Discouragement. All leaders go through it, as do fellow Christians. Some of us hide it better than others, but discouragement in ministry is a real concern. I can’t count how many times I wanted to quit and go back to making surfboards—something I knew really well and was good at until the Lord called me into ministry.

As people were bailing out from following Jesus because of something He said [in John Chapter 6], He turned to the twelve [disciples] and asked, “Will you also leave me?” Their response was the same as what I felt when discouragement hit: “Lord, where would we go? You have words of eternal life.”

In the early days when Pastor Chuck was coming to Hawaii, we roasted a pig and had Chuck and his group come out to the North Shore for potluck fellowship. I got Chuck alone and began to pour out my heart, telling him about people and problems I was having in ministry. I figured Chuck had the answers. He listened patiently until I finished and said, “Well, Bill, … people will be people” and turned and walked back to the potluck. I have since used that line a lot with younger pastors. Much of our discouragement has to do with “people” issues.

It is interesting that, of all the animals God chose to compare us with, he picked sheep. Why sheep? Because the behavior of sheep is much like that of humans. It is not a very flattering comparison. Sheep more than any other animal need endless attention, meticulous care, and constant watching over. Sheep don’t naturally care for themselves. Sheep have a crowd mentality. If one walks off a cliff, others will follow. If one is spooked, the whole herd panics. Phillip Keller, a rancher in East Africa, in his book A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23, writes, “Just as sheep will blindly, habitually, stupidly follow one another along the same little trails until they become ruts that erode into gigantic gullies, so we humans cling to the same habits that we have seen ruin other lives.”

A few years ago, in Japan, Hideto Matsumoto of Band-X hanged himself with a towel on a doorknob. The next day a 14-year-old fan hung herself in the same way. Sheep have a herd mentality. I’ve seen in churches where someone gets upset and leaves the church—and their friends and others follow for no good reason. Sadly, it is the herd instinct of sheep.

Sheep are helpless when left to themselves. They will graze until the landscape is barren without seeking new pastures and will die of starvation.

Sheep will stand eye to eye with a predator that proceeds to eat them while other sheep look on, not realizing they are next on the menu. Sheep have no fright-and-flight mechanism. Cults devour sheep one after another.

When we consider the makeup of sheep, we begin to understand the high calling of the shepherd. Sheep tend to hammer and batter each other; no wonder one pastor called them “attack sheep” when they turn on the shepherd.

Shepherds of Judea had a hard and tedious task. Pastureland [in Israel] was scarce along the narrow central plateau which plunged down steep cliffs to dry desert. Sheep would wander into dry canyons or onto perilous precipices, and the shepherd would risk his life in a rescue attempt. Sheep are oblivious and indifferent to being rescued. A certain type of weed, if eaten, would make sheep sick and even die.

It is discouraging when sheep in the church take a course of action detrimental to their spiritual health and refuse to respond to the shepherd’s attempt to rescue them. Often wolves in sheeps’ clothing come into the flock, wooing sheep into false doctrine or aberrant lifestyles.

It’s heartbreaking for a shepherd to see a once-thriving, strong believer now in a place of compromise and carnality. We might feel like throwing in the shepherd’s staff and giving up. And yet the Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ, leaves the 99 and goes after the one. Maybe that one is you. We, too, are the sheep of His pasture.

Know that the LORD, He is God; it is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; we are His people and the sheep of His pasture. Psalm 100:3

Discouragement comes with the calling, but you don’t have to give into it. He is the same God who called you in the beginning and has promised never to leave or forsake you to the end. He is the same God who will bring you across the finish line to Heaven and say to you and the ministry He entrusted to you: “Well done, my good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of the Lord.” He has promised to finish the work He began in you.

So don’t give up—but do give in to the Great Shepherd of your soul who loves you and died for your sins. Let discouragement be the tool that drives you to the throne of grace and a new place of intimacy and dependence upon our precious Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And remember, until we arrive in Heaven, “People … will still be people.”

This teaching is taken from the Calvary Chapel Association (CCA) website, calvarycca.org. Pastor Bill Stonebraker is a member of the CCA Council.

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