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By Bill Lawrence

President of  Leader Formation International

Have the mind among ourselves which was also in Christ Jesus . . .

                                                            Philippians 2:5

Go to the night when Jesus was with His men, at one point all twelve of them, but one was betraying Him and was at that very moment accepting thirty pieces of silver to turn Him over to the Pharisees and the Sadducees for a false trial and crucifixion. Only Jesus knew this, but He taught the eleven the Upper Room discourse, then walked from the Upper Room to the Garden of Gethsemane, having taken His three key disciples, Peter, James, and John, to His personal place of prayer to the Father, and poured our His heart to His Father. It was here that He was a human as He could be apart from the cross itself. And it was here that He cried out to His Father,

. . . if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not as I will, but as You will.

                                                            Matthew 26:39

What He was praying is, If it is possible deliver Me from the price We must pay to deliver men and women from the penalty for sin tell Me what it is, and I will pay that rather than the cross.

Nevertheless, . . . not as I will, but as you will.

That is the mind that Paul wants all leaders, not just the Philippians in their differences, but us in our leadership to have. He is saying, Don't pursue your will but pursue the will of the Father, Son, and the Spirit. Come together in the unity that the Lord God desires for you. Put Jesus first, not you!

You see, leadership is followership first, and that is always first.

I will say this over-and-over again: to be a leader you must first be a follower.

You cannot be a leader for Christ unless you are first a follower of Christ.

If Jesus could not be a leader for the Father unless He was first a follower of the Father through radical desperate dependence on the Holy Spirit, how can any of us be an exception? There are no exceptions. Period!

It's interesting to realize that the first task of a leader is to be a model of Jesus, to show your followers what Jesus is like in everyday life, in being holy, not like a priest or some high up superior, but as a very real mitty-gritty hands on task accomplishing caring individual who supports those who suffer and have great needs. The primary responsibility of a leader is to meet these needs and help them grow in Christ and so model Jesus to all followers.

Knowledge

Sacrifice--take up the cross

Resurrection

Enablement

Obedience

Discipleship

Repeated over-and-over again

I can never learn because every age has different demands

You never learn if

You only learn it in a new way

By Bill Lawrence, President of  Leader Formation International

My God, My God, Why have You forsaken Me?

                                                            Mark 15:14

Jesus, the Most Unwanted Son, forsaken by the Father. He was also. The most Unwanted Man in history. No one could ever be more unwanted than when the Man on the cross, as well as through His life.

But why? Why was He on that cross between two evil thieves? The answer is very simple: He did nothing.

He was not forsaken for what He did. He was forsaken for what I have done and for what you have done. For what we have done. For what all humanity has done. He died for our sin.

He took our place on that cross. That is where we belong, and that is what He prayed about on the night of the Upper Discourse when He taught His men--and us--how He wants us to live now that we are in His place on earth through the enablement of the Holy Spirit. But we could not do that if He had not become the most unwanted man in all of history.

Many have been unwanted throughout history, especially unjustly put on trial, condemned, and their lives taken from them as was the reality of Jesus. But only Jesus could do this for all humanity, in the place of all of humanity, and for the redemption of all of humanity. He is the only one who could give His life in our place and pay the price for all of us and make us pure before the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

But you must see Him as the utterly Unwanted One who willingly identified with us and became one with us. Consider what He did to be unwanted the same way we are unwanted and became wanted the same way we are wanted. He identifies with us as the Unwanted One and strives to make us the wanted ones if only we will trust Him as the One who died for us and now lives in us.

One of the realities that was unique about Jesus is the fact that He loved to, in a sense, "hang out" with the unwanted. For example consider the event John, His earthly best friend, described in chapter 4 of his Word in which he tells us about the event know as The Woman at the Well. It was a very unique moment in our Lord's life in which He deliberately met with an unwanted woman. He and His disciples were going up the west side of the Jordan River on their way from Jerusalem back to Galilee after a Passover, and they stopped in the city of Sychar. The disciples had gone into the marketplace to get some food for all of them, but Jesus hung out at a well, a public place where people came to get water and discuss what was going on in their lives, because Jesus wanted to establish a relationship with an unwanted person.  It was a natural place to connect with an unwanted one since that was all who would come to the well at that time of day. So it was that one of the most unwanted women came in mid-day, the only time she could come because of her lifestyle, since she had five husbands and a doubtful way of life and was well known by the leaders of the city. Thus it was that by establishing a relationship with the unwanted woman He could build a relationship with many in the city, even those who would naturally think they were righteous, when in fact they may well have not been.

It's amazing that this unwanted woman influenced many to trust in Jesus, as Johe wrote: many believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified (4:39). An utterly disqualified woman caused many to believe in Jesus under her impact. Little wonder that Jesus loved to hang out with the undesirable woman--she affected many, many, to put their faith in Him.

The Unwanted reached the unwanted. This should encourage you if you are one of the unwanted. It does encourage me.

There is one other place for the Unwanted I wish to go, this time in Galilee called Capernaum, where there were people who were not valued by the religious leaders but that valued so greatly that He called one of the men to be His disciple.

The man was Levi, regularly known as Matthew, the author of a book about Jesus written specifically for Jews. Once again Jesus was kind of "hanging out" with them, this time reclining at Levi's table during a meal with tax collectors and, sinners, hardly the kind of people that the synagogue leaders or the primary thinkers from Jerusalem would approve. His disciples were with Him even as they were influenced by His actions in Sychar. The point is that a large number of them were following Jesus. Levi presented it in his declaration of the life of Jesus as He wrote to make Him known.

Jesus called for Levi to follow Him, and he immediately left his tax booth and became a follower of Jesus. Amazing! A man well known--and hated--in Capernaum as a tax collector was now a follower of Jesus. This did not make sense. Further Levi had a gathering of all his friends--fully known of  as sinners--dining with Jesus and His disciples. The Pharisees simply could not stand this. No righteous man would ever do this. This was not acceptable. They asked Jesus's disciples how this possible. Why was He doing this they asked. Jesus heard what they asked and answered them directly.

This is why I came He said. Love cannot be a theory but only be a relationship. I came to hang out with sinners because the only way to reach sinners is to make your love for them clear and show them how this love can transform their lives and meet their needs. The life they have seen is really empty and ineffective and results in barren death and I want to show them what true fruit is and how what I offer them will meet their deepest needs and go to the deepest emptiness in their hearts. I want to show them that I will meet their most painful struggles and deliver them from futility and free them from the bondage that has chained them to eternal death by giving them eternal life. I want to give them the joy and fruit I created for them to possess. This is why He says I did not call the righteous, but sinners. So it is that He did not call those who think they are righteous but those who know they are sinners.

Jesus knew He was headed to the cross, and He knew this every day of His leadership. That's why He knew He was unwanted in every way: by the self-righteous who did not need His sacrifice, by the unaware who did not understand the true nature of sin, by the Father whose heart was broken by His sacrifice on the cross. But He is wanted by all who know of their need for His sacrifice.

It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those two are sick.

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.