Bonus Reading: Feed My Sheep

Feed My Sheep

One thing I learned during my experience out on the range was that if you care for sheep, you feed them all the time. I was surprised when we moved three or four times throughout the day to make sure the flocks got the right mix and variety. The obvious concern was providing the flocks with adequate, balanced nutrition. When we came in at dusk, their grazing intake was supplemented with a meal of enriched grain. Feeding is the only way to secure healthy production. Without it, there is less milk and fiber, and fewer healthy births.

But of course, proper feeding is the issue. The animals get into poisonous plants, eat weeds that provide only empty calories, and kill themselves eating trash. I couldn’t tell the difference between one form of vegetation and another but soon discovered that shepherds have a sophisticated knowledge about their animals’ consumption. Every region has its own combination of soil, climate, land formation, and plant communities. Each is a “mosaic of micro-environments” that the shepherd must master.¹ 

An early-twentieth-century researcher found that Bedouin tribes in the Sinai knew the attributes of over one hundred plants.² They knew which were good for sheep and which for goats, which were seasonal and which perennial, which were medicinal for what ailments and which animals, and which were vulnerable to overgrazing. Another writer describes 271 plants and shrubs that grow across all the Arab desert lands. Clearly if you care for sheep, you need to know what your flock is eating. Empty calories just won’t do.

In a touching rabbinic midrash on Psalm 78, God watches David lead his flocks out to feed. According to this imaginative commentary, David’s royal calling was based on his care and skill with his animals during feeding. 

In a memorable passage in John 21:15–23, Jesus questions Peter’s love for him. Three times he asks, “Do you love me?” Three times Peter answers definitively, “Yes, you know that I do.” Each time the Lord follows with a challenge to “feed my sheep.” There are several semantic subtleties in this interchange. Jesus uses two different words for “loving,” and Peter uses two different words for “knowing.” The disciple who denied Jesus is obviously distressed by the probing repetition of the questions and wants to convey the certainty of his love. 

Jesus apparently doesn’t want confessions of sentiment alone. He wants love expressed in action described by another pair of synonyms. He uses poimaino, the general term for shepherding, once. But in the first and last command he employs the verb bosko, a herding term that refers specifically to feeding. The Lord was emphasizing to Peter that leading means feeding.

Peter would have understood the significance of the imagery from his Bible. The Shepherd of Israel had provided richly satisfying heavenly bread in the wilderness centuries earlier (Psalm 78:24–29). While manna was a miraculous means of physical sustenance, the “bread of angels” (v. 25) was more importantly an image of divine revelation. The people of God were ultimately sustained by the word of God (Deuteronomy 8:3). Jesus was calling Peter to express his love for him by providing spiritual food.

The connection between caring for people as sheep and nourishing them with God’s word is plainly visible in the story of the feeding of the five thousand: “When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things” (Mark 6:34). Like the Divine Shepherd in the Old Testament, Jesus cared for a hungry crowd by giving them physical food, and he reached out to a greater hunger with God’s life- giving words. In fact, Jesus turned every crisis into a teaching moment. 

Paul said, “Let no one deceive you with empty words” (Ephesians 5:6). He understood the need for “healthy teaching,” encouraging constant nourishment on God’s words (1 Timothy 4:6 AT).⁴ Paul believed that scriptural truth alone is sufficient for rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16), and that these forms of feeding are pastoral tasks. The apocryphal book Sirach had earlier used the same terms for God, who “rebukes and trains and teaches them and turns them back, as a shepherd his flock” (18:13 NRSV).

More than thirty years ago my wife, Maureen, and I spent a memorable winter in China meeting with members of the underground church. We carried in our backpacks Christian books and tapes that would be useful as a portable seminary. Chinese Bibles took up the most space. When we met our first contact, she informed us that we would need to speak in coded language: “Just refer to what you brought as ‘bread.’” That night we served “bread” to a hungry pastor who had traveled for days from a remote province where his whole church had just been jailed. He was hoping for “bread” to take back to his discouraged flock. The unforgettable look of gratitude on his face reminds me that this world’s only source of life and hope is God’s word.

Will you join me for some honest self-assessment? What do we as leaders eat? To what sources do we return for our soul’s primary sustenance? Is our “diet” rich in God’s word? Are we as leaders good readers? Do we study Scripture and meditate on it daily, relishing its insights as spiritual delicacies? Do we supplement this feeding with devotional classics, theological treasures, and inspiring biographies? Are our podcast feeds and everyday conversations with fellow believers filled with biblical truth? Or do we fill our hungry void with the empty calories provided on television and by endless “browsing” on the internet?

If leadership is a form of hospitality, and teaching is one way people are “fed,” then we should ask some pointed questions about our teaching leadership—whether in preaching, counseling, mentoring, or other teaching venues. What do we feed those we serve? Are they getting frequent meals rich in nutrition, or is it old and trivial stuff? Would Paul criticize us for empty words? As a teacher my favorite compliment is, “Thank you for feeding my soul.”

Perhaps we do feed our people well but do not teach them how to feed themselves. We ignore their habits of browsing on sickening trash and the vacuous options and synthetic substitutes that our culture puts under their noses. There is a famine of God’s word in our time. There are “great crowd[s] without anything to eat” (Mark 8:1 NRSV). If we “send them away hungry, . . . they may collapse on the way” (Matthew 15:32). Let’s nourish our flock back to health with the transforming words of life. And insist on some discriminating browsing. 

1. William Lancaster and Fidelity Lancaster, “Limitations on Sheep and Goat Herding in the Eastern Badia of Jordan: An Ethno- Archaeological Enquiry,” Levant 23 (1991): 128.
2. Joseph J. Hobbs, Bedouin Life in the Egyptian Wilderness (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), appendix 1.
3. Exodus Rabbah 2:2.
4. Paul uses the word hugiaino for healthy teaching and faith in 1 Timothy 1:10; 4:6; Titus 1:9, 13; 2:1, 2, 8.

Taken from The Good Shepherd: Forty Biblical Insights on Leading and Being Led © 2024 by Timothy S. Laniak.  Used by permission of Our Daily Bread Publishing, Box 3566, Grand Rapids, MI 49501.  All rights reserved.