In this paper, we develop a high order semi-implicit time discretization method for highly nonlinear PDEs, which consist of the surface diffusion and Willmore flow of graphs, the Cahn-Hilliard equation and the Allen-Cahn/Cahn-Hilliard system. These PDEs are high order in spatial derivatives, which motivates us to develop implicit or semi-implicit time marching methods to relax the severe time step restriction for stability of explicit methods. In addition, these PDEs are also highly nonlinear, fully implicit method will incredibly increase the difficulty of implementation. In particular, we can not well separate the stiff and non-stiff components for these problems, which leads to the traditional implicit-explicit methods nearly meaningless. In this paper, a high order semi-implicit time marching method and the local discontinuous Galerkin spatial method are coupled together to achieve high order accuracy in both space and time, and to enhance the efficiency of the proposed approaches, the resulting linear or nonlinear algebraic systems are solved by multigrid solver. Numerical simulation results in one and two dimensions are presented to illustrate that the combination of the local discontinuous Galerkin method for spatial approximation, semi-implicit temporal integration with the multigrid solver provides a practical and efficient approach when solving this family of problems.