Living Without Lack
This post covers lessons learned about keeping God in mind at all times from reading Dallas Willard’s ‘Life Without Lack’, NT Wright on what made the Apostle Paul so successful and how we might apply such lessons today, the number one rule of being a parent, and a personal update including some reflections on sudden death and the TV show The Gilded Age.
Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23 by Dallas Willard
I took this book with me on our holiday to Mersea to read for spiritual edification. I think it is essential always to be reading a book that is specifically purposed to lift the soul to God. I chose this one because I found it recommended by John Mark Comer in his book on hurry and I’ve often heard Dallas Willard spoken about but have never read anything he wrote.
Essentially, the argument of the book is that we can experience life in God as not lacking in any way: ‘The world is a good and perfectly safe place to be’, Willard is quoted as saying in the preface. God provides for all of our needs but a lot of the time (probably most of the time) we are not aware of it or appreciative of it. If we really knew the reality of the first verse of Psalm 23 - ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want’ (or in the Coverdale version, ‘…therefore I cannot lack’) - then our entire outlook would be different.
How is this possible? In the preface, the author Larry Burtoft tells us, ‘Dallas believed it was possible to keep our minds constantly on God and that this was the heart and soul of spiritual formation in the kingdom of God. This is a book about why this is so, and about how it can be so for us’.
The mind, in other words, is the key to everything in the spiritual life: ‘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’ (Willard, Life Without Lack, p.3). Given that reality, it makes a lot of sense that the Bible talks about praying without ceasing and constantly meditating on the Word of God. I’ve been thinking about this whilst I’ve been reading Scripture in recent days, and when you look for this theme, you find it everywhere, particularly in the Psalms.
In the final chapter (which was my favourite), Willard talks about ‘a day with Jesus’, by which he means a day in which one is continually coming back to thoughts about God through prayer and meditation:
Remember the principle I laid down…the most important thing about you is your mind, and the most important thing about your mind is what it is fixed upon. So the object is to have your mind always fixed on the Lord. This is only possible through constantly renewed effort, choosing to “retain God in your knowledge” (Romans 1:28) and to “set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth” (Col. 3:2).
Life Without Lack, p.205
That might sound intense and unenjoyable, but it’s really not. I am an infant when it comes to this practice, but I can honestly say that even the attempt to keep the Lord in mind constantly is transformative. I feel like reading Willard’s book has crystallised and sharpened my desire to do this. Previously it was a reasonably vague desire to memorise Scripture and to think about Scripture from time-to-time during the day. Now, I have a much better understanding of what the point of doing things like this is.
In his introduction to another great spiritual writer’s book, Willard says this:
‘He knew how we are capable of keeping many things before the mind at once, and he knew that when something is drawn before the mind it does not disappear immediately. Rather, it lingers around the mind, and the fragrance of its being stains the atmosphere of consciousness.’
Dallas Willard in Frank C. Laubach, Letters by a Modern Mystic, p.vii
So that’s the point. What we set our minds on ‘stains the atmosphere of consciousness’ for good or evil. It’s quite simple really: replace the negative, anxious, painful thoughts with thoughts of God in Christ and all of his manifold goodness to us.
I am surely going to write much more about this in days to come. But Willard’s book led me to Frank C. Laubach’s book Letters by a Modern Mystic. I have almost finished reading this short book and I have to say that it is quite mind-blowing. And I don’t normally say things like this. I have yet to fully internalise the message so I won’t write about it till next week, but the message of Laubach seems to me utterly transformative. I feel like I want to buy a hundred copies of this book and give them to every Christian within my vicinity. It really is that significant. Maybe lots of people already know this message in some form, but I don’t think I really did, at least not in the way he puts in. Willard obviously learned this from him (or at least had this confirmed by him) and was transformed as a result.
I have also bought Willard’s book Renovation of the Heart. Apparently he goes into a lot more detail about the mind in this book, so I’m interested to read it.
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