Feed my Sheep | Process Video - Illustrated Faith

In my church we have regular leadership team meetings. It’s where the senior Pastors impart teaching and wisdom into the group of people who have been designated leadership roles within the church. Both the Trophy Husband and I attend these meetings and just like any other sermon at church I find I take a whole lotta notes on what is shared. As you can imagine, the topic of teaching usually revolves around what it means to be a leader and how we can look to the biblical model of leadership for guidance. So we started at the beginning and studied Moses. We noticed that just when Moses was starting to think too big of himself God reduced him to the role of a shepherd for 40 odd years. He obviously needed to learn a few more lessons before he could lead the Israelites to the Promised Land!

Through the era of judges such as Samson and Gideon God often described the leaders as shepherds (1 Chron 17:6-7)

Next came the era of monarchs – the greatest of which was King David. David was described as a boy after God’s own heart. He started his life as a shepherd boy. He replaced Saul and gained the title of King, but his role was to shepherd the people.

Seeing the pattern yet?!

In the era of exhile one of the accusations against the rulers of Israel was that they were ‘bad shepherds’ – they fed themselves, took advantage of the sheep and caused the sheep to scatter (Ezek 34:1-10)

Last comes the era of the new covenant. This is where Jesus comes to be our ultimate Saviour and our ultimate leader. He describes himself as the “good shepherd”, the shepherd who will lay down his life for his sheep (John 10:11) And after he went to the cross, died and rose to life once more he charged us with carrying on his duty. He commands Simon to “feed my sheep” and “tend my lambs”.

You can see from this study that a good leader needs to think of themselves as a shepherd. It’s actually considered a lowly position and you’ll often find yourself covered with dirt and mud and quite a bit stinky. That’s because you’re spending all your time with sheep. But the sheep know you and love you and look to you for guidance. You keep them safe from harm and you lead them onto better pastures.

But the best lesson I learned from this teaching was that we are all called to be leaders. We might not have a designated role within the church but we have all been commissioned by Jesus to feed his sheep. So the question is which lambs are you tending? Is it your work colleagues, or your uni friends? Is it your unsaved family members or even ‘just’ your children? Which sheep are you feeding?

In my video today I share my process of how I journaled this teaching by taking one of the quotes my Pastor used and turning it into the focus of my page. I journaled next to John 21 where Jesus commissions Simon to feed his sheep and wrote out the quote “He doesn’t ask you to be in leadership, He asks you to feed the sheep”. My Pastor has a bit of a quirky sense of humour and turned this into a pun when he put the emphasis on the word ‘leadership’ and turned it into ‘leader-sheep’. This is exactly the thing that sparks my imagination and that’s when this page was first created in my head! Watch me turn it into a reality during my video today.