I have wondered what keeps us in the sometimes heart-crushing, discouraging, and even anxiety-feeding battle for others’ souls. Why do we refuse to give in even when disappointed repeatedly or when their flippant lack of appreciation tempts us to coldness or depression? 

Give your heart to someone and you make yourself vulnerable. Shed tears for their soul (2 Cor 11:28-29), pray your knees bloody for their growth (Eph 3:14), fill them with Scripture day after day (John 17:17), snatch them from the fire of heresy (Jude 23), weep in their sorrows, rejoice in their victories (Rom 12:15), rebuke them in sin (Prov 27:5), pour out your soul in earnest pleadings for them to repent and be reconciled to God through Christ (2 Cor 5:20), and sometimes all you get is a dead look of indifference, or worse, the smile of agreement only to be betrayed by another dive into their vomit.

Give everything you have to help someone become like Christ and they could turn and squish you like a bug. He who loves most suffers most. It’s an inescapable fact of ministry. Look at Christ. No one loved more than He did, yet would anyone dare to claim to suffer as He did?

So why don’t we give up? Why do we forgive a fallen disciple 10,000 times over (Matt 18:22)? Why do we run through dangerous woods and leap across nauseating precipices for that one lost sheep (Luke 15:1-7)? Why do we spend sleepless nights praying for that poor soul who is so easily sucked into his old habits? Love. In the end, when all strength and wisdom have been exhausted, when all possible words of exhortation have been drained, and not an ounce of patience resides in your heart to endure with this weak soul for another second, one wind still carries you on, and it is love. “Love…bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails” (1 Cor 13:7-8a).

It is no wonder that in the two greatest commandments you find love (Matt 22:37-39). It is no surprise that love rises to the top of Paul’s list of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22), or that Paul crowns it the queen of virtues (1 Cor 13). When all other virtues reach their last leg, love still marches on. When all reason is spent, all resources depleted, and so many prayers offered that we are left speechless, we hang on by one thread—but an unbreakable thread it is!—the thread of love.

Your disciple may thrust a knife in your stomach, and as you fall bleeding to your knees you look him in the eyes and say, “I’m never giving up on you, no matter what.”

Christ did not first make us righteous, then love us. He loved us in all our wretched sin, dirty and undesirable. He loved us while still sinners. He didn’t give up. And neither will we.