Dave Kraft » Mission Church Church Leadership

Matthew 9:35-38 and Mark 6:30-44 refer to the same event — conversations and teaching after the feeding of a large number of people. In these passages we see the compassion of the Lord for people who are hurting; a theme that runs throughout both the Old and New Testaments. 

Shepherding the sheep

In these passages we also see the longer-term solution to people feeling helpless, hopeless, and harassed like sheep with no shepherd. The solution is to multiply the number of compassionate leaders who can offer care to hurting sheep. The same idea is conveyed in one of the New Testament classic leadership passages, 1 Peter 5: 1-11, where Peter reminds us that elders (leaders) should, in the first place, shepherd the sheep. And because the sheep often outnumber the desired number of care-givers, we need to pray for more shepherds, which is what Jesus tells his disciples to do in Matthew 9:37. Things haven’t changed much in 2000 years. The harvest (hurting sheep) is still many, and the shepherds (leaders/care-givers) are still few.

Jesus is always more than adequate in every task and challenge I face.

Here are 3 principles for shepherds/ leaders from these passages of Scripture:

1. The needs always exceed the resources. The needed finances always exceed the finances we have. The hurting people always exceed the number of people we need to minister to them.
2. I am always inadequate for the task Jesus has for me. Almost every leader God called felt he wasn’t quite ready, adequate or capable: Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and David, to name a few. Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 3:5, “Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God...”
3. Jesus is always more than adequate in every task and challenge I face. Ephesians 3:20 tells us, “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us...” The disciples in the Gospel stories experienced that Jesus was more than adequate for their inadequacies.

We can rely on Jesus when we're humbly shepherding his sheep.

 

 

Have Dave Kraft speak at your church about Leaders Who Last.

 

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