In the weeks before our trip to Florida and the life altering events that took place, I found myself immersed in a book by Dallas Willard, “Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23.” It was not actually written by Willard as a book, but was compiled from audio recordings of talks originally given to members of a small congregation he and his wife attended in the early 90’s. The “without lack” from the title has little if anything to do with material resources, but deeply explores a life without lack of confidence, a life fully trusting, in the all sufficiency of God to meet ALL our needs in ALL circumstances. Even, circumstances like being struck by a pickup truck in a pedestrian crosswalk which forever changes the direction of your life - physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
I can honestly say, that had I not spent the time with this wonderfully sensitive, yet starkly direct book, exploring faith and trust in the sufficiency of God, I do not know how I would have ever survived the physical, emotional, and spiritual realities that were thrust upon us February 27th, 2024. For months, I have wanted to find a way to distill the concepts presented in “Without Lack,” in the hope that they may be as challenging, possibly life changing, and ultimately comforting beyond understanding, for you, as they were for me. Words still escape me in trying to express the supernatural sense of peace God provided in the midst of overwhelming pain and tragedy in Joy’s life threatening injuries, my own injuries, and the long and winding road of recovery.
From the first moment of my crawling to Joy’s side and putting my hand under her blood soaked head, pleading for her to open her eyes and look at me, to my first view of her in the ICU, head roughly shaved and bandaged, her beautiful face battered, bruised, and bloody, with tubes protruding everywhere, to the rollercoaster ride of many gains and setbacks over 8 weeks of hospitalization including 3 weeks intensive care, there was a miraculous peace that can only be attributed to the matchless grace and mercy of God. Throughout the ordeal, I would sometimes feel like I needed to pinch myself to understand I wasn’t dreaming and that despite the visible horrors around me, I could still rest in a peace that truly passed all understanding.
While I can reflect on many “God things” that happened leading up to and in our lives since the accident, the impact this book had on my life and faith is immeasurable and profound as I came to understand the meaning of a “faith of sufficiency” as Willard called it. In our current western culture of excesses in almost every area, the word sufficient, has almost come to mean “minimal” or the “least amount necessary,” but as used by Willard in this context, and as I alluded to earlier, it is meant as an all sufficient trust that leaves us lacking no question of the goodness and sufficiency of God to meet our needs, to keep us safe, and to give us hope for the future in all circumstances, yes, all circumstances.
Because of the impact this profound view of faith and trust has had on my life, I have long desired to find a way to share these principles, but struggled to find how best to express them. So, I finally came to the place where I decided that rather than delay any longer trying to, “put things in my own words,” I would instead provide an abridged, “Reader’s Digest,” version of the key truths Willard makes because there are many things that no one can say better than Dallas Willard himself.
One of the most basic, but profound, observations Willard presents is the clarification of “faith” as a measure of “trust’ rather than just belief as it is so often interpreted. He states:
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. For example, “For by grace you have been saved through trust” (Eph. 2:8). To have faith in God is simply to trust God, to rely upon him in the face of all fears.
Now as is evident by the title of the book, Willard relates a life of trust in God to the 23rd Psalm, however, he uses the account of Job to illustrate a progression of what he views as three stages of maturing faith. He defines these stages as proprietary, desperation, and sufficiency, each a legitimate and valid faith, and yet with a goal of progressing to a confident trust in the ultimate sufficiency of God in all circumstances. Appreciating this view of the stages of faith proved insightful and transformational for me as I had never quite viewed faith/trust from this perspective before. I knew I had a high degree of “belief” faith, but did I match that with “trust” faith?
Facing head on how much I trusted God in my faith was brought into acute focus with the accident. I hope that the following attempt to provide a “Reader’s Digest” version of the key concepts I found so life changing, may be impactful, or at least thought provoking, to you as well. Here is my abridged presentation of Willard’s explanation of a maturing faith/trust in the all sufficiency of God as he writes:
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.” We can learn much from Job’s journey through the maturing of his faith as we move forward in our own.
The faith of propriety, while it is genuine faith, is essentially superstitious and relies heavily on ritual, for it believes that it must get everything just right to reap the benefits. It involves a vision of God that has him up in heaven looking down to see if you are going to make any mistakes. If you do, you are in real trouble. The example of Job rising early every morning to offer burnt offerings on behalf of his sons, the faith of propriety is intent on living life, as we say, “religiously.” Job got out there and did it just right, and the Lord was pleased with that and blessed him for it. God will bless that kind of faith because God likes to bless people. Satan knew this, and decided to challenge this arrangement.
After God told Satan that he had permission to go after Job, all hell broke loose, and the limited nature of the faith of propriety became apparent. Job did not sin, but we soon learn that he also did not have peace in his faith. After his well-meaning friends sat with him for a week trying to comfort him while he scraped his boils, Job cried out his first lament. While he did not curse God, he did curse the day he was born (Job 3:1), pouring out his deep regret for having lived to see the days of his suffering. Then, at the end of his inconsolable groaning, we see it: “The thing I greatly feared has come upon me, and what I dreaded has happened to me” (v. 25).
What was it that Job dreaded and feared? Just this: that God was going to take down the hedge of protection. That God would take away his blessings. His faith, as sincere and genuine and good as it was, was mixed with great fear. Why? Because he was trusting in his own propriety rather than trusting in God. Job never gave up on propriety, and that’s good. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to do the right thing. But there are problems with propriety, not only because we tend to make bad choices and bring difficulties upon ourselves, but because things can go badly even when we do everything right. Sometimes God even allows those bad things to happen because he has something better for us, just like he had something better for Job.
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.
I am confident that when God called Job to Satan’s attention in the first place, God knew what was in Job’s heart. But Job did not know what was in his own heart. That kind of knowledge comes only through experience. God knew Job had faith, and it was now maturing from the faith of propriety to the faith of desperation. Like the faith of propriety, the faith of desperation is a wonderful thing. I have seen it in many people lying in bed sick, or losing their possessions, or watching what they cherished in their hearts go down the drain. With grim faces, they say with Job, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15). Not everyone is able to do that. There are a lot of people who say, “Well, if God’s not going to give me the goodies, I’m not going to trust him!”
Not everyone handles setbacks like Job did. He held on, clamped down his teeth, and said, “Whatever comes, I will trust him.” That word trust is very important. I am glad Job did not say, “I’ll faith him.” The word faith is a real problem in our time. It has become “respectable.” How many churches do you know that have the word faith in their name? How many with the word trust? Trust is sloppy. It’s out there on the street, in the field of battle. Trust is where Satan and God are struggling for the soul of man! But faith . . . faith is quite nice, isn’t it? Very prim and decent—proper even.
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. The faith of desperation—trusting faith—digs in, holds on, clings tight, and says, “I don’t care what’s going to happen, I am holding on to God!”
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. In the moment of need. Not before the moment of need, not after the moment of need when the storm has passed, but in the moment of need. For it is in that moment, when everything else is gone, that you know the reality of God. That moment may be a blood-stained one, as with the faithful martyrs of Hebrews 11 or the stoning of Stephen from Acts 7, but it will also be a God-drenched one. This may sound outrageous to you, but I think that 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. 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.
After Job’s three friends gave up on him “because he was righteous in his own eyes” (Job 32:1), a young man named Elihu stepped forward to reprimand them for their ineptitude in answering Job, and to offer his own wisdom. He recognized where Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar were wrong, even though he was not yet clear on what was correct. Elihu believed Job was mistaken to hold God accountable for what was happening to him. But the truth is God was responsible for it. Job was right. In the final analysis, God is responsible for everything. God, in fact, led Job into his troubles. Does that bother you to read? If so, remember that Jesus teaches us to pray that God would not “lead us into temptation” (Matt. 6:13). Jesus is not talking about temptation to sin. God will not do that.* We are to pray that God would not put us to the test and that he would deliver us from bad things. It is the kind of prayer a child would pray, an admission of our weakness and vulnerability. It is a prayer for protection and deliverance from the trials and the evil that would overwhelm us. When we do pray like this, most of the time he will do just that—deliver us from evil. But sometimes God does not deliver us immediately. This is what happened with Job, and he was on the verge of experiencing something deeper than anything else he had known up to that point.
“Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind” (Job 38:1).
God’s first words were not words of comfort, empathy, or encouragement, and certainly not an apology for letting it all happen… But Job stayed right there. Although he was silent, he did not flee from God, for God had granted him his deep desire. Repeatedly throughout his ordeal he had cried, “I would like to appear before God. Where is God? I want to talk to God!” If you want to talk to God and you pursue that desire, God will grant you that talk. He will decide when it’s appropriate and under what circumstances, and if you persist, you will see God. You will have your talk. It is likely to be a humbling, enlightening, and faith-deepening experience as it was for Job.
The conversation began, with God saying, “My friend, you don’t really understand what you are talking about. So I need you to pay close attention to what I am about to say.” Then God began to talk, and Job took it all to heart. Job made only two responses, both of which are pertinent to our discussion about faith.
Job had been humbled to the point of being speechless. He realized the foolishness of everything he had said, and he simply responded, “I have spoken but I will not answer. I will go no further.” God continued to question Job, who then responded, I know that You can do everything, And that no purpose of Yours can be withheld from You. You asked, “Who is this who hides counsel without knowledge?” Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
Keep in mind that God did not say that Job was wrong in what he said, but that he did not understand what he was saying. We are often like this—correct in what we say, without understanding its meaning or significance. Teachers know what it is like to have a student who has the right answer, but does not have the foggiest idea of what he is saying. As Job came to this realization, he said to the Lord, “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You. Therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes”
We must live through things like Job did, and become desperate as Job was. What made the difference for Job was that he hung in there and his faith of desperation carried him to the point where God showed up and Job could say, “I’ve heard about you, but now I’ve seen you.” It was an undeniable experience of God, and it changed his life. His vision of God was now so great that he realized what had happened to him didn’t matter. That is the deep faith of sufficiency.
In this new place of faith in God, Job said, “I repent.” How did he repent? He stopped pressing his case with God. He stopped trying to get God to make everything right. Having seen God, he let go of desperation. He saw that whatever needed to be taken care of would be taken care of. Job saw the greatness of God, and in that vision he was able to rest in the all-sufficiency of God-Yahweh.
This is why we need to live in clear view of the cross. When we look at what Christ did for us on the cross and keep that at the center of our vision, there are not many things that will bother us, or even matter at all. When we realize that Christ went willingly to the cross on our behalf, trusting in the greatness of his Father, it casts a transformative light on our own sufferings. That’s what Job saw. Job beheld the greatness of 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. This is what happened to Job. It is interesting to note what Job did not say after seeing God. In almost all the other epiphanies in the Old Testament, when someone saw God they would cry out, “I’ve seen God; now I’m going die! No man can see God and live!” Not Job. 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.
One of our problems—and I am particularly speaking to those of us who spend a lot of time in churches—is that we think that experiences like these are only for very special people. But that is not so. 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 did not arrive at his relentless faith in God’s all-sufficiency simply by trying to trust in the greatness of God. It was the result of two things: he sought the Lord and the Lord showed up.
We have this promise from Jesus: “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him” (John 14:23). Jesus means that he and the Father will be moving through and about us in our lives. He will speak to us. He will act on our behalf, and we will know the presence of God in our lives. If you are in doubt about this I beg you not to say, “Oh, well, I’m just supposed to believe.” Do not do that. Seek the Lord. Ask him to reveal himself to you and give you the faith of sufficiency that knows no bounds.
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. 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! Tell it to God! Let him hear from you. He is not nervous, he is not insecure, he is not worried. It will not upset him to hear you complain. It is one of the ways that we seek God. One lesson Job teaches us is that we can seek God by complaining. He said, “Oh, that I knew where I might find Him, that I might come to His seat! I would present my case before Him, and fill my mouth with arguments” (Job 23:3–4). He carried on and complained. It was his faith of desperation speaking, but it was faith. If with Job we say, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him,” and hang on, we will grow into the faith of sufficiency (Job 13:15).
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. That point is important. You cannot do justice to the teachings of Scripture unless you understand that if you do not rise and go after God’s blessing, God will rarely just give it to you. I say “rarely” here because at times God does decide he’s going to pour something good on you without being asked. But that’s unusual, and 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. Take this opportunity to join with the psalmist in saying, “Examine me, O LORD, and prove me; Try my mind and my heart” (Ps. 26:2). You may find yourself saying, “Wait a minute, God! I didn’t count on this!” That’s all right; I guarantee that once you’ve gone through it, you will never regret it. Job never regretted it. Job wanted God; he wanted to trust God. He persevered and came out trusting. 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. We simply know, beyond a doubt, that “the LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.”
If you’ve managed to make it all the way through my attempt at an “abridged” version of this personally impactful text, my hope and prayer is that it may have provided at least a glimpse of a spiritual concept that could warrant further investigation if so desired. That perhaps this has allowed you to consider faith, trust, and the sufficiency of God in a new light.
And, while this effort may have fallen woefully short in conveying how this view of trusting God buoyed, protected, and carried me/us through the events of February 27, 2024 and the months following, I can only again state, how thankful, grateful, and blessed beyond words I am, to have been resourced in such a miraculous way “for such a time as this.” Obviously, there are many aspects of the book which I did not include, so I would certainly encourage reading it in full, Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23 – February 26, 2019 by Dallas Willard.
I conclude with a final quote from the book: 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.