is that we can seek God by complaining.

“Though he slay me, yet will I trust him,” and hang on, we will grow into the faith of sufficiency (Job 13:15).

Faith is not just an individual matter.

Unbelief and belief are real forces in the world, and they are polarized so that one takes away from the other.

When faith begins to move, it moves on groups. When you are with other people, your faith is affected by the totality of the faith present.

So an important part of our growth in faith involves the people with whom we associate.

God uses others to transform our own faith.

We must never forget that faith is a gift. Like any gift, faith must be received. It must be wanted. God very rarely just dumps it on people who do not want it.

That is not the way of God. It is asking, it is seeking, it is knocking.

The truth of God’s grace is that we never merit the good that is done to us. Grace is opposed to earning, but it is not opposed to effort, because effort is action and earning is attitude.

You cannot do justice to the teachings of Scripture unless you understand that if you do not rise and go after God’s blessing, ...

if we want to work with God, we must determine what is normal for him in dealing with people and set our expectations realistically. When we aim for the unusual and glorious things to happen, that can damage our faith. We must take the faith we have, act on it, and grow toward the faith of sufficiency.

If you want faith, ask God for it. And when you ask God, be willing to let him take you through what is necessary to prepare you for it.

Because faith is a gift given by God as we are ready, it comes to us without any kind of strain, or hype, or exaggeration.

So listen: Keep on asking, and you will receive. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened for you. All who keep asking will receive, all who keep seeking will find, and doors will open to those who keep knocking.

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.

God is running the show, and we can rest in that knowledge.

The problem comes when we believe we ought to be able to have faith simply because we want to have faith. It is not possible. What is possible is asking, seek...

Acknowledge your doubts openly and honestly and wait until faith comes. Seek God and ask him to give you the gift of faith.

Self-denial means knowing only Christ, no longer knowing oneself. It means no longer seeing oneself, only him who is going ahead, no longer seeing the way which is too difficult for us. Self-denial says only: he is going ahead; hold fast to him. —DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

For faith to serve as a channel of God’s provision to our needs, two more conditions are necessary: the first has to do with our relationship to ourselves, and the second with our relationship to others.

Death to self is not ultimately a negation, but a rising up into the very life of God (2 Peter 1:4). Thus our lives are saved by his life (Rom. 5:10). This is essential.

You were not put here on earth to get rid of yourself. You were put here to be a self, and to live fully as a self. The worth of the self—your self—is inestimable, and God’s intent for you is that you become a fully realized self as you make the grace-fueled movement from the old self to the new (Col. 3:9–10).

The Greek word translated as “soul” here is also translated as “life” in other passages because the soul encompasses and “organizes” the whole person, interrelating all dimensions of the self, and both terms take us back to the self.

Jesus is speaking to a common human condition, the feeling that you have exchanged your soul—your self—for something far less valuable. It is a real danger that we all face.

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. But we seek God to work through those things and come to the place where we are ready to lay it all down.

We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed—always