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Pastor Bill was born on April 13, 1953 in 
1973 he studied Buddhism,
Hinduism, and practiced yoga and meditation. The time came where he felt the
emptiness and dead end of these worldviews and gave up his investigation of the
east and began reading the Bible. On December of 1974 he gave his life to Jesus
Christ.
Pastor Bill entered the
ministry in
Bill has lived in
Pastor Bill is an avid
surfer. He learned to surf on Oahu in
Bill, along with his
wife, Debi is an avid fitness buff as well. He walks
daily as well as regularly lifts weights. He loves to read {you might call him
a bibliophile!} and has a great interest in Art, History, Music, and Culture.
He is an avid baseball, basketball, and hockey fan. He enjoys watching movies,
especially history and sci-fi movies.
He graduated from Melodyland School of Theology with a Christian Studies
Diploma in
Bill considers himself Reformed and God-centered in his
theology. He has been greatly influenced by John Piper, Jonathan Edwards,
Augustine, and C.S. Lewis. His passion is to make God supreme in his life, in
his church, and among the nations.
TALKING ABOUT BOOKS
This article inspired me to devote most of my reading in the year 2000 to the
biographies of great Christians. I read over 45 biographies last year and my
life is indebted to all those who ran the race with perseverance before me and
especially to John Piper who has taught me to be a "Christian
Hedonist". Read this article and listen well to this great wisdom. Pastor
bill
Brothers, Read Christian Biography By John Piper
Hebrews 11 is a divine mandate to read
Christian biography. The unmistakable implication of the chapter is that, if we
hear about the faith of our forefathers (and mothers), we will "lay aside
every weight and sin" and "run with perseverance the race that is set
before us" (12:1). If we asked the author, "How shall we stir one
another up to love and good works?" (10:24), his answer would be:
"Through encouragement from the living (10:25) and the dead"
(chap.11). Christian biography is the means by which "body life" cuts
across the generations.
This fellowship of the living and the dead
is especially crucial for pastors. As leaders in the church we are supposed to
have vision for the future. We are supposed to declare prophetically where our
church should be going. We are supposed to inspire people with great
possibilities. Not that God can't give vision and direction and inspiration.
But He also uses human agents to stir up His people. So the question for us
pastors is: Through what human agents does God give us vision and direction and
inspiration? For me, one of the most important answers has been great men and
women of faith who, though dead, are yet speaking.
Christian biography, well chosen, combines
all sorts of things pastors need but have so little time to pursue. Good
biography is history and guards us against chronological snobbery (as C.S.
Lewis calls it). It is also theology - the most powerful kind - because it
burst forth from the lives of people like us. It is also adventure and
suspense, for which we have a natural hunger. It is psychology and personal
experience, which deepen our understanding of human nature (especially
ourselves). Good biographies of great Christians make for remarkably efficient
reading.
Since biography is its own best witness, let
me tell a little of my own biographical encounter with biographies. Biographies
have served as much as any other human force in my life to overcome the inertia
of mediocrity. Without them I tend to forget what joy there is in relentless
labor and aspiration. I have devoted more time to the life of Jonathan Edwards
(good biography of O. Winslow) than to any other non-biblical person. Before he
was 20 years old Edwards wrote 70 resolutions which for years have fired my
work. Number 6 was: "To live with all my might, while I do live."
Number 11: "When I think of any theorem in divinity to be solved,
immediately to do what I can towards solving it, if circumstances do not
hinder." Number 28L "To study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly and
frequently, as that I may find, and plainly perceive, myself to grow in the
knowledge of the same."
When I came to be pastor of
T.H.L. Parker (who, by the way, has spent
most of his 40 years' ministry in country parishes) published a short study of
Karl Barth in 1970 which I devoured in my middler year in seminary. It had a tremendous impact on me
because of two simple sentences. One was: "That evening Barth began [writing] a pamphlet which he finished the next
day, a Sunday [13,000 words in a day!]," I responded, "If neoorthodoxy merits such phenomenal labor, how much more
orthodoxy!" The other sentence was, "Barth
retired from his chair in
Recently I have been greatly encouraged in
my own pastoral work by Warren Wiersbe's Walking with
the Giants and Listening to the Giants. The main reason these mini-biographies
have been helpful is seeing the sheer diversity of pastoral styles God has
chosen to bless. There have been great and fruitful pastors whose preaching
patterns, visitation habits and personalities were so different that all of us
may take courage. One humorous example: Over against the austere Edwards, who
measured his food intake so as to maximize his alertness for study, you can put
Spurgeon, who weighed more than 300 pounds and smoked cigars. Both men won more
converts to Christ than any ten of us will. Spurgeon said to a Methodist
critic, "If I ever find myself smoking to excess, I promise I shall quite
entirely." "What would you call smoking to excess?" the man asked.
"Why, smoking two cigars at the same time!" was the answer.
George Muller has for years been a
pacesetter for me in prayer. His Autobiography is a veritable orchard of
faith-building fruit. In one section he tells us, after 40 years of trials,
"how to be constantly happy in God." He said, " I saw more
clearly than ever that the first great and primary business to which I ought to
attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord."
For ten year, he explained, he went at this
backward. "Formerly, when I rose I began to pray as soon as possible and
generally spent all my time till breakfast in
prayer." The result: "Often after having suffered much from wandering
of mind for the first ten minutes, or quarter of an hour, or even half an hour,
I only then began really to pray." So Muller changed his pattern and made
a discovery which sustained him 40 years. "I began to meditate on the New
Testament, from the beginning, early in the
morning. . . searching into every verse for the sake of obtaining food for my
own soul. The result I have found almost invariably this, that after a very few
minutes my soul has been led to confession or to thanksgiving, or to
intercession, or to supplication; to that though I did not, as it were, give
myself to prayer, but to meditation; yet, it turned almost immediately more or
less into prayer."
I have found Muller's way absolutely crucial
in my own life: be with the Lord before I am with anyone else and let Him speak
to me first. One other thing impressed itself on me from Muller's life. He
prayed with astonishing confidence for supplies for his orphanage. But when his
wife became ill with rheumatic fever, he prayed, "Yes, my Father, the
times of my darling wife are in Thy hands. Thou wilt do the very best thing for
her and for me, whether life or death. If it may be, raise up yet again my
precious wife - Thou art able to do it, though she is so ill; but howsoever
Thou dealest with me, only help me to continue to be
perfectly satisfied with Thy holy will." His wife died, and Muller
preached her funeral sermon from Psalm 199:68: "Thou art good and doest
good." What a world of difference between this view of God and the one I
found when I read William Barclay's Spiritual Autobiography. Barclay lost a
daughter at sea, but his response was not that of Muller: "I know, O Lord,
that in faithfulness Thou hast afflicted me" (Ps. 119:75). Instead Barclay
said, "I believe that pain and suffering are never the will of God for His
children" (in spite of 1 Peter 3:17!). To call a fatal accident an
"act of God," he says, is blasphemous. Barclay's Autobiography is the
more depressing when I think how many pastors feed on Barclay for every sermon.
He scorns a view of the atonement in which the death of Christ propitiates the
wrath of God. And he says, "I am a convinced universalist."
I can't help wondering whether the theological weakness of many pulpits is
owing to the facile dependence on the anemic theology of commentators like
Barclay.
I would rather stake my life on the theology
of Sarah Edwards. When she heard that her husband Jonathan had died of a
smallpox vaccination at the age of 54, she wrote to her daughter: "What
shall I say? A holy and good God has covered us with a dark cloud. O that we
may kiss the rod and lay our hands on our mouths! The Lord has done it. He has
made me adore His goodness, that we had him so long. But my God lives; and He
has my heart. O what a legacy my husband, and your father, has left us. We are
all given to God; and there I am and love to be."
I close with a word of
appreciation for a living autobiography - Carl Lundquist, who completes his
28-year presidency of
