The money was forty-five days late, and we were counting on it.
A client owed us — a real sum, for work already delivered and delivered well. The invoice came due, and then it didn’t get paid, and then the date slid, and slid again. “Net 45,” someone in their accounts department said, as if that settled it. To them it was a line on an aging report, a lever of cash management, a number that could wait. To me it was payroll. It was whether I could pay the people who had actually done the work.
I remember the particular indignity of it — the way being owed money you’re depending on puts you at the mercy of someone who feels nothing. They weren’t cruel. They were something quieter and worse: indifferent. We were a line item to them, and you can’t wrong a line item. You just let it sit.
I learned something at the bottom of that ledger that no leadership book had ever taught me. I learned what he counts on it feels like from the inside — and I made a promise I’ve worked to keep ever since: that no one who worked for me would ever be left in that lurch on my account.
Because once you have been a number on someone else’s spreadsheet, you never quite forget what it does to a person.
The Vocabulary of People as Things
Modern business has built an entire dialect for not seeing the people in front of you.
Human capital. Headcount — as if a person were a unit you count, like inventory. Resources to be allocated, FTEs to be optimized, a workforce to be right-sized when the quarter disappoints. The language is efficient and clinical, and that’s the point of it. You can’t grieve a headcount. You can’t wrong a resource. The vocabulary does its quiet work of converting persons into line items, and once they’re line items, anything you do to the line is just math.
But they were never line items. Every person on your payroll is an image-bearer of God — a soul with a family and a fear and a Friday-night hope, entrusted to your care for the hours they spend under your authority. And Scripture has a specific, weighty word for someone who holds other people under his authority and is responsible for their flourishing.
That word is shepherd. And God has strong feelings about the kind you are.
Woe to the Shepherds Who Feed Themselves
Ezekiel 34 is one of the most ferocious chapters in the Bible, and it’s aimed squarely at leaders who used the people under them for their own gain.
“Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up... and with force and harshness you have ruled them” (Ezekiel 34:2-4).
Read that as an indictment of leadership and it lands like a verdict on a certain kind of company. The flock exists to feed the shepherd. The strong are exploited and the weak are discarded. The metric is what the shepherd extracts, and the condition of the sheep — strengthened or weak, healed or sick, bound up or bleeding — doesn’t enter the accounting at all. Force and harshness. That’s how the flock was ruled.
And then God does something that should make every Christian who employs anyone go very still. He says: I will deal with those shepherds. “I am against the shepherds, and I will require my sheep at their hand” (Ezekiel 34:10). He takes it personally. The sheep are His, on loan to under-shepherds, and He will require an account of how they were handled.
That includes the wages. “Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts” (James 5:4). The Law had been blunt about it: “You shall not oppress a hired worker who is poor and needy... You shall give him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets (for he is poor and counts on it)” (Deuteronomy 24:14-15). Don’t even let the wage sleep at your house overnight (Leviticus 19:13). For he counts on it.
I know what he counts on it means, because I have been the one counting. So when James says the withheld wage cries out and reaches the ears of the Lord of hosts, I don’t hear a metaphor — I hear a sound I recognize. A cry once went up from my own house, and the Lord of hosts was listening even when the people who owed us weren’t.
What a Shepherd Actually Does
If you’re a shepherd and not a hired hand, the work has a shape. None of it is complicated. All of it is costly.
You pay justly and promptly. The wage is not a lever to optimize against your own people’s need; it’s a debt of justice you discharge gladly and on time. Jesus said it to the seventy-two as He sent them out: “the laborer deserves his wages” (Luke 10:7) — deserves, not “may eventually receive, terms negotiable.” “Net 45” is not a moral category. He counts on it is. Pay people what the work is worth, and pay them when you said you would, and pay them when they need it rather than when it’s most convenient for your cash position.
You tell them the truth. The manipulation we’ve spent this whole series renouncing toward customers — the managed urgency, the half-told story — doesn’t get a pass when it’s pointed at your own team. You don’t dangle a promotion you have no intention of giving. You don’t let someone believe their job is safe the week before you cut it. The flock can bear hard truth from a shepherd who loves them. They cannot bear being managed.
You let them rest. The lamb rests, and so does the lamb’s flock. A shepherd who grinds his people to the bone — who treats Sabbath as theft and rest as weakness — is feeding himself on their exhaustion. Build a business where the people can stop, because you actually believe provision comes from God and not from their burnout.
You lead them to green pastures. A shepherd doesn’t just guard the flock; he grows it — finds the good grazing, the still water, the place where the sheep get stronger. Invest in your people’s development even when it would be cheaper to use them up and replace them. They were entrusted to you to flourish, not merely to produce.
And when the time comes to part — because it will — you separate generously. Sometimes the most honest, even the most loving thing is to let someone go. But there’s a world of difference between a shepherd who releases a sheep with dignity, warning, severance, and a good word, and a hired hand who culls a headcount over a calendar invite. Even the ending is shepherding. Do it like someone will give an account of it. Because someone will.
The Hired Hand and the Good One
Jesus drew the line exactly here.
“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees... He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep” (John 10:11-13).
The hired hand isn’t necessarily cruel. He’s just transactional. He’s there for what the arrangement yields him, and when the cost of staying exceeds the benefit — when the wolf shows up, when the quarter turns, when caring would cost something real — he calculates, and he flees, and the sheep scatter. He cares nothing for them because they were never his; they were only ever his means.
The Good Shepherd owns the sheep and loves them, and so He does the thing no calculation would ever produce: He stays when the wolf comes. He lays down His life. He spends Himself for the flock instead of feeding Himself on it.
That’s the choice in every decision about your team. Hired hand or shepherd. Means or end. Feed on them or spend yourself for them. And the people who work for you can tell which one you are — not from your values page, but from what happens to them when caring gets expensive.
You Shepherd Because You Are Shepherded
Underneath all of it lies the one truth that makes shepherding sustainable instead of crushing.
Peter, who’d been recommissioned by Jesus with the words “feed my sheep,” later wrote to leaders: “Shepherd the flock of God that is among you... not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock. And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory” (1 Peter 5:2-4). The flock is God’s, not yours. You’re an under-shepherd, working beneath a Chief Shepherd to whom you’ll one day give the account Ezekiel promised.
But notice what that makes you. If there’s a Chief Shepherd over you, then you are not, finally, the shepherd. You are also a sheep.
I learned this the hard way, the month our provision hung on someone who felt nothing. Waiting on a payment that might never come, I rediscovered that it had never really rested on that client at all — or on any client. “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1). The reason you can lead your people beside still waters is that you’ve been led beside still waters. The reason you can let them rest is that your own provision doesn’t depend on grinding them, because you have a Shepherd who provides. The reason you can spend yourself for the flock instead of feeding on it is that you’ve been fed — fully, at the cross, by a Shepherd who laid down His life for you when you were the straying sheep.
You shepherd out of the overflow of being shepherded. Cut off from that, you’ll revert to hired hand every time the wolf shows up, because self-protection is the native language of a man who thinks he’s on his own.
What It Costs, and What It Teaches
It costs margin. Of course it does. Prompt and just wages, real development, true rest, generous severance — every one of them is a line a colder operator would trim, and your competitors will trim them and run lighter for it. Faithful shepherding is more expensive than using people up. I won’t pretend otherwise; I never have in these letters.
But consider what you’re actually buying, and what you’re teaching. Every person who works for you is learning what business is from how you run it — and if you claim the name of Christ, they’re learning something about Him, too. The employee who gets paid on time by a Christian boss, told the truth, allowed to rest, developed, and one day released with dignity — that person has received a small sermon about a God who keeps His word and counts His people precious. And the one kept back by fraud, ground down, discarded as a headcount, has also heard a sermon. A different one. About a God they now want nothing to do with.
Your payroll is preaching one of those two sermons right now, whether you mean it to or not. I know, because a company once preached the wrong one to me — and I have never forgotten what it told me about the people who ran it.
We made it through that month — barely, on borrowed nerve. The client paid eventually, long after the damage was done, never knowing there had been any. But I carried something out of it I’ve never set down: the memory of what it costs to be the one waiting, and the resolve that no one under my care would ever wait like that on my account.
And something quieter, too. With my provision hanging by a thread another man held, I finally learned where it had been anchored all along — to a Shepherd of my own who has never once made me wait on what I counted on.
Tend the flock that’s among you. Not for what you can extract. For the sake of the One who will require them at your hand — and who laid down His life for yours.
The flock was never yours to use. You keep it for the Shepherd who keeps you.
You know how it feels to wait on money someone else is sitting on. Who’s waiting on you?
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“You are also a sheep” is so important to remember!