Life Without Lack

We must come to an awareness in our own minds concerning the nature of God. That is, we must think about God in ways that match what God is like. Without harmony between our ideas about God and his true character, we will never be able to make the kind of contact with God that will give us confidence, grounded in our experience, in the complete sufficiency of God to provide for our needs.

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.*

We have the ability and responsibility to keep God present in our minds, and those who do so will make steady progress toward him, for he will respond by making himself known to us.

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).

You may very well say, “Can’t God just move in on us and touch us or do something to us?” Yes, he can do that, and he does that on many occasions. But when it comes to experiencing the sufficiency of God, we are not talking about what God can do; we are talking about what we need to do. And what we need to do is to turn our minds to God.

We bring the reality of God into our lives by making contact with him through our minds, and our actions are based on the understanding that results from the fullness of that contact. There is nothing mysterious here. This is why the mind, and what we turn our minds to, is the key to our lives.

God’s power is unlimited. Jesus demonstrated this when he was faced with the challenge of feeding thousands of hungry people, having only five loaves and two fishes (Mark 6:32–44). What did he do? He produced matter—enough loaves and fishes to feed them all and still have leftovers. Suppose he had not had those five loaves and two fishes to start with. Do you think he could have still produced a few of them out of thin air? Of course he could. But he wanted to give us an indication of God’s exceedingly ample power to meet our needs even though we have very little. So he took the very little and he multiplied it.

Fasting is feasting upon God. This is how Jesus was able to fast for forty days and not die. This is something you only learn by experience, and he wanted us to fast with that expectation. The availability of this energy is the absolute source of absolute sufficiency.

There is often a great expression of unfaith in the way we approach this, but nonetheless when we are having a baby, and when we are raising a child, we are making a person. We are exercising the creative part of the image of God in us.

“Hallowed be thy name.” What are you praying for when you pray for that? You’re praying that God would be known for who he is. That his name would be cherished and loved. Why? Because once you begin to have an impression of who God truly is, everything else fades into insignificance. When the bountiful sufficiency of God in himself and the glorious realm of his kingdom are continually brought before the mind, it puts everything else in its proper place and opens us to a life in which we find God more than capable of supplying everything we need.

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 important to remember this when we are fretting over a perceived need. In such a time we may be tempted to think that maybe, just maybe, God is as stingy and small as we are. He is not. God loves to give. God loves to forgive. God loves to just gush forth with his goodness (John 4:14). Nothing so delights him as giving to anyone and everyone who will receive. “For God so loved the world that He gave . . .” (John 3:16).

The command to not take God’s name in vain is most often misunderstood as relating to swearing or cursing, especially in ways that ask God to “damn” someone or something, or possibly when a person exclaims, “Oh, God!” While that may be a problem, this is not the issue that the command is addressing. Rather it is dealing with any way of using God’s real name, Yahweh, that is not in accord with God’s real nature. 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.

At what point do we finally come to the place where we can use God’s name without doing so “in vain”? After we have come to know Jesus Christ. Only after that point are we fully capable of using his name rightly.

Norman Vincent Peale’s recommendation for those caught in fear is to imagine that the worst thing they feared had taken place, and then ask themselves, Where would I be if this actually happened? What would happen to God?3 If we were to do this, we would realize that in reality it would not make much difference, since most of our fears are quite trivial. 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. One use of the word weird is to indicate that an experience is strange, uncanny, or has a sense of the supernatural about it. From that perspective, everything I have been describing—from Moses’s shining face to Jesus glowing on the mountain—is truly weird. It’s supernatural, out of this world. That is what holy is, something wholly otherworldly.

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.

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.

Our work may be of many kinds. It might include having and raising children, developing good personal relations, being artistically creative, leading politically, working in the church of Jesus Christ to spread the truth, building houses, running trains, doing all the necessary work available to human beings as they live together in this world to produce what is good. 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. And this will certainly entail making sure we do not sacrifice our families to our ministry or jobs.

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

God was proud of Job. Indeed, he was justly proud of him, even though Job had a long way to go. 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. That is our privilege, and the reason we are here. That is what humans are, why God pays attention to us, and why God abides with us.

human beings cannot be forced to do evil. They cannot be forced to do good either. They must choose to do evil or good. How do they choose? By being persuaded that one course of action is better than another.

“Speak, LORD, for Your servant hears” (1 Sam. 3:9). When we get up out of bed in the morning, among our first thoughts should be this: Lord, speak to me. I’m listening. I want to hear your voice. This is not because it’s a nice way to start the day, but because the only thing that can keep us straight is being full of God and full of his Word. If you don’t do something like this, you do not have the option of having a neutral mind. Your thoughts cannot be empty. As

Jesus’ basic idea about this world—with all its evil, pushed to the limit in what he went through going toward and nailed upon the cross—is that this world is a perfectly good and safe place for anyone to be, no matter the circumstances, if they have placed their lives in the hands of Jesus and his Father. In such a world we never have to do what we know to be wrong, and we never need be afraid.

For example, most Americans think that they ought to be able to do what they want to do whenever they want to do it. This understanding of freedom is often identified with the American way of life. That is as crude and straightforward a statement of Satan as you will ever find. If there is anything you ought not to do, it is to do what you want to do whenever you want to do it.

Faith—trust—is the key that unlocks our readiness to receive God’s sufficiency in our lives. Given how we commonly use these words today, it is helpful to replace all occurrences of faith in the Bible with trust.

Job’s journey of faith moved from ritual to relationship. He began with what we may call the faith of propriety, moved through the faith of desperation, and finally arrived at the faith of sufficiency—the faith that says, regardless of what happens, “It doesn’t matter. I have God, and that is all I need.”

One of the things you find in people who have not suffered much is their tendency to believe in propriety. But when they have the sawdust knocked out of them a few times, they lose their great faith in propriety. I have known quite a number of pastors who believed that divorce was something you could never really get over. But then their children experienced it, and they were liberated from that belief. This is not hypocrisy. It is the transformation of their faith. They went through a painful process and came to understand how the blessing of God goes well beyond failure, disappointment, and tragedy.

There is a family of words in the New Testament that are variously translated as belief, faith, and hope, and what they all have in common is the notion of reliance, confidence, and trust. It is trust that puts you in contact with God so you can draw upon his unlimited and inexhaustible resources. Unfortunately, many folks have their faith lined up in such a way that they do not need to rely on God. They do not need to trust God. They have a proper faith in terms of what they need to believe to go to heaven when they die, but they hope that God is never going to put them in a position of needing to actually trust him before they go there.

while these people did not receive deliverance from their sufferings, what they did know, in the very moment of their pain, was the abundant provision of God. They were without lack in that moment. Some of you may say, “You know, if I had known he was going to define lack and sufficiency that way, I wouldn’t have bought this book!” I understand, but a life without lack is all about knowing the unlimited sufficiency of God in the moment of 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. Your point of desperation will likely not involve being sawn in two or wandering about destitute in sheepskins, but it might. Regardless, when you have nowhere else to turn except to God, and you turn to him, your faith of desperation will meet the fullness of God, and you will taste the life without lack as you discover the depths of the faith of sufficiency.

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

Faith and complaining are not mutually exclusive. Even if you have strong faith, you may still complain to God. While Job never cursed God or accused him falsely, he did complain. He complained and he moaned and he groaned. When bad things happen, you can do that too. If you doubt this, just read the psalms!

Grace is opposed to earning, but it is not opposed to effort, because effort is action and earning is attitude.

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.

One problem that has hindered this teaching in the past is that those presenting it have not carefully drawn the distinction between death to and death of self. As a result, people view death to self as if it means getting rid of yourself. That is not at all what it involves. 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).

When our abilities are the only things we know to trust, and when we are living with them as ultimates, we are living “in the flesh.” We are living in dependence upon the God-given drives of our human personalities rather than in the God who gave them to us. That is life in the flesh, the frightful story of which the apostle Paul described repeatedly.* That is a strong claim. As long as our desires are paramount in our lives, we cannot have faith in God.

That is why God does not give us significantly more faith until we have come to terms with death to self. 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.

What is wrong is when not getting what we want propels us into a state of bitterness, irritation, impatience, and anger, and we depend upon our own tricks and devices, our confidence in our own power, to get the things that we want. 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.”

Think again of Job. Did he miss out on God’s provision? He certainly went through a hard time, but he came out far ahead of where he had been. In the end Job tasted the lush provision of God’s sufficiency.

Deny your self and follow Christ, or deny Christ and follow your self. Those are the options. The results? Saving your life or losing it.

One good way to check our motives when doing something for the Lord is to see how sweet and patient we can remain when it does not go the way we want it to. If we believe we are acting out of love toward someone, but we become angry if the other person does not reciprocate, that indicates there is something beyond love motivating us.

If death to self should bring us eye-to-eye with physical death, what do we say at that point? We say the same thing we would say about giving up an ice cream cone, or a job, or anything else. When we give up the smaller, everyday things we are training for times when greater sacrifice is required.

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. Our ultimate approval is from God, not from other human beings.

We may have thought we were fine with surrendering our selves completely, but then realize this is not the case. We should not be taken aback by this; such experiences can give us important insight into how the process of dying to our selves works. We come up against a desire and discover that we are not as willing to give it up as we imagined. This becomes an opportunity to repent and receive further instruction in humility, through the realization that we are more in the habit of getting what we want than we were previously willing to admit.

Father, I abandon myself into your hands. Do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you, I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my soul. I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands without reserve and with boundless confidence, for you are my Father.4 —CHARLES DE FOUCAULD

Remember, faith has two parts: will and vision. We must be willing to see God as he is before God can further reveal himself to us and give us more faith. This requires us to live in such a way that we are consistently seeking him and growing in our faith, and this attitude of life requires more and more death to self as we go along.

One of the better efforts at describing agape love is that of Thomas Oord in his book, The Science of Love. Oord precisely defines love as “acting intentionally, in sympathetic response to others (including God), to promote overall well-being.”

If you look at Mohammed, or Buddha, or Confucius, or any other leaders, you will never find anyone who loved his disciples the way Jesus did. Not one of them. Some people, in an attempt to prove the superiority of Christ, focus on the fact that only he rose from the dead. That is true. But deeper still, the very character of Jesus stands out in how he related to his followers. None of these other leaders were willing to die for their disciples. And when you read their teachings, you can clearly see that Jesus was the only one living in the realm of agape love.

forgiveness does not require you to forget what happened. It is simply wrong to say to another person, “Oh, come on, if you really forgave me, you would have forgotten it.” You may never forget what a person did, and you may find that you treat them differently because you have learned something about their character that you didn’t know before, but you can choose to love them for who you now know them to be and support their efforts to grow. Forgiveness lets people off the hook and frees us to love them.

Unless you are engaged in activities that are harmful to people, your work is valuable. It is good. God put us here to work, and all the fundamental occupations of humanity are good. If you drive a truck, or deliver the mail, or teach, or sell insurance, or manage investments, or mend broken bones—whatever you do, it is good in God’s kingdom. The main thing that will ruin any possibility of staying with Jesus throughout one full day is the feeling that it is not okay to be who you are or to do the work you are doing. If that is your view of life, the opportunity to be with Jesus will be cut off before it starts.

You are not meant to live in a constant state of fatigue. Tiredness is a spiritual problem, not because it is a sin, but because being tired creates difficulties for your spiritual life, robbing you of the energy needed to pursue God.

Whatever you decide to try, your day should involve scheduled times of meeting with Jesus. I would suggest planning to take ten minutes or so every two to three hours during the day to lift your heart and mind to God in praise, thanksgiving, and sharing the concerns on your heart. Do this alone if possible. Sometimes you may do this by going outside and looking at the beauty of a flower or the magnificence of the sky, or maybe by listening to beautiful music.

Emergencies are opportunities to bring God into the realities of your life.

Train yourself to use each change of person or event to remind you to pray and to bless, so that mere change becomes a signal to turn your mind back to God. Do this and you will shortly master the secrets of praying without ceasing.