Blog

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.