Blog

Bill Lawrence

President of Leader Formation International

I am the Door; if anyone enters through Me,

he will be saved and go in and out and find pasture

John 10:9

For many believers the Christian life is a life of turmoil, confusion, and distress, not at all what they hoped it would be or expected it to be. They had great promise and anticipation. Every Sunday they go to church, listen to a sermon, and come out of church full of a commitment to live according to the message they just heard, but their life doesn't work out that way. Instead their lives are marked by struggle, confusion, distress, failure, and finally they simply accept the reality that life as they know it. It is an appearance, not reality, and the hope they thought it would be.

There are more believers like this than we want to admit. They know the truth, but they can't live the truth. And they are right. They can't live the truth. They simply can't live the truth. Jesus never ex-pected us to live the truth. When He commands us to live His way He doesn't expect us to live the way He commands us on our own. That is imperative. ON OUR OWN! He does expect us to live life His way, but not on our own. We cannot live the Jesus Way on our own. He never expected us to live His way in our own power. The problem is that large numbers are never taught this. Instead they are taught God's truth as if they can live it themselves and must live it on our own and they are failures because they can't. Of course they are failures. How could they be anything else? Everyone who tries to live Christ's way on their own will fail. Failure is inevitable. Such teaching is destructive and shameful. It is false and unjust. It is as shameful as the failure it produces. The problem is they do not teach the truth of what it means to have Jesus as our Shepherd, for Jesus is our Shepherd. You see as our Shepherd is more than our Provider for food and water. You must understand that He provides for us as our Enabler as well, as the One who enables us to live His way. He not only commands to live as He wants us to live. He also empowers us to live the way He lived because He lives it through us. The Good Shepherd takes us to food and strength, but food and strength are never just external realities. In fact they are more internal realities, the God-enabled strength and capacity to do what He wants us to do.

You see, those believers don't realize they are powerless apart from radical desperate dependence on Jesus. Apart from Him they are sheep without the Shepherd day-by-day. Instead they live among wolves who use them up at every turn, waiting for the right time to devour them, destroy them, eat them up, and move on to the next one they can take advantage of.

They think they are living the Christian life, serving the Lord, honoring Him and lifting up His name. Instead they are striving to obey Him and honor Him on their own, as if honoring Him is up to them. They truly don't know what it means to be inside the Door, to enter the fold constantly, to leave the fold on a daily basis and be led in green grass and to bear fruit His way by following Him while radically desperately depend on Him. But along they way they have much to do. They have business to do, conversations to have, wars to fight, struggles to face, relationships to build, service to carry out, gifts to exercise. So much to do. The reality is that no one of us is able to be fruitful on our own. It is not up to us to live the Christian life in our own. We need to pass through the Door, to become radically, desperately dependent on Him in all we do and He will work through us to bear His fruit through us.

What you may well realize is that, if you are one of these people I am describing, you may be following a false shepherd, one of the thieves, and not Jesus. So it is that you must turn from the false shepherd, but where do you go? What I want to do in this blog is to guide you through the Door into the fold of Jesus and then to follow Him constantly according to His word so that your life becomes alive with His fruit as He desires and not be pursuing emptiness with the death of fruitlessness. The evil one deceives so many even as he deceived Eve in Genisis 3, by promising her life only to give her death. You see it is Genesis 3 all over again. That is going on in so many churches in our time. These churches have beautiful buildings, wonderful music, full pews, busy committees, promising Sunday school classes, and fruitless harvests. Nothing could be more futile. Nothing could be less productive. So your life is empty and barren. Who wants to be like you? All you can reproduce is another Cain.

So when you realize that Jesus is The Door you know that you enter into His fold on a daily basis to be in touch with Him, to refresh your relationship with Him, to deepen your knowledge about Him, to grow in your radial desperate dependence on Him, to rest peacefully knowing He is for you and wants you to be close to Him. He will meet you in the fold to be refreshed in your awareness of His presence with Him and to sharpen your awareness of Him in your life. Certainly He will call your attention to sin and help you gain purity on a daily baseness. Then you get rest to get ready for a new day to follow Him and do His will as He desires. There will be new opportunities to serve Him and speak for Him and meet the needs of others and meet your own needs according to your challenges.

By doing this you will find the way to be strong in the Lord and to learn that by going through the Door you will learn to be desperately dependent on Him and that will lead you to abide in Him and to find the amazing ways He enables you to follow Him and be productive, to delight in His presence not only to lead you but to use you to enable you and to make you fruitful to accomplish His purposes. Nothing could be greater.

My hope is to guide you through the Door on a regular basis as you go in it and then out of the fold so you will learn to live His way according to radical desperate dependence on the Lord and to find peace, joy, fellowship, and accountability on a regular basis. I also hope you will find rest and peace on a regular basis as you live in His presence, experience His joy, and have fellowship with Him.

Yes, He is The Door and the One who guides us to His productive pastures, His peaceful fold, and His fresh water as we learn to experience the fulness of His power.

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

Philippians 4:13

Bill Lawrence

President of Leader Formation International

God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

Bill Bright

God loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life?

You're kidding! You have to be kidding if you think I'm going to believe that God loves me.

Think of how my life began and then tell me God loves me. I don't think He even knew I existed. I don't think He ever cared I existed let alone that He loves me. And He has a plan for me? Think about how I began and then tell me that He has a wonderful plan for my life. Do you know the story of my life? Tell me how great a plan He had in all of that. You're nothing but a joke if you're even that! God loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life! Huh! What a joke that is! That's not even funny. It's weird, wacky, off the wall! Do you think I'm that big a fool to believe that? Do you think I have money to give you or a way to honor you or a platform to exalt you? I'm not that big a fool that I'm going to fall for your little game!

Do you know where my life began? I'll tell you so you'll leave me alone.

It wasn't in a palace or a mansion or even a nice house. No sir! It was in north Philadelphia, in a row-house just off Girard Avenue not far from downtown, not too far from the colonial part of the city, but it definitely was not part of that or even a nice part of the city. Just part of rowhouse Philadelphia where the rowhouses are all small, ugly, alike, and unwanted. You only live there because you're on your way up (you hope) or because you're on your way down (too bad) or you're on your way to nowhere  (wherever that is).

That's where my life began. A winter night in mid-February 1938 when a man and a woman got to-gether for sex. Why? For fun? Or joy? Or money? As best I can tell it definitely wasn't for me! At least as it turned out it wasn't for me! But Me is what they got! Or at least Me is what she got.

She was Martha. Martha Heintzelman. She was beautiful from what my half-brother, Donald, told me. He knew her much better than I did since he was with her until he was about twelve years old and knew her, not only as the birth-woman I knew, but as a kind of mother. I never knew her that way, but I knew of her through him when I was twenty-one, so he told me about her long after I was adopted.

But let's go back to when I began, not when I was born, when most life stories start, but when I was conceived, because that's when my life really began. Yes, I was conceived in mid-February 1938 and born on November 19, 1938.

Now tell me God loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life when all you have about me is an un-wanted newborn taken to a rowhouse near Girard Avenue close to downtown Philadelphia, probably cared for much of the time by Martha's mother in Allentown about fifty miles north of Philadelphia. It makes sense that Martha went up there at times, but it appears she was a nothing mother. She got baptized and had me baptized at St. Peter's and Paul's Roman Catholic Cathedral close to the Art Museum near downtown Philadelphia when I was two years old. Along my  to adoption I was lost in Atlantic City and rode the trolley car to Willow Grove with Martha and a girlfriend in suburban Philadelphia and then Martha made her final statement when I was four moving toward five. If this little boy isn't adopted by the time he's five I'm going to put him in a Roman Catholic orphanage!

A Roman Catholic orphanage!

Are you telling me that God loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life when I'm headed to an orphanage? Are you telling me that I should believe that?

You know what?

You're right!

God does love me and does have a wonderful plan for my life--and for your life as well because God loves you as much as He loves me, no matter what is true about your life.

That's what I want to tell you about in this blog, From the Most Unwanted to the Most Wanted.

I want you to know what I discovered more years ago than I can count. Even though it looked as if God doesn't exist let alone that He loved me and wanted to be involved in my life or that He knew my name let alone cared about what is happening in my life, He truly wants to work in all that I do. I want you to know that God is alive and that He is engaged in all that is taking place in my life--and in yours. Nothing develops in us apart from His grace and His purpose even though we cannot see it until He makes it clear. And that can take more time than we can understand.

In my experience there were years before I could see what He was doing, years of time for me to grow, years of experience before I could teach God's purpose through others, decades to pass until I could put it all together and help others grasp God's grace in those they influence.

This is what I want to share with you as we work on this blog to grow from being the Most Unwanted to Becoming the Most Wanted. This will take time and thought and prayer and sharing with other's who know us as well as those who may not know us now but who may have insight into the grace of God and how He is working in our lives. Just remember that what we can read in a few verses took years for the writer to grasp. That is true in the lives of men like Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, Isaiah, and more. Step back, cry out for peace and patience, reach out for support from those around you, and endure with the strength that comes from the Holy Spirit.

Remember,

The only way to become the most wanted is to endure the

struggle over being the most unwanted through God's grace.

Bill Lawrence

President of Leader Formation International

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus . . .

                                                                        Philippians 2:6

You know what it's like to be deep in trouble, when you are divided from those you want to be one with but you can't be because the differences are great and the demands you face are too much to over- come. That was the division that marked the church in Philippi, one of the five vital cities that formed a semi-circle east of Ephesus, one of the unique, cultural, and commercial cities where Paul started churches as part of his evangelistic efforts before he was arrested by Roman authorities the first time. There would be a second and final time, but that was yet to come, and Paul had letters to write and churches to plant and many to reach before he was finished.

He had impacted Philippi with the gospel, planted a church, established leadership in that church, reached other cities, and then determined to go to Spain, but he was imprisoned before he could get there. While he was in prison there was a division in the Philippian church and he wrote a letter to the leaders of that church who read it to the whole church.

So it was that he exhorted the church in Philippi when he said,

                                             Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ . . .

                                                                                                Philippians. 2:6.

Let this mind be in you . . . This was a present tense imperative that was the only solution to their division and their differences. It was not a discussion or a debate or a difference that Paul supported. It had to be resolved, and it could only be resolved if it was done with careful consideration the Jesus way.  That's why Paul directed them to think it through wisely and effectively by sharing Jesus's mind.

He doesn't take a side in this division. He never stood with one side or the other. It seems that Paul did not see it as important for him to be for one perspective or the other. In other situations he does correct  untruth, but here his concern is only for the mind of Christ. He wanted the mind of Christ to be important for all. What he was saying was Think this through and grasp what Jesus would conclude based on His teaching. Humble yourselves and arrive at a decision after carefully consider-ation.

Realize that you can only arrive at Christ's conclusions if you study His teachings carefully, thoroughly, and completely, talking calmly, speaking to one another gently while abiding in Jesus and living according to John 15:1-15. You see, nothing captures the mind of Jesus like John 15:1-15, and that's the mind that He passed on to His men in the Upper Room, the mind that He passes on to us on the night of His arrest, the very mind He wants us to have.

The core of that mind is Love another. Ultimately the key summary of all His commands, the essence of all His commands, is that we should love another, and love even those we dislike. I repeat it even as He repeated it, because it is neither natural nor possible for us to love everyone, especially those who are unattractive to us.

The problem is that we are least likely to seek Christ's mind when we most need to have Christ's mind.  We are often convinced we are right and don't want to consider the possibility that we could be wrong. Or we may be unwilling to seek Christ's mind because it will cost us greatly. It may well be that we will lose recognition or have to face the reality that we have been wrong or unjust or made a mistake because we don't want to face a humbling failure. We would rather assert our success or be honored in some way even when we don't deserve it.  

If you have the mind of Christ you are also willing to die for those who have no righteousness because that's exactly what He did--and that's exactly what Paul faced. Even though he would be released and go on to Spain, he would be arrested a second time and taken back to Rome and finally be put to death for the Gospel. His faith would cost him everything, but only after he wrote several key messages to those he served throughout the Roman Empire.

So he wrote to the ones he reached in Philippi and his word was kept and kept and kept across cen-turies, and we read it today. Thus he exhorts us to have the mind of Christ. Learn the mind of Christ so we can Live the Christ way as He thinks and lives in us and through us. This is John 15:1-15 made real through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and all of John's Word.

The mind of Christ is the way He thought, He learned, He taught, He lived, He discipled, He died, He rose from the dead, He commissioned, and He enables us through the Holy Spirit today in the 21st century to live His way. It is how He works through us today. It is His work through all who serve Him now. And He does this all over the world. What Paul commanded from a Roman prison is still in force today through you. Think His way so you can live Christ's way.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ . . .

Philippians. 2:6.

By Bill Lawrence

President of Leader Formation International

To Learn 'n Live the Jesus Way we must honor the One who said " Let there be Light"

Let there be Light.

Let His light shine through you brighter and brighter until all who know you know that He lives in and shines through you.

He is Jesus and I am Bill Lawrence  and I want His light to shine through me and all who learn from me. My aim is to introduce a blog to you that I am calling Learn 'n Live the Jesus Way in which I teach biblical truth from both the Old and New Testament. Each blog will have a specific title based on the passage I am covering  . In each blog I want you to understand how Jesus lived so you can live the Jesus way and shine the Jesus light through you because He lives in you and through you if you know Him. And if you don't know Him I want to introduce Him to you through this blog and those that follow so you can have eternal life and begin to live His way through the Holy Spirit.

First I want you to know that Jesus learned the Word God,

He learned the Old Testament as He quoted it, proclaimed it, taught it, and behaved as it commanded.

He modeled what became the Gospels as He taught His men and seekers like Nicodemus (John 3) and the unexpecting questioners, like the woman at the well (John 4).

He demonstrated it in the book of Acts as He worked through the proclaimers in the Roman Empire.

He inspired the Epistles as He worked through Paul, Peter, James, and John as well as the writer in the book of Hebrews.

He dictated The Revelation to the Apostle John when he was on the island of Patmos, in his final word to us, recorded in the last book in the Bible.

This means that these writings are all  biblical truths, and the Christian life is an expression of God’s grace. And through God’s word I want you to experience what it is to know the total fullness of God’s grace because the Bible is all about God’s grace.

But I want to speak now of what I call Learn ‘n Live, that has a two-fold emphasis.

That is why I must focus on teaching biblical truth that you may already know or will be learning and at some point soon, I hope, teaching truth as marked by great insight, content that relates to life and reality as we know it. This is the truth that Jesus learned as a boy and lived in His daily life first as a carpenter and then as a disciple maker when He was one of us and learned  to understand life through His radical desperate dependence on the Holy Spirit.

Learn this insight, the core knowledge, the reality we need to mull over in our minds over and over again as we consider what the facts are and what they mean in our thinking from what these facts mean as they go deep in our thinking.

The second vital emphasis I want is for us to live according to the Old Testament as we face our deepest fears, the truth about us that we keep secret, especially from those we lead, because we cannot live the Jesus way unless we are free from our fears. We don't want anyone to know the struggles we wrestle with and won't face that we must face if we are to be used by Jesus. This is why Jesus called Peter Satan because Satan was having an impact in Peter, and Jesus wanted to deliver him from the evil one. The problem with this reality in our lives is that when we keep it secret we also commit sin, and it is keeping us from being used by the Lord as His leader, so we must face it. Otherwise He must make it known so we will desperately turn to Him and discover the freedom that is ours in Him. Thus He will treat us exactly the same way He treated Peter whom He called Satan, not because he was owned by Satan but because the evil one could use him unless he faced the struggles in his life. Thus the Lord, who sees, all will make our secrets known, not for our shame, but because Calvary was a public reality and the resurrection became public, and His grace is public, and He wants all He has done for you to be known by all to be public so He can use you publicly in powerful ways to make the difference He wants to make in the lives your influence. So it is that He treats us exactly the same way He treated Peter.

This is true because you are the are the ones who work to Learn ‘n Live the Jesus Way in

Satan’s World because living the Jesus way is the only way we can make a difference for Him in our generation.

Thus it is that I am introducing this blog to you.

Learn and Live the Jesus Way--and we do this in Satan's world

These two realities will constantly be in our thinking as I make them central to all I say. Thus it is that

             You are nothing becoming something by God’s grace.

             You are nobody becoming somebody according to God’s purpose.

             You are unvaluable becoming valuable through God’s enablement.

And the cross is at the center of all that our Lord does in our lives as He is working in us and blessing us and preparing us for eternity because He is coming to take us to be with Him forever.

So what else can we say but what we all want? We want Jesus to come. Think of what He said:

I am coming quickly!

 Amen.

Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

Bill Lawrence

President of Leader Formation International

The greatest crisis in the world today is a crisis of leadership

and the crisis of leadership is a crisis of character.

                        --Howard Hendricks

The greatest crisis in the world today is the heart of all that I am dealing in leaders now.

I am Bill Lawrence, once a pastor in San Jose, CA, then a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, and then an international mentor in multiple countries around the world. I have struggled to learn as much as I could and I now seek to share  some aspects of truth with all who will join me through three kinds of Blogs that I am calling Learn 'n Live the Jesus Way, From the Most Unwanted to the Most Wanted, and The Open Door.

Along the way I have discovered that the best way to lead is to stand and walk and talk on your knees. Prayer is the greatest weapon you will ever have, and I ask you to join me in prayer as we consider these three blogs designed to strengthen your weakness--the weakness you share with me because I too am weak--through the strength of Jesus as we are enabled together by the Holy Spirit. I will overview each of my blogs as I introduce them and then present them one-by-one as the Lord guides me in the indefinite future.

Learn 'n Live the Jesus Way

This is a serious Bible study done as I believe Jesus must have done, verse by verse, paragraph by para-graph, situation by situation related to life as we live it with an emphasis on the thorough consideration of multiple portions of the text in both the Old and New Testaments. I will introduce it in an overview blog and then go to Philippians 2 where we can focus on thinking in light of Paul's exhortation to think as Jesus thought. Nothing could be more relevant to leading the Jesus way of leading than to think as He thought. From there we will go to many different passages and see life and the needs we face as we consider the specific issues we face and strive to approach them His way and determine to carry out His will as we see it. We will study how He related to His men as He exhorted them, comforted them, confronted them, taught them, even pleaded with them to be His disciples. Lead those you are directing in the same way He did as you Learn 'n Live the Jesus way--and never forget you do this in Satan's world. He is clever, implying that he is giving life to each generation as he actually influences them to receive his reward of death.

From the Most Unwanted to the Most Wanted

I can never escape from the fact that I was once the most unwanted, a child with neither mother nor father, although it seemed that I somehow might have had both unseen in the silent Lord. Yet the only option for me was either adoption or an orphanage. Could there have been a worse fate than an orphanage? And then I had wonderful adopted parents who did not want me to grow up. They wanted me to stay the little boy I was when they brought me into their lives and they did everything they could to keep me that way. But the sovereign God who was silent through adoption remained publicly silent in my teen age years only to show up in power and impact in my twenties and demonstrate that He had been worked behind the curtains all along. And I know the same is true for you even though so much is missing in your life right now. I want you to know about God's grace and His faithfulness and the One who said, Let there be light, is working now even when you can't see Him to bring Amazing Grace in your life. My passion is for you--and my blog will say this over-and-over. Just remember that the rush by word now is often the introduction of the amazing action of the sovereign Lord YAHWEH.

The Open Door

Despite all that we know about God, there were times when life is senseless and confusing, and there is no word for anything that is going on. You just get up and go on through the day doing what you need to do with no insight or understanding of what YAHWEH is doing, just another day. How do you make any sense out of this? That's when you need to walk through the open door, close the door, move into the small room or down be-side your bed, and get down on your knees or at least sit down and wonder, Is there any reason for this? Why am I alive? What is the reason for all of this? Is there a in the word for any of this?

I will try at least to give you something to think about. Something to consider. Something that may give you some perspective that will help you or find someone close to you or even a stranger who has great needs you can meet and you discover that the greatest way you can meet your needs is to meet someone else's needs.

So I say to you go through the Open Door and see what need it meets or where it takes you. After all a new discovery often overcomes all your old needs.

A dark moment in life may take you to a small candle light or a sudden bright brilliance or a kind of insight or a question that you can think about or even an answer that meets your needs in a new way. Something done differently any way.

So those are the blogs that lie ahead for you. These are thoughts to mull over. Plans to consider. Ideas to brew over. Actions you can take for others. Maybe you can start blogs for yourself and those you influence in different ways. YAHWEH can use these insights and hopes you that could fulfill. Get started. Why knows how God can bring blessings in your life.