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Bill Lawrence, President of Leader Formation International

Sometimes the common can become too common. Certainly, this could be true of Psalm 23, one of the best-known passages of God’s word among us. Unless you consciously live with this psalm as your wisdom, your resource, your insight, and your daily desperate dependence on the LORD, it could become so common that it will lose its vibrancy. The LORD is the Covenant making, Covenant keeping LORD, the One who will meet every need in your life as you trust Him daily in radical and desperate ways. You must make this psalm alive in your life because you will have personal realities you never faced before, relationships you never experienced before, business deals you never made before, shortcomings you never struggled with before, hopes you never considered before, growths you never wrestled with before, even failure you never confronted before.

Life will be different, ups and downs, opportunities that challenge you which are new and you won’t know how to respond to them. But your Shepherd will guide you through it all. If you walk with Him you will be in green pastures beside still waters, yes, yes, and the shadow of death will cover you at times, but your cup will overflow before the full tables of bounty before your enemies, but always in the presence of YAHWEH. He never leaves you. He is only gone from you if you leave Him. Be certain to keep this psalm in your heart in fresh ways constantly.

This is your daily way of life if you make Psalm 23 in the heart of your life.

by Bill Lawrence, President Leader Formation International

It’s still early in 2023, the start of a new year with the left-overs of old commitments, old obligations, old problems, old factors from 2022 and earlier years. There’s a new and fresh walk with the Shepherd that has challenges and calls and opportunities and options before all of us. The great question we must answer is what will we do to serve as His shepherds when we lead His flock?

Do we have plans for these realities? Do we have solutions for past pains? Do we have plans for vital opportunities? Do we have supporters for our challenges? Do we have resources for all of these demands? How do we face all that is before us? Are we just going to walk away from the painful struggles before us—only to realize that they are not going to walk away from us? What will we do with the issues we don’t want to face but won’t go away? Have we even thought about them? Do we have goals for them? Or did we suddenly discover we have one problem—one big one—we weren’t even aware of until we received an unexpected call at the start of the year. How unfair can life be? Bad news during a fresh time. Give me a break! But life doesn’t give us breaks. Life only gives us reality.

Life is unfair. That’s why we must think of Psalm 23, a psalm that David wrote as a description of his experience. His life certainly was unfair with a father and brothers who did not care for him or King Saul who turned on him so he had to run for his life, and when he was king he faced war after war as well as a son, Absalom, who turned on him. He lived in constant turmoil and knew little peace, but he knew YAHWEH, his Shepherd. Think of how beautifully he described his walk with the Lord in Psalm 23 and see how this relates to your life. Do you realize how the Shepherd works in your life when you walk with Him? He spoke of green meadows and still waters and how his needs were constantly met, of fearing no evil because he always had his Shepherd with him, so death was never more than a shadow for him. His enemies never overcame him because his Shepherd had a celebration banquet in the very presence of his enemies, so they could never touch him. And he had the eternal reality of living in his Shepherd’s house forever. What could be greater? And that is true for us too.

Come with me and live this psalm and different passages also in 2023 with many leaders in God’s word as we learn how the Shepherd guides His flock in the reality of time into the certainty of eternity.

Let’s walk together through green pastures, beside still waters, in the shadow of the valley of death, before the table of our enemies, into the house to His very eternal life.

                        YAHWEH is MY Shepherd . . . I will dwell in the house of YAHWEH forever.

by Bill Lawrence, President of Leader Formation International

The Twenty-third Psalm is The Leader’s Psalm, David’s psalm, one he may have created as a shepherd, that he sang over and over again throughout his leadership as the King and when he was a warrior. It must have been a vital verse for him.  For that reason I offer it to you as a word for all who lead in these seasons of injustice as Jesus walks beside you in your season of darkness.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

 I fear no evil, for you are with me.

Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

                                                Psalm 23:4

For our brothers and sisters in Ukraine under

the attack of the evil one from one who walks with you

Today I speak to you as a pastor to pastors.

If I could be with you as you serve your frightened sheep, the suffering, the crying, the questioning, the suffering—all who wrestle in the most difficult times of their lives—I want to tell you what the ultimate Shepherd is saying to you. You have so many overwhelmed hearts, so many who carry such terrible weights, who have such penetrating pain and face such undeserved injustice. You must bear all of this with your sheep. And yet as pastors you have your own families, your wives, your children, and even your aging parents. Still you are their shepherd, the one who turns to follow the Chief Shepherd.

So I come to you to support you in some way, with words that I hope will encourage and help you and give you strength from the One who gave all for you. May it be that the sheep you lead can find a way to follow His word as you follow Him, the Chief Shepherd who walked the same path of pain for us and paid the price for sin that we will never have to pay. We will pay for following Him, but never for our sin, and through us we trust Him that many others will know the forgiveness He has given us.

What you must understand is that the evil one who attacked Him now attacks you who follow Him who enter the valley of death with Him. The Lord walks alongside you and protects you now. He can never take you down even if the shadow takes you from the struggles of life into the glory of eternity without ever actually taking you down into the damage of death. This is what the death of Jesus on Calvary and His resurrection brings to us.  This is what I would say to you if I could be with you and what I say to you now. Read my word to you as I take you to Psalm 23:4. There is no word greater than this, no certainty truer, nothing more absolute, nothing more certain.

So I say to you no matter what you face that you must do what this verse says.

Follow the Leader

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

On our way to eternal life as we follow the Leader, we will enter into the shadow of death.

This is not a way we would choose, but it is a way we will all face. Many of us have already walked through the valley of death with Him as we have walked with Him even when we didn’t know it. I certainly have. When I was five years old I entered this valley when I had pneumonia and lived on the edge of death for three weeks, but the Good Shepherd took care of me through the desperate prayer of my parents and the newly created sulpha drug that delivered me and brought me to health. And once again, only five years ago I had a fall that took me to the edge of death, yet God delivered me from death to life through prayer and the amazing wisdom of medical experts enabled by God.

Many of you have had the same experience in very different ways.

Now large numbers of you face this same risk as the Russians rush in on you. They come to take you and those you shepherd. They tear upon your fold, strive to destroy your safe place, tear apart your secure life, and destroy all you have built. What must you do? Can you take as many as possible to a safe place, perhaps in Poland or Romania or even further? What of those who are weak and in deep need? Can you protect them? The answers to these and other questions are confusing and uncertain.

But we must remember that we experience only the shadow of death, not the destructive grip of death. Yet if death takes you, He takes you to the banquet of glory He has prepared for you that lies ahead of you as He promised.

Those who know Jesus will never know the true grip of death, the choaking grasp of death, the tear that takes us down and rips life out of us. We are never torn away from life. Death never grips us or holds us or rips us away from eternal reality. We are never dead. Our bodies are, but our hearts, our souls, our spirits, our eternal realities never ever take is into any true loss of any kind. Instead, we are transformed from the temporal to the eternal. And those who follow Jesus with us must know this. He walks beside us, in the shadow of death, between death and us. He is always real to us no matter what we face. Call upon Him and lead them to call upon Him, and they will know His presence and His protection.

This is why we only enter the shadow of death and never death itself no matter how real it appears to be. We die, but we are never dead. Our bodies die, yet our selves are never dead. We only know eternal life through the grace of God.

Those who follow the Shepherd with us must know this. You must constantly tell them this.

This is not a false truth. This is the greatest truth we can ever have and give to those we shepherd. There is a dark valley, but there is a brilliant celebration for all who trust Him. Putin can never take this away from us!

Fear no Evil

I fear no evil, for you are with me.

Fear will come upon us when we first face death.

You cannot help but feel fear. It is all around you. The reality of what you face will come upon you and you cannot avoid the reality of what is happening. I have spent days thinking about what is happening and I have seen the events become worse and worse until now I see buildings where you have lived being destroyed, beautiful buildings being reduced to ashes, hospitals twisted into places of pain rather than sources of strength, husbands and wives weeping as they are crammed onto trains and separated, perhaps forever. I see places where I have been now attacked, men and women whom I have served being threatened, all because of one evil man. Just one evil man! One sinful evil man! How amazing can the evil one be. Perhaps you have noticed that I have not capitalized the term “evil one.” I choose not to dignify this term nor that demon. I will not honor such an evil person in even such a small way. No evil person is worthy of even a capital letter.

Yet it is a battle not to fear the evil of our world, especially the evil of our time that would destroy this great country of Ukraine that has become the strongest testimony for Christ in Europe in our day. The country has grown to become a major center for the cross of Calvary, the core of the good news of Jesus of Nazareth, the proclaimers of His message, so strategic that the evil one has acted against its true greatness.

So we must turn from our weakness in ourselves to radically dependence on the Shepherd we follow, the One who walks beside us in the shadow of death. We carry the cross even as He did and bear His fruit for so many who face His sacrifice. Pray for them as they walk untouched through that dark, dark valley of death to the glory that awaits them, whether it is the glory of time or eternity.

Find all Comfort

Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

How can we have comfort as we struggle in the days of darkness?

We share many days of darkness as I write this, the valley of the shadow of death. Still, Jesus is beside us. While we are full of fear, we must trust Him, and He frees us from the fear of death. So we can be free from fear because have His rod and His staff. Yet you have never needed the Shepherd’s tools and the Shepherd’s comfort so much. What else can you count on? How can you count on it? The Russians are all around you! All you have are the weapons of the Cross and the tools of the Shepherd. All that Jesus carried on His back is now on your backs and all that He used are in your hands, as you remain radically dependent on Him. I cannot be physically with you, but I am prayerfully with you, and I call on scores and scores of brothers and sisters around the world to join with you to support you and walk with you as you carry that Cross on Calvary’s road, even on the Ukrainian Way. But remember, you walk on the Resurrection Way also, the Jesus way, the way Jesus walked as He went to the Cross and then was carried to the grave and then rose to the resurrection and finally arose to His throne. He rules even over Russia. He rules over Russia, and He will carry you with Him either through life or through death to resurrection, but always to worship at His throne and His glory. In this darkest valley you must be full of hope even as we are for you and with you.

What weapons do you have?  Some rifles, some grenades, perhaps some artillery, maybe you will get some fighter planes or some rockets. Who knows? But maybe you will have none. Remember that David was often without weapons in his battles, or at least with adequate weapons or enough weapons, but God always out weaponed by His enemies, even when He had no weapons. We do not know what He is going to do, only that prayer is one of the greatest weapons of all. And who is greater than the Holy Spirit? We do not know what Jesus is going to do and we do not know how He is going to win, but we do know that He will defeat His enemies in His time, yet at great cost, the cost of the Cross.

David, the poet, knew much about battle. After all, he was a warrior, a king who fought many wars. The first one we know of was for few short moments with the giant Goliath, whom he defeated with apparent ease because his giant faith overcame the giant’s armor. Yet he faced many other struggles, some of which were in himself with his pride and his lust, even greater than with Goliath. And some of them he lost because he didn’t face them the same way he faced them with the Philistine because he lacked trust in the sovereign Yahweh who was always on his side. How tragic it is not to remember that God is constantly on our side, especially when we suffer. It is then that we learn about resurrection.

There is suffering at this time and Calvary is always more than we want to pay, but His triumph is always resurrection, yet at great cost, but only through Jesus, who walks in this dark valley with us, and we have His weapons, the weapons of the Cross that brings us to resurrection and prayer.

The chief weapon is prayer, our cry out to the Lord who also cried out in prayer to His Father from the cross. But now we have what He has finished. His work is done. He not only has the weapon of prayer but also the weapon of His very resurrection, His defeat of the evil one, the triumph over death and the eternal victory of lasting life. He has won the war! No matter what battle we face, if we cry out to Him and fight with the weapons of prayer and resurrection we will have His presence, even when the battle is overwhelming.

You walk through the valley of the shadow of death. You didn’t choose it or cause it or create it, you just suddenly enter into it with those who unexpectedly enter it. Actually, I have not entered into this. My far away friends, my brothers, my fellow pastors, those I served but never knew except as I spoke to you when I met with you at Kiev and in other parts of Ukraine, those men whom I taught from God’s word, you are the ones who are now in the valley of the shadow of death, and I enter it with you as I can. If I could, I would walk with you against the evil one and his agents in this time. I want to walk with you as best I can, which is not very much, but God’s word takes me there, and I want His truth to sustain you. What little I have I give you, but while I have little, He has all, and He gives all to you. May His weapons and His tools be your strength in this terrible time

As He said,

I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.

P.S. This is a message of the word I sent to the pastors I served in Ukraine to support them in their effort to help those who struggle so much from the injustice of Putin in Ukraine. It is all I can do to stand with them in these overwhelming days. Please pray for these pastors and make every effort you can to stand with the Chief Shepherd to stand beside the shepherds of the suffering sheep in that terrible nation. The evil one has done all he can to attack the Cross and overcome the Resurrection, but no one and nothing can overcome what the human Jesus did, the One who now reigns eternally on His divine and holy throne. Cry out for them even as He did from the Cross and has commissioned us to do from the mountain in Galilee. He rules over Putin. No one can overcome Him! Go and live The Leader’s Psalm in His will.

by Bill Lawrence, President of Leader Formation International

Short cuts along zigzag lines over wilderness wanderings to Christ’s will

Jesus, the Leader, was real. Radically, totally, absolutely real. This means He was fully God and fully man in the same person.

However, He emptied Himself of His divine prerogatives and was absolutely free, not of His deity, but of His rights as God, His self-reliance and His own will. He limited Himself and accepted human limitations and human needs, yet without sin. He was fully man with no sin. He was Genesis 1 without Genesis 3.

He absolutely needed the Father and depended on the Holy Spirit. He was exactly what God expected man to be before man sinned. Now some may react to the word absolutely, and I understand if they do. I don’t mean absolutely as in out of control; I mean absolutely as in the deepest need possible. We must not be afraid to recognize Jesus as human, as one of us in every way but sinful. That’s what Christmas is all about; that’s what His humanity is all about; that’s what the incarnation is all about. Jesus was fully and totally identified with us. He was not like the father who plays with his children and pretends they are bringing him down to the ground, laughing with great joy that they can take this bigger than life figure down to their level, although both children and father know this is not the case. The incarnation was not a make-believe event for Jesus; it was the most real historical event ever. Thus we know that His infancy was real, boyhood was real, His need for prayer was real, His limits were real, His testing and temptation were real, His suffering was real, His pain was real, His death was real, His resurrection was real. Everything about His humanity was real. Period.

In fact, His testing and temptation not only were real; they were imperative. His testing and temptation are what made the wilderness imperative for Jesus, and if the wilderness was imperative for Him, how can it not be even more imperative for us? So it was that the Holy Spirit impelled (Mark 1:12) Jesus to go into the wilderness so He could prove Himself as the Messiah. Long after Moses built the tabernacle and Solomon built his temple and Herod built an even greater temple, the wilderness remained God’s original temple, the place where His worshippers went to meet Him in solitude and isolation. God’s presence made the wilderness holy, but where holiness is, evil is not far away because evil has a compulsive need to combat holiness and seek to replace it with its own destructive desires. As a result, Satan was not far away when Jesus entered the wilderness.

The wilderness was an awful place, the place most impacted by the curse of sin in the physical world, a place full of nothing that was holy, just as sin that promises everything ultimately is full of nothing that is holy. It was Jesus with the wild animals growling and roaring about; Jesus with the angels supporting and encouraging; Jesus with the Holy Spirit enabling and sustaining Him; Jesus with the Father praying and communing with Him; Jesus with Satan, testing and tempting Him. Forty days in solitary isolation without food, forty demanding days that tested Him as Messiah and led to intense temptation. Testing and temptation always go together, and at the end of those forty days, Satan came to tempt Him directly with three of the greatest leader temptations any of us can experience and all of us feel every day.

The first temptation—turn these stones into bread—was the temptation to self-reliance, to take things into His own hands and meet His needs apart from the Father. It was a temptation to doubt the Father and to act on His own because the Father was not acting quickly enough. In His response, “Man shall not live by bread alone,” Jesus says some things are more important than bread, even after forty days of fasting and trusting the Father, and obeying God is one of those things.

The second temptation was the temptation to self-protection, to take care of yourself and keep yourself safe no matter what you face. But Jesus said, “Put not the Lord your God to the test.” In other words, do not put yourself in danger, but know that Yahweh your Elohim will protect you at all times no matter what danger you face. Safety is never a matter of self-imposed danger but self-disciplined trust.

And the third temptation was the temptation of self-promotion. Make yourself successful, self-exalted. How common a failure this is among leaders in our day. So many fall into this failure. They seek self-recognition and actually want worship from others. No failure is more destructive than this shame. To lead you must model for all what it means to lead from your knees and cry for forgiveness from the cross and resurrection out of the grave. Then do as Jesus did and lead His way from His grave through Him out of death through His life into His glory. This is Resurrection Leadership.

Inevitably, we take short cuts to long ways that lead us to zigzag lines along wilderness wanderings. What looks like a short cut turns out to be the longest way possible. Taking control of life and relying on ourselves to meet our needs virtually results in a long wander, rather than a short sojourn. We turn into a confusing wilderness. For Jesus, it was far more important that He trust the Father’s good will than that He turn to the ill will of the Evil One. Often we fail to realize that when we take things into our own hands as leaders and rely on ourselves, we actually turn to the destructive will of the Evil One and reap his tares rather than the Father’s fruit. After all, a starved Messiah was of no use to the Father, even as a failed leader cannot glorify the sovereign Lord or lead His people. It’s all a matter of trusting Him and fasting a little while longer if that’s what is needed. By saying no to the self-reliant Evil One who tempted Him, Jesus trusted His Father and proved Himself worthy of being the crucified Messiah. And for us as leaders not to trust ourselves but to trust Jesus turns us away from self-reliance and proves us worthy to lead the Jesus way, the way that takes us to the cross and the grave, then through His resurrection to the glory of His purpose and His power. Nothing could be more demanding nor more effective.

The death of the leader means broken leadership, but broken leadership means resurrection leadership. What could be greater?

by Bill Lawrence, President of Leader Formation International

Matthew 28:18-20 Again and Again

All authority has been to Me in heaven and on earth,

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations . . .

Jesus commands us to be leaders who obey Him by reproducing His kind of leaders over-and-over again. In fact, our lives are all about doing what He tells us to do by using our opportunities to accomplish what He directs us to pursue. So, if you are a business leader or an educator or a politician or a pastor or an athlete or a coach or an artist or a draftsman or a factory worker or a husband or a wife or whatever your role in life is, you are most of all a disciple-maker, His kind of leader. In other words, you give yourself to the Lord to be used by Him to be His instrument to make those you influence His reproducers for Him. This is your constant purpose in all that you are doing with your life. You see, your task in life is to form everyone you influence to be His instrument wherever He puts you. This means it is our task to do what He wants done with His life in us: to make that man or woman we influence His kind of disciple-maker as a result of His life through us.

There will be many growing factors that will mark your life and make the way you relate the same way Jesus related to those He influenced when He was here on earth. That is exactly what He wants to mark us now, as He commanded. Consider the implications of His commands for you as His follower.

Jesus wants His followers to have growing relationships.

Just as He had growing personal relationships with those He called to Himself, so He wants us to have growing relationships with those we call to follow Him with us.  There was intense growth between the initial relationships of Jesus and the twelve, and that is what He wants between us and those we call to follow Him. Even though we do not leave our regular way of life as Jesus and His men did, we will often be together as friends or in meetings and business situations, engaged in ministry opportunities and individual contacts. In all of these we help them grow as disciple-makers.

You help them become more effective as Bible teachers.

You will enable them to become increasingly more useful as Bible teachers by attending their classes if that is what the Lord wants them to do, seeing them teach, evaluating them in appropriate ways, identifying their strengths and pointing out their limitations, helping them understand how they could be more effective, and equipping them to become the kind of communicators God wants them to be. This would be a great encouragement for them.

Prayer, prayer, and more prayer.

As nothing was more important than prayer to Jesus, so nothing can be more important than prayer to you and to the men and women you influence. It’s amazing, isn’t it, that prayer was so important to Jesus and was central in His life. After all, He prayed every time He had an opportunity to pray. When He ate, when He acted, but especially when He was going to walk on water and call His men to follow Him in an intense way, He spent hours praying. And when He knew He was about to die for our sins, He asked His Father if He could avoid death, but He could not. He taught His men to live and die as He lived and died: by prayer. Everything is built around prayer.

Have honest interaction, confrontation, and intense relationships as necessary 

If you consider the kind of relationships Jesus had with His leaders as He formed them, it will be more than evident to you that they became very intense and open. He did not hold back from facing them, from holding them accountable, from being confronted by them, from being questioned by Peter or John or even Judas who betrayed Him. It will be the same with all whom you influence to be the disciples of Jesus and you must strive to make them the kind of leaders Jesus wants to use.

Any leader who forms future leaders according to the biblical principles of His life will produce increasingly effective leaders who will equip even more productive leaders until the body of Christ will do what God created it to do and reach the world with the good news concerning Jesus. What happened in the first three hundred years after the cross will happen today, even in a resistant world, if only leaders will have the heart of Christ, a heart that desires to form leaders who lead this way.

So we must lead as Jesus led if we are to be the kind of disciple makers Jesus was. This is the Christian life and Christian leadership, and nothing else is. The Christian life is misunderstood in our day, as it has been in much of history. It has been taken more as a way of life than the purpose of life.  It is seen as the means of life rather than as the very purpose and end of life. That is not how Jesus saw His life. These other things—fishing, being a carpenter, earning a living, all the other ways of life—were just that: the ways of life. Life for Him was the way He formed His followers and made them the men and women who accomplished His lasting, eternal purpose: becoming His disciples, His ultimate followers, His different makers, those who carried out His purpose, accomplished His purpose, and achieved His aims, demonstrated His rule on earth. This is what we are about.

He is the King of Kings, the Ruler of All, the Lord of Lords, and we are His servants.

For this reason,

He sent us to do what He has done: Form Leaders! 

This is leadership.