🕊️ The Notes I Leave: Feeding the Sheep

Total Time: ~30 minutes

Format: 1/2 public + 1/2 members-only

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🕊️ INTRO

Shalom, and grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Welcome to The Notes I Leave podcast.

The Hebrew word “shalom” signifies more than mere peace; it signifies wholeness, completeness, well-being, harmony with God and others. All of which, I wish for you.

The purpose of this podcast is to share the diverse experiences I encounter as a professor, teacher, entrepreneur, student, father, son, brother, and follower of Christ Jesus. These notes are intended for you, now and in the future.

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📖 MAIN MESSAGE

📜 This week’s theme:

In this episode, I discuss how the Lord is training us to feed His sheep by our steadfastness in His word.

📜 Anchor verse(s):

11 And the LORD said to me, “Faithless Israel has proved herself more righteous than treacherous Judah. 12 “Go and proclaim these words toward the north and say, ‘Return, faithless Israel,’ declares the LORD; ‘I will not look upon you in anger. For I am gracious,’ declares the LORD; ‘I will not be angry forever. 13 ‘Only acknowledge your iniquity, That you have transgressed against the LORD your God And have scattered your favors to the strangers under every green tree, And you have not obeyed My voice,’ declares the LORD. 14 ‘Return, O faithless sons,’ declares the LORD; ‘For I am a master to you, And I will take you one from a city and two from a family, And I will bring you to Zion.’ 15 “Then I will give you shepherds after My own heart, who will feed you on knowledge and understanding. 16 “It shall be in those days when you are multiplied and increased in the land,” declares the LORD, “they will no longer say, ‘The ark of the covenant of the LORD.’ And it will not come to mind, nor will they remember it, nor will they miss it, nor will it be made again. 17 “At that time they will call Jerusalem ‘The Throne of the LORD,’ and all the nations will be gathered to it, to Jerusalem, for the name of the LORD; nor will they walk anymore after the stubbornness of their evil heart. 18 “In those days the house of Judah will walk with the house of Israel, and they will come together from the land of the north to the land that I gave your fathers as an inheritance.

Jeremiah 3:11-18, New American Standard Bible, 1995

📜 Application or takeaway:

The Lord has placed on my heart the constant necessity of His word.

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🙏 TRANSITION TO MEMBERS

That is the heart of what the Lord laid on me this week—but for those of you walking this journey further with me, there is a deeper side I want to share; in the members-only section, I’ll be opening up about how this career change challenged me as a father and a disciple.

But first, I would like to leave you with a quote and question.

📚 Quote:

“If you love Jesus, feed His sheep. Do not fleece them. Feed them with the gospel; feed them with the same food that made you live—Christ Himself. The best proof of love to Christ is care for His flock.”

—Charles Spurgeon

☕️ Question:

Are our actions contributing to entertainment of the goat or feeding of the sheep?

📞 Call to action:

If you are not yet a member and want to support this work while gaining full access to deeper reflections like these, head to https://www.biblicalanatomyacademy.com click on ‘Podcasts,’ and then click on ’Support the Podcast’ or simply access the direct link via https://podcast.biblicalanatomy.com/support

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🕯️ PRAYER AND BLESSING

Father, thank You for guiding us—even when the path is not clear to us. Teach us to walk in humility, trust, and obedience.

Until next time, may the peace of Christ dwell richly in you and may I express ‘maranatha,’ which is an Aramaic word translating to “Come, Lord Jesus.”

Dear Lord, Father God, help us all understand that we have a role in feeding your sheep.

That we do not have to obtain a certain status in the church or in Christianity.

We do not have to earn a certain number of rings or belts or whatever the status we have in

our mind is to be able to nourish your sheep.

We simply have to share our testimony.

To share your gospel, to share our experience in the church with someone that's maybe just beginning

their path or just a few steps behind us.

And let us recognize that it's not one road of experiences, it's one path to you.

But our many experiences provide us opportunities in discipleship that we could serve each other

across the table and that it's not a Paul Timothy relationship that we often think of where

Paul is discipling Timothy only, but that Timothy disciples Paul also, and that our relationships

with brothers and sisters in the church should be similar in which we're discipling each other

along the way and sharing our testimonies for your glory.

In your son Jesus' name and the Holy Spirit, we pray. Amen.

Well, thank you today for joining me.

I'm so honored to be able to open in prayer.

I'm so honored to live in a state and even a country that I can do such a thing.

In many ways, I wish I lived in the 1700s or 1800s or even early 1900s, but the Lord put me

here for a specific reason, and I am blessed to have the form of technology that we do to get

out a message that the Lord has put on my heart to to share with people all over.

This morning, I came to a conclusion on what the episode title should be for today, in fact,

for the last week's episode also.

It's sort of a two-part series.

And I also looked at our analytics for the podcast and was very proud of what the Lord has achieved

through me and what the Lord has achieved through our business.

And we had nothing to do with it.

The business and myself had nothing to do with it.

But I'm honored that we've been used as a vessel to reach different parts of the globe.

Most of our listenership is United States based, but we have listeners in Australia, we have

listeners in the UK, we have listeners throughout Europe.

I believe I think I even saw a listener in Africa and a few listeners even in Asia.

So I really don't know how our message is making it that far, but it is, and it's to His glory.

And so I pray that this message help you, that it serve you, but not because of me or anything I have to say.

Like a good pastor who is preaching God's word, I want to make sure that my opinions are based

in God's word and that as I make mistakes, I'm continually in prayer and steadfast focus of

his word so that as I grow and inevitably change my opinions, that those opinions are being

changed to be more in his word and more with with what he is placing on our hearts.

There have been a number of sermons over the course of time that have been titled a similar

message of feeding God's sheep.

There have even been some that have been focused in sort of this dichotomy of the ways of the

world and entertaining goats versus the ways of God's kingdom and feeding his sheep.

And so the last part of the series last week, we talked about entertaining the goats a little bit.

We did spend most of our focus on feeding his sheep, but today I want to focus even more on feeding his sheep. And this isn't new.

I'm going to quote some ver a well, a number of verses from Jeremiah here, specifically Jeremiah

3 verses 11 through 18.

And in these verses, we're going to see that even in Jeremiah's time, that there was need for a shepherd.

There was need for shepherds.

But as we read other verses in the Bible, and even this verse, I believe that it's clear that

we are managers as shepherds. And shepherds look differently.

I'm on a podcast and I believe the Lord is calling me to shepherd.

Certainly he's calling me and has called me to teach, but I believe he is also calling me to shepherd.

And my means that he's provided me is a podcast platform.

I don't shepherd a church.

I'm not the pastor of a church, but there are shepherds who are.

And there are shepherds like Charlie Kirk that in his lifetime, he went from college campus

to college campus to evangelize and to shepherd and to teach.

And shepherds of all different sort of vocations that the Lord has provided.

But all of those shepherds must know that they are managing God's flock.

As soon as a shepherd begins to think that the people in his church are his people and that

he has wrongly labeled the church as his church, that pastor has a lot to worry about, a lot to concern themselves with.

I've heard it said in churches before that a certain person was baptized in their church by

them and their people in their building.

And that pride just saddens me because none of us have a flock.

We're part of the flock.

We may be a few steps further down the line in terms of sanctification and maturity in Christ.

And because of that, we are trusted responsible for other members of the flock.

And we will pay an account for how we manage Christ's flock.

But make no mistake, if you are a shepherd listening, it is not your flock, it is His flock.

Even if you've raised the funds here on earth to build a building, it's not your building, it's

His building that He has allowed you to operate in.

All things for His kingdom.

Let's not take the worldly things that we've come to know and relate them to things He's gifted us.

Let's not give too much credit to ourselves in what we think we have accomplished, but recognize

that we are allowed to accomplish them.

And those things can be taken away. Quite quickly.

So let me never say that listeners of this podcast are my listeners.

I don't even consider my own children my children.

God has just entrusted me to be their Earthly father.

But they have a Heavenly father who is their true father, and we are all a part of God's flock.

So, my prayer is that I serve youe in some way, but not because I did it, but because the Lord

felt it appropriate to use a wretch like me to get a message across. Let's read Jeremiah 3:11-18.

And the Lord said to me, Faithless Israel has proved herself more righteous than treacherous Judah.

Go and proclaim these words towards the north and say, Return, faithless Israel, declares the Lord.

I will not look upon you in anger, for I am gracious, declares the Lord.

I will not be angry forever.

Only acknowledge your iniquity, that you have transgressed against the Lord your God, and have scattered your favors.

To the strangers under every green tree: and you have not obeyed my voice, declares the Lord.

Return, O faithless sons, declares the Lord.

For I am master, for I am a master to you.

And I will take you one from a city and two from a family, and I will bring you to Zion.

Then I will give you shepherds, after my own heart, who will feed you on knowledge and understanding.

It shall be in those days when you are multiplied and increased in the land, declares the Lord,

they will no longer say the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord, and it will not come to mind Nor

will they remember it, nor will they miss it, nor will it be made again.

At that time, they will call Jerusalem the throne of the Lord, and all the nations will be gathered

to it, to Jerusalem, for the name of the Lord.

Nor will they walk any more after the stubbornness of their evil heart.

In those days, the house of Judah will walk with the house of Israel, and they will come together

from the land of the north to the land that I have gave your fathers as an inheritance.

When I did some research on shepherding and I was listening to a pastor out of Texas,

I forget the specific name of the city.

It'll come to me in a moment, but listening to a pastor in Texas and loved the message, loved

the message that he preached.

And in that message, he talked about the 15th verse here specifically, and he also talked about

how we need to expositionally be preaching God's word line by line and not going through topical

preaching and jumping all over the Bible.

Sugarland. Sugarland, Texas was the city, and the name of the church was Sugarland Bible Church.

I think it was Pastor Woods was his name.

And this was in 2015 or 2016. Loved the message.

Completely agree with the message.

Completely agree with what he had to say.

And in that finding this verse, I look at a few verses before it and a few verses after it.

And a lot of times we pick and choose specific verses.

Now, by me including these eight verses, I don't think it disagrees with verse 15.

It only enhances verse 15, and I'm not claiming that he should have picked more verses.

I think the one for his point was sufficient, and there's no doubt in my mind that he's read

all of Jeremiah and all of these verses, and I believe understands them likely quite well.

But we often do that.

We pick a verse and it becomes perhaps even a famous verse, but we don't know the verse before

it or the verse after.

So when I see verses like this and I see that it's in the midst of a message, I like to include the entire message.

So thank you for listening as I walk through that message.

I intentionally try to keep it at a slower pace.

One, I read at a fourth grade level.

And all joking aside, two, I do not want to make a mistake in God's word.

I take that very seriously.

And I still occasionally do.

And I ask for forgiveness and usually say, excuse me or something like that, or repeat the verse

if I've messed it up.

That may seem really legalistic, but I take that seriously and I want to make sure that I'm

not making mistakes in reading God's word.

In verse 15 when it says, Then I will give you shepherds after my own heart.

I think most of us when we hear my own heart think of David, but here we're using the word shepherds

which can be translated potentially to pastor, which potentially can be translated to elder.

The leaders of the church, the shepherds of the church, and I don't mean a specific church in

Idaho or Kentucky or Texas, I mean the one body under Christ, the one church, shepherds of the

one body under Christ, they must be after God's own heart.

They must be on fire for the Lord and striving to make others on fire for the Lord as well,

and not by their own doing, but by the Holy Spirit working within that other brother or sister.

You know,

I look at the business world and we operate a business that's a part of this podcast.

And by ways of the world, it's a very unsuccessful business.

But I realize by the way, ways of the of the Lord that it is extraordinarily successful.

And there are so many things that are in stark contrast between the way that the world operates

and the way that the Lord operates.

And I continue to get business advice, entrepreneurial advice, and 99 times out of 100, I reject

it because it smells just like the world.

One of the things that the world does is not have shepherds raise up shepherds, but shepherds

to remain in their place of authority and that the congregation must remain below them.

Like in business, a CEO doesn't want to get too many trade secrets to people below because they

might just take their job.

That's not the way that the Lord operates.

We're one body under Christ and as shepherds, we should be training up not only future shepherds,

but concurrent shepherds to be with us in that.

And while this podcast has emphasized a number of things under the umbrella of our business

Biblical Anatomy Academy, why not have a lot of podcasts that are speaking about the same sorts of things?

Certainly this is not the only podcast that is focused on the entertainment of goats and downgrading

that and elevating feeding the flock of Christ.

We don't even strive to be the best episode or show that does that.

Really, the reason why the name of the podcast is the Notes I Leave is because simply I've learned

things in my walk with Christ and I want to leave them as notes.

For not only my children and my friends, but for others that come across these episodes, however

they do, whatever part of the world that they do, or that they are.

And for them to be encouragement in your walk.

And if you're an apostle, to head down that path because the Lord has paved it for you.

If you're an evangelist, to head down that path because the Lord has paved it for you.

If you're a prophet, to head down that path because the Lord has paved it for you.

If you are a teacher like me, to head down that path and I help you as much as I can, but not

because I had anything to do with the path, because the Lord has paved the path for you.

Or some translations refer to teachers as also pastors.

Some translations of God's Word refer it separately.

And if you are a pastor, to go down that path because the Lord has provided it for you.

What a wonderful thing that is.

It's kind of like, well, I teach at the college level and I have for the last 10 years.

And at the college that I teach, it is not a top 10% go on.

And so I've preached this many times that why are we acting as though we are opponents and we

are acquiring knowledge to have a good grade on a test?

But we're not sharing that knowledge. Look around.

We have nothing against our fellow students.

Why not meet for coffee and share material that you are understanding?

Maybe they might be able to share information that you're not understanding, and together as

a cohort, we can make it through this grueling program.

At the high school that I teach, it's the same way.

We don't take just the top 10% of students to go on to the next grade.

We're looking for everyone to pass.

We're not handing out tickets for them to pass.

It is a grueling effort to get to the next grade, but we should not be in opposition to each

other to get to that next grade.

Now, in our walk with Christ, we don't label it as grades or a program, but as we walk that

narrow path through that narrow gate to Christ, Why not train up others in His way?

In what has been nourishing to us, why are we not using that to nourish others and share that direct nourishment?

So often even in the church world we have a pastor that receives their nourishment from the

Lord, but then it's a brick wall and that everyone has to come through them to get to the Lord.

And the Bible admonishes that it actually completely squashes that.

Many faiths have occurred and are completely false faiths because of that idea that you have

to go through somebody specifically to get to the Lord.

We all, you all have access to the Lord directly just as much as I do or anyone else does.

Christianity is such a wonderful thing because You don't have to take my word for it.

Open up God's word and find it for yourself.

If I'm ever teaching on anything, I'm reading line by line directly from God's word.

You might have a different translation that might state it a little bit differently, but the

message is still the inerrancy of God's intent, God's word.

So please open his word and read it for yourself.

As a teacher, it's not for me to create people underneath me.

It's for people to come alongside me and we live together as brothers and sisters in Christ

as we learn from the one true teacher.

Just as I said prior, that shepherds are managers of his flock.

Teachers are managers of his students.

We all belong to him.

And let us not ever forget that.

Today, the Lord has placed on my heart this need to discuss what it's like to feed His sheep

and by using His steadfast word.

It's a constant necessity to be in His word.

If we're not in His word on a daily basis, which, hand raised, I fail, continually.

But I recognize the failure and steadfast try to correct it.

And legalistically, I don't hold myself to that failure.

I get back on the horse, so to speak. So to speak.

I've always got that one incorrectly.

I've always said sort to speak.

What sense does sort to speak make?

That doesn't make any sense. So to speak.

We need to constantly be in his word.

As I continue to grow and reject things of the world, guess what that opens?

Valuable time to be in his word, to listen to sermons from trusted teachers, to be under the

stewardship of a pastor of a church that teaches the Bible.

To be encouraged by that pastor to plant another church perhaps, and teach God's Word, preferably expositionally.

As we transition here to the members only section, I'd like to share a quote and a question

with you as I often do.

A quote for you is from Charles Spurgeon. I've quoted him before.

It states that if you love Jesus, feed his sheep. Do not fleece them.

Feed them with the gospel.

Feed them with the same food that made you live, Christ himself.

The best proof of love to Christ is to care for his flock.

And to me, that so hits the nail right on the head.

The same food that nourished you provided to others, not a subsidiary or a secondary something

of that food, not a duplicate of that food, but the very food that fed you.

Feed them. Share the gospel.

Share how you developed a relationship with Jesus Christ, because that's what everyone needs,

is a relationship, not religion, a relationship with Jesus Christ.

And I'm going to present the same question I did last week because it is so pertinent to this

two-part series and our lives for that matter, that are your actions, are our actions contributing

to the entertainment of the goats or the feeding of the Sheep?

We only want you to subscribe to our members only section if you feel called.

You can go to biblicalanatomyacademy.com for that.

I've taken you through the directions before.

It's not all that difficult to find.

And if you're feeling called, I think you're probably going to find it pretty easily.

So with that being said, I'm going to transition to that members only section now.

I wish you nothing but the best, brothers and sisters.

I love you and God bless.

Until next time, may the peace of Christ dwell richly in you.

And may I also express Maranatha, which is an Aramaic word translating to come, Lord Jesus.