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How do you think about generosity?

How does your picture of the world shape your view of generosity?

For example, is the world made by God? How might your picture of the world reflect your view of God, about His character and the manner in which He acts in His world?

Do you think that God is ‘stringy’ or full of lack, giving only IF he has to do so? Do you think of Him as a hoarder of many good gifts, a kind of cosmic curmudgeon yet representing a Santa-like figure, a distributor of goods globally?

On that view of the world, God is pictured more like a belated giver, even regretful in His giving, holding-out, controlling others with His ‘strings-attached’ kind of generosity. With that story of the world, life is sung more in the key of ultimate scarcity, zero-sum thinking, “get-all-you-can-while-you-can” kind of living.

But is that the world God has made? Is that the view of God that is offered to humanity from the pages of scripture?

#generosity #Life Without Lack #bible project #bibleproject #practices

Life Without Lack P2: Introduction

We have all things & abound, not because I have a good store of money in the bank, not because I have skill & wit with which to earn my bread--but because the LORD is my Shepherd. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#Life Without Lack

A Life without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23 By Dallas Willard

Psalm 23 begins with an astounding assertion:

"The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want."

This describes the life we all desire, one where we lack nothing.

The Self-Sustaining, Superabundant Sufficiency of God and a “Life Without Lack”

Our view of God - especially how we keep God before our mind - is the basis for experiencing a “life without lack.”

#Life Without Lack #whole-life discipleship;#Dallas Willard

The ‘Never Enough’ of Desire

Ecclesiastes 1:8 is very perceptive: “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.”

Eyes and ears - and any member of a body - come alive with insatiability because of the nature and power of desire, and its place within human life and its endeavoring.

Dallas Willard has it exactly right when he talks about the insatiable power of desire. From Life without Lack:

Human desire is infinite by its nature; it cannot be satisfied. You must take your stand against it because you cannot satisfy it.

Desire is infinite partly because we were made by God, made for God, made to need God, and made to run on God. We can be satisfied only by the one who is infinite, eternal, and able to supply all our needs; we are only at home in God. When we fall away from God, the desire for the infinite remains, but it is displaced upon things that will certainly lead to destruction (134)

Consider the never-get-enough power of desire in ordinary, everyday experience as it relates to comfort, recognition, power, money, prestige of status, reputation-building, sex, possessions, etc. Desire has an ‘itch’ that cannot be sufficiently scratched, a ravenous hunger that bullies with wanting “MORE!”.

Is it no wonder that vanity and jealousy pervade human life and community with others?

The brilliance of Jesus’ ‘dying to self’ teaching becomes all the more fundamental in order to know how to become a more complete, thriving human being. The discipline of ‘losing our life’ or ‘taking up our cross’ for Jesus’ sake is how we can begin to put desire in its proper place vs. being ruled by insatiability.

Dallas observes,

The cross means the acceptance of limitation on desire. Without establishing this for yourself, there can only be frustration and worse, for you simply cannot satisfy desire.

. . . If we are going to live a life of abundant sufficiency [in God], we must be focused and intentional in standing against these dreadful roots of the self-life. Until we have done that, we will be incapable of entering by faith into the life God longs to give us (134).

#Life Without Lack #Desire #Dallas Willard

Life Without Lack: Living into the Fullness of Psalm 23

If you have never read anything from Dallas Willard, this is a very good place to start, not only because of the wisdom, insights, and rich understandings that drip from each page but because, inadvertently, Life without Lack is a remarkable gateway into so much that Dallas has written (e.g., Renovation of the Heart; The Divine Conspiracy; Hearing God; Spirit of the Disciplines). When you read Life without Lack you come to realize just how much Psalm 23 is like an animating, background culture to so much of what Dallas thought, lived, believed, and taught.

From the publisher’s description and LifeWithoutLack.net:

In this unique work of never-before-published teaching, Dallas Willard revolutionizes our understanding of Psalm 23 by taking this comfortably familiar passage and revealing its extraordinary promises: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…. I will fear no evil.” The psalmist claims to live without any need and without any fear. How is that possible?

Written with Willard’s characteristic gentle wisdom, Life Without Lack reveals the secret to enjoying God’s presence and becoming utterly caught up in his abundant generosity. The more we practice living in his presence, the more we experience the peace and freedom from worry that is promised in the psalm. Based on a series of talks by the late author and edited by his friend Larry Burtoft and by his daughter, Rebecca Willard Heatley, Life Without Lack will forever change the way you understand and apply the most well-known passage in all of Scripture.

#Dallas Willard #Life Without Lack #Psalm 23

‘Masters of Self-Justification’ and Derailing Our Experience of God’s Sufficiency

1 John 2:15 wisely exhorts us to not “love the world” or the “things in the world.” Eugene Peterson’s The Message puts it this way:

Don’t love the world’s ways. Don’t love the world’s goods. Love of the world squeezes out love for the Father. Practically everything that goes on in the world—wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to appear important—has nothing to do with the Father. It just isolates you from him. The world and all its wanting, wanting, wanting is on the way out—but whoever does what God wants is set for eternity.

Dallas Willard, from Life without Lack, discerns that ‘the world’ here is not referring “to the created world of nature, with all its magnificence and beauty, nor even to the many good things that make up the world of human culture” (75).

Instead, we have to be especially discerning, attentive, and awake to “those aspects of our world, especially our cultural and social practices, that are under the control of Satan and, thus, opposed to God” (75).

What are those ‘aspects’ under the control of Satan?

1 John 2:16 tell us that three spiritual dynamics mark ‘the world’: “lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes”, and the pride of life.” ‘Lust’ here is not merely sexual. A better word is desire, as Dallas says, “wanting something that appears to be good for some purpose or pleasure.”

Eve and Adam’s original temptation follow this pattern: “desire of the flesh” (good for food); “desire of the eyes” (pleasant to the eyes); “pride of life” (desirable to make one wise). Jesus was also tempted in all three ways as well but did not succumb to these weapons played-out on his desires (”turning stones into bread”; “jumping off the temple”; gaining political power and glory: Matthew 4).

Those three dynamics outlined by 1 John are ‘spiritual’ because they are immaterial by nature yet highly consequential; they play with our ‘wanting’ and very often fool our wanting. Dallas says they are “the three primary weapons to oppose God and derail our experience of God’s sufficiency, all of which are forms of temptation.” For Satan does not have direct power over our will. “He cannot make us to 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,” discerns Dallas (75).

Thus, we easily become “masters of justification,” of our own saving, redeeming, securing, and protecting.

Learning to discipline our desires and their power to-want-to-rule is part of what it means to be Jesus’ disciple; it is to exercise our “life in the Spirit.” Consider this talk by Dallas at Wheaton College in 2009:

#Dallas Willard #Life Without Lack #Evil #Holy Spirit #Psalm 23 #Desire #practices

Ecclesiastes and Life by Our Own Smarts

Ecclesiastes is one of those books of scripture that totally 'reads' the times in which we live in and so identifies deep aspects of the human condition. It is part of a broader context of ‘wisdom books’ (e.g., Proverbs and Job) that interact with questions about how to live life well.

Ecclesiastes also offers a very fascinating compliment to learning how to step into the reality of a 'life without lack,' as Dallas Willard would say, by how we relinquish control of doing life on our own terms, and the folly, in fact, of doing life by our own smarts alone.

Enjoy this animated 5.5 minute walk-thru of Ecclesiastes by our friends at The Bible Project: