Brandon Cooper, MDiv, serves as chaplain at El Camino Academy in Bogotá, Colombia. He is the founder of Follow After Ministries (www.followafter.net) and the author of A Word to the Wise: Lessons from Proverbs for Young Adults (Camp Sherman, OR: Deep River Books, 2010).
When a scribe came to Jesus to ask what the most important commandment was, Jesus answered “love …” and then “love …” again (Mark 12:28–31). When we are loving God fully, we discover His love welling up inside us and overflowing into every relationship we have. So far, so good; most of us understand the Christian imperative to love. And yet, if pressed, most of us would also blunder about for any good definition of what it means to love another.
Love, in the English language, covers everything from my taste in music to my unconditional affection for my wife and children. To which love exactly are we called? To merely feel a squishy fondness for our students, say, as if the warm fuzzies and gold stars exhaust our responsibility in Christ? Surely not.
“Love,” said C. S. Lewis, “is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it may be obtained” (1970, 49). Genuine Christian love has little, if anything, to do with bare emotion and rather more to do with spending ourselves wholly, as Christ did, that those we love may live God’s best in every way.
Jesus is, of course, the fullest expression of God’s love for us. John famously describes Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection as springing from the unfathomable love of the Father (John 3:16). Indeed, we only know what love is because Christ laid down His life for us (1 John 3:16), and so “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19, NIV). If we are to pin down a precise definition of love, it seems we must look to the life and ministry of Christ. As the Good Shepherd, Jesus came so that we “may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). By yielding ourselves to God, we experience the abundant life promised to us. He is the desire of our hearts (Psalm 73:25) and the pearl of great price for which we would sell all else (Matthew 13:45–46).
As Christian educators, are we not all undershepherds, leading those entrusted to us nearer still to the Good Shepherd? If so, then our ministry is to see our students living the fullness of life that Christ offers. Our ministry is to stun them with the wonder of God’s unfailing love so they may ultimately find delight in Him and Him alone.
To accomplish this ministry, we need restless love. Augustine famously said, “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (2008, 3). I wish to take this profound thought a step further. For those of us who have the privilege of ministering to God’s children in Christian schools, our love should be restless until our students find rest in Him.
To think that Christ expects nothing more of us than faithfulness would be fooling ourselves. To faithfulness we are certainly called—but to a loving faithfulness. Faithful servants need only complete their tasks, but lovingly faithful servants complete their tasks—and then press on indefatigably until they have done all that is humanly possible to see the beloved living God’s best. Will Christian charity permit us to view educational ministry as a job for which we receive fair remuneration? We may have finished with our daily tasks—our lesson plans and grading. But, suppose for a moment that even one of our students is not living out the fullness of life that Christ offers; can we really rest? Love compels us to persevere—to weep, to pray, to minister the gospel still (2 Corinthians 5:14).
In this way our Savior loved every broken sinner He encountered. By even briefly examining His ministry—the wondrous display of His grace—we can identify at least five key components of restless love (although this is hardly an exhaustive list). Through prayer and discernment and an unfailing reliance on the guidance of His Holy Spirit, we will see what our students need at every step of their long journey to the New Jerusalem.
1. Individual Attention
First, Jesus—despite the wearying demands of ministry—paused to offer sinners individual attention. He did not merely scatter His seed to the wind and the crowds, but He often stopped to invest concentrated time and energy on a single soul until He saw the desired fruit. For example, when Jesus came to Jericho, intending to pass through, He encountered a wealthy tax collector who had gone to great lengths to catch a glimpse of Him. Looking up into the sycamore tree where Zacchaeus perched, Jesus said, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today” (Luke 19:5). Luke often uses the term must to express divine necessity (Bock 1996, 1518). The divine necessity in this case was the salvation of one of God’s children. Jesus had to stay with this lost sheep because the Father’s love compelled Him. He saw someone in need of grace, and He took the necessary steps to see that Zacchaeus experienced that grace.
Will we likewise stop when love compels us to invest time and energy in a student’s life? When everyone else has given up on the “difficult” kid, as everyone had given up on Zacchaeus, will we sit down for a meal, longing for salvation to come to the house? “The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost” (Luke 19:10)—and we ought to be about our Savior’s business.
2. Inquisitive Dialogue
Of course, once we enter the metaphorical house of some student—or perhaps sit down to a literal meal together—what then? Encountering a sinner is the first step, but we must then press on to engage him or her in inquisitive dialogue. Consider Jesus with the Samaritan woman (John 4:1–26). Although racial and religious boundaries should have kept Jesus from conversation, He probed and prodded to expose her deepest need and then offered her the only possible healing. Of course, what took the omniscient Christ mere minutes may take us months of intentional conversation. We must learn the lesson of Proverbs 20:5 well: “The purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out.” We must take the time to ask our students penetrating questions and then listen lovingly to their responses so we best know how to lead them to the Savior.
3. Concern and Correction
When we truly listen to our students, we will discover great spiritual need. None of us has arrived at perfection, and our students are not exceptions. If we want to see these young souls living God’s best for their lives—if we truly love them restlessly—we will demonstrate concern and correction. The two must certainly go hand in hand; correction without real concern is authoritarianism, and concern without correction is no love at all. We must aspire to relational authority steeped in profound, transparent care for those we serve. When the rich young ruler approached Jesus, trapped in the deceitfulness of his outward conformity, “Jesus looked at him and loved him” (Mark 10:21). And because Jesus loved him, He called him to cast aside his idols and follow his Master unreservedly. Concern and correction. 
Remember that the Christ who confronted the religious establishment in Jerusalem wept over that same city out of His deep love for His lost people (Luke 19:41). Let us walk the narrow path between two precarious pitfalls. Let us neither harangue and badger without love nor refuse to confront because it can be uncomfortable, thus failing to love our students enough to do what is hard.
4. Self-Sacrificial Giving
Fourth, restless love demands self-sacrificial giving. Restless love is necessarily self-crucifying love. We needn’t search the Gospels much to see this. Jesus’ whole life, and especially His death, reflects His willingness to give of Himself sacrificially so His people may live God’s best. At the Last Supper, He broke bread and poured wine for His disciples, teaching them how His body would be broken and His blood poured out. John records that on that night, Christ clothed Himself as a slave, knelt down, and washed His disciples’ feet. As He finished, He said to them, “I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you” (John 13:15).
Jesus expects us to spend ourselves on behalf of our students. We will have to give sacrificially—of our time, our money, our energy, our very lives—depriving ourselves of very real comforts so that our students may look upon Him in whom all comfort is found.
5. Prayerful Waiting
Sadly, even when we have done all this faithfully and lovingly, our students will sometimes refuse God’s best. Like the rich young ruler, their faces will fall when they hear God’s claim on their lives, 
and they will walk away dejected. In such cases especially, our love must be restless. Jesus’ powerful parable of the lost son captures well the image of prayerful waiting. When the young prodigal returns home after his days of sinful recklessness, even while he was still a long way off “his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him” (Luke 15:20). One wonders how the father came to see his son so far away. I cannot think but the father saw his son from a distance because he never stopped looking, lifting his eyes to the hills unceasingly in the hope that one day his beloved son would come back home.
Some of our students will flee God’s sheepfold, embracing damnable foolishness and willful pride. Let us measure our response carefully. Will we wait expectantly, knowing that the grace of God captivates even the most hardened sinner? And will we wait prayerfully, pleading with the Father to rescue one more child—and knowing that the Father pleads with those who refuse His grace (Luke 15:28)?
I hope we have all had sleepless nights, agonizing in prayer and fasting, lifting up our hands for the lives of our students, crucifying our comfort so that they may have the comfort of the Crucified. If not, we have never loved restlessly. Lift your eyes to your Maker, from whom your help comes (Psalm 121:1–2); lift your eyes to the hills, waiting prayerfully to see the prodigal return.
Hours before His death, Christ prayed for all those who would follow Him throughout history: “I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them” (John 17:26). Christ has revealed the Father to us, and He has come to dwell within us so we may share His love, the love of Calvary, with all those He has given us. And what is this love but a steady wish that our students may live the abundant life Christ offers, and a steadfast work to accomplish that wish? Love restlessly so that they may find their rest in Him.
References
Augustine. 2008. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bock, Darrell L. 1996. Luke, vol. 2: 9:51–24:53. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.
Lewis, C. S. 1970. God in the dock: Essays on theology and ethics. Ed. Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
CSE 15.2 Restless Love