Blog

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.

by Bill Lawrence, President of  Leader Formation International

Fear not, the prophet says to the leader.

Even when everything goes well, fear dominates so many leaders and they are afraid.

In seasons of prosperity, we worry that financial security will go away unexpectedly. In times of health, we constantly seek to avoid illness. We tend to think that good times will fail suddenly, and bad times will last forever. In moments of safety, we anticipate accidents. When things go badly, we expect them to stay bad. In those moments, if we own a company, we shrink it as much as possible, break the lease in any way we can, cut as many workers as we think must, and get rid of as much debt as practical. We may not be very effective, but we’re safe.

It makes sense to think this way because our fears are often true, and fear is God’s way of calling us to seek His faithfulness. But why is it that we focus on what we cannot do, rather than what God can do? Is there another way to respond to the struggles of life beside fear? How about faith? Remember, it is one thing to be sensible, but it is another thing entirely to be fearful. We become fearful because we think everything is up to us. Silent trust is more valuable than self-trust.  It’s up to us to solve our problems, it’s up to us to overcome our struggles, it’s up to us to make everything right. That’ what we say—and that’s how we fail.

Isaiah’s point is that nothing is up to us. Everything is up to the One who is with us and who works in and through us. We trust ourselves while we talk about God, but God wants less talk about Him and top trust in Him. Fear is either uncontrolled by us or totally in control of us, but it’s not trust in God. When we give up to it fear completely controls us, even when we pretend that we control it. Fear dominates everything, decides everything, and destroys everything. Fear, fear, fear, nothing but fear determinates everything and defines everything. Fear is the worst reality we face, much greater than the reality of God when we give into it and fail to trust our Lord.

Yet God says, “Fear not.” Why shouldn’t we fear? Because just as God restored ancient Israel when the nation changed its mind and repented, so He will restore us if we turn from going our way to living His way by trusting Him.

As leaders, we must face the tensions of life without fear and learn to see fear as a reminder that life is bigger than we are but not bigger than God is. Understand that fear has two dimensions, one that harms us and one that helps us. The harmful side of fear assumes that life is up to me, and I, as a leader, must overcome the struggles that we all face, but it’s more than we can overcome, and that’s why we are so afraid of being a leader. However, there is the other side of life and leadership, the side in which we must worship God as we fear Him because He is out to deliver us. This is the side we must show our followers as leaders, the side that moves all of us forward and takes us into deeper and deeper joy and fulfillment. This is when we discover that God acts on our behalf to enable us to overcome our struggles through His resources.

I AM is with us.

This is where God makes Himself known as the great I AM, and we can be free from fear when we remember that the great I AM is with is. Because of this we can think of the fear of God in a radically different way from how we often think of it. When we realize God is the great I AM we worship Him and recognize His greatness. We realize how much He is for us. When we truly recognize God’s greatness, fear does not relate to the hard times of being a leader, but to the greatness of God that helps us lead His way. He can guide us through the hard moments and use us to lead His followers—His followers—to move effectively through His intended hard ways. Or even the unnecessary but avoided hard ways we bring on ourselves. This means that fear refers to our reverence or awe that results in righteous behavior and the exaltation and wonder that brings to our lives. God is on our sides and His greatness is for us, so fear does not mean terror but triumph. Thus, when we say, “Fear not,” we do not speak of terror because it is against us but of confidence because God is for us, and we have nothing to doubt since this is true. We have no reason to fear life or what causes uncertainty in our lives. Remember that to fear God is not to be afraid of Him but to honor Him, to exalt Him, to praise Him, to raise Him up—and to depend on Him when we are utterly powerless. That is fruitful fear.

No matter what you face as a leader I AM is with you, beside you, behind you, under you, around you, and for you. He leads us out of the darkness of our sin and into the brightness of His grace You will never be on your own because the Jesus who died on the cross for you now lives in you and works through you as you trust Him. This is what makes all of us one of His leaders, one of us who leads His way in His will in all He does through us.

So, we say to all the Lord’s leaders,

Fear not for I am with you—but that means He is with

you, behind you, under you, around you, and for you.

Matthew 28:18-20 Again and Again

by Bill Lawrence, President of Leader Formation International

Jesus commanded us to be leaders who obey Him by reproducing leaders over and over again. In fact, our lives are all about doing what He told us to do by using our opportunities in life to accomplish what He directs us to do. So, if you are a business leader or an educator or a political leader or a pastor or an athlete or an artist or a draft man or a factory worker or whatever your task is, you are most of all a discipler and a disciple maker. 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 as well. This is your constant purpose in life, all that you are doing with your life in all that you do.

This means that 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 followers.

Jesus wants His followers to have growing relationships with our followers.

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 as well as in meetings and ministry and individually.

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, 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. As His relationships and Bible teaching were to Jesus, nothing was more important than prayer to Him. 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. 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 Jesus accomplished was built on prayer.

Have an honest interaction, confrontation, and intense relationship as necessary

If you consider the kind of relationships Jesus had with His leaders as He formed them, it is 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, but only as they know prayer is the core of your life.

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 the most resistant parts of the world, if only leaders will have the heart of Christ, a heart that every Christian leader is to needs leaders who lead this way.

He sent us to proclaim what He has done—reedeem a dying world, yet only as a result of prayer!

By Bill Lawrence

President of Leader Formation International

Philippians 2:5-11

1. To be Christ’s kind of leader we must become followers, something few of us do naturally.

Few of us realize that Jesus was the ultimate follower.  We may know this theologically because the Bible speaks on many occasions that He submitted Himself to the Father, especially in the Garden when He accepts the cross when He would rather not be crucified if He could escape that awful reality (Mt. 26:39, 42, 44), but it was God’s will that He drink the cup. Yet, many fail to realize that He was the Lord of all because He was always in total submission to the Father, and that He could only be Lord of all by being submitted in every way.

Jesus is our Leader because He was God’s follower, and we can only be His leader if we are His followers even as He was.

2. To be a leader we must do what Jesus did (Phil 2:5-11):

     Empty ourselves

     Humble ourselves

     Sacrifice ourselves

We only know His resurrection as we know His death.

We must turn from our longings for power, control, recognition, and all the other elements that drive us and trust Him to raise us up according to His will even as He trusted the Father to raise Him.

Ultimate humility alone meant radical exaltation.

3. To be a leader we must be a seeker, pursuing Jesus at every turn through His word and desperate dependence on Him.

The amazing reality is that Jesus knew the word—the very word He fulfilled, the very word He taught and obeyed, the very word He declared and proclaimed.  The very word His listeners knew to be the word of God was His word. in every way and God’s word made Him a leader. It is when we treat the word the same way He did that we become His kind of leaders.

4.To be a leader we must be a worshipper of Jesus, bowing before Him, exalting and honoring Him, always focusing consciously on Him in every relationship I have, every decision I make, and every action I take.

It’s amazing that the Son of God became a man of God, a human being in the most human way possible, an active worshipper of God. It’s not only that He went to the synagogue, although He did that.  Jesus also maintained the rituals of God, the Passover and Yom Kippur and all the other Jewish annual events. He fasted and feasted, He prayed intently, and He sought the Father whenever He could and did not lead without praying.

Worship was at the very heart of His leadership. If He did not worship, He did not lead. If worship is not the core of all you do, you are not His kind of leader. You may say what He said, you may do what He did but if you do not seek to influence others as He did and do not worship as He worshipped, you cannot lead as He led.

5. To be a leader we must serve Jesus in every way by being focused on His commission no matter where He puts us or what it costs us.

Jesus came with a commission. He was sent by the Father to keep the Father’s word. He was empowered by the Spirit to fulfill the Father’s will. He came to accomplish the Father’s love by redeeming us. He has given us the same commission He had to fill the world with His good news: God loves you and offers His eternal life to all who will trust His beloved Son.

We now have the commission that Jesus had, and He acts to accomplish it through us.

This is why we are leaders.

Thus, I am His kind of leader when I am His kind of follower, a humble person committed to His word, His will, and His ways. Stunning that to be His kind of leader I must be His kind of follower. That is contrary to everything we know about leadership in our world. Those around us think that to be a leader is to be in charge, to be over others, and this is true in many ways, except for one way. It is not God’s way. To be God’s kind of leader we must be the Jesus kind of leader: under Him the same way He was under God. Constantly under Him even to the point of carrying a cross and dying to everything but the Father’s will. This means that the humility of God’s kind of death results in God’s kind of life.  And this makes you the Jesus kind of leader.

How are you doing?