By Duke Taber
Most of us arrive at the subject of love carrying something. Maybe a relationship that left you emptier than you expected. Maybe a church community that talked about love endlessly but felt cold when you needed it most. Maybe a nagging sense that what the world calls love and what the Bible calls love are not quite the same thing — and that the gap matters more than anyone is letting on.
You are right about that gap. It matters enormously.
The Bible’s teaching on love is one of the most countercultural, demanding, and ultimately liberating bodies of truth in all of Scripture. It does not begin with your feelings. It does not rise and fall with your circumstances. And it does not end with romantic partnership, though it certainly includes that. Biblical love is rooted in the very character of God — and studying it for even a single week can quietly rewire how you treat every person in your life.
This seven-day reading plan is built for exactly that kind of encounter. Each day targets a specific dimension of what the Bible reveals about love, moves through both Testaments, and lands with a practical question designed to carry the truth off the page and into your Monday.
Before You Begin: Why a Structured Plan Changes Things
There is a meaningful difference between stumbling across a verse about love and actually tracing love as a theological theme across the whole of Scripture. If you have spent time on why casual Bible reading isn’t enough, you already know the difference between encountering a truth and actually studying it. A reading plan forces your eyes to see Scripture in relationship rather than in isolation.
Research from the American Bible Society confirms what believers have known for centuries: as we read the Bible consistently, God can give us a firm sense of identity, help us love others, decrease stress, loneliness, and anxiety, and increase generosity and joy. A week focused specifically on love — how God defines it, demonstrates it, commands it, and enables it — is one of the most concentrated doses of spiritual formation available to any believer.
Set aside fifteen to twenty minutes each morning. Open with a brief prayer asking God to make the text come alive. Bring a journal if you can. And resist the urge to rush. Seven days on this topic, done with genuine attention, is worth more than a year of half-distracted reading.
Day 1: The Source — God Is Love
Read: 1 John 4:7–21
There is no better place to begin than where the Bible plants its flag most plainly. The Apostle John does not merely say that God shows love or that God approves of love. He says something far more radical:
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” — 1 John 4:7–8 (NKJV)
This is a statement about God’s nature, not merely his behavior. Love is not something God does when the mood is right. It is what God is. That changes everything about how we understand every subsequent day of this plan.
John builds his argument through one of the most stunning theological moves in the New Testament: the Incarnation is the proof. God did not offer love as an idea or a principle. He sent his Son. The cross is not an argument about love. It is love, demonstrated. John then presses the logic forward: if this love has genuinely landed in us — if we are truly born of God — it will produce love for each other. The absence of love for others is not a spiritual inconvenience. It is a sign that something has gone wrong at the root.
Spend time today simply sitting with the question: What does it mean that love is not first a feeling, a duty, or a relationship — but a Person?
Day 2: The Definition — Love in 1 Corinthians 13
Read: 1 Corinthians 13
I have read this chapter at more weddings than I can count, and I have noticed something uncomfortable: the more often it is read at weddings, the less often it seems to shape marriages. It is worth asking whether familiarity has dulled us to what Paul is actually saying here.
This chapter does not appear in a pastoral letter about marriage. It appears in the middle of a dispute about spiritual gifts in a dysfunctional church. Paul is not painting a romantic scene. He is confronting a community that had allowed pride, factionalism, and spiritual one-upmanship to eat away at what should have defined them. His corrective is love — but described with a precision that should stop you cold:
“Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” — 1 Corinthians 13:4–7 (NKJV)
Notice that every quality here is behavioral, not emotional. Paul never says love feels a certain way. He says love acts a certain way. This is the corrective the ancient Greeks understood intuitively when they developed distinct vocabulary for different kinds of love. The highest form — agape — is a selfless, pure, willful, sacrificial love. It is the type of love that desires the greatest good for someone else. It is intentional, meaning you choose or purpose to love someone. Agape love may produce emotions but is not born out of emotion. It is the choice of your will.
For a deeper dive into how these categories shape everything you read in the New Testament, the 1 Corinthians 13 Bible study at AnsweredFaith is worth your time.
Today’s question: Which of Paul’s descriptions in 1 Corinthians 13 is most difficult for you to consistently live out — and why?
Day 3: The Command — Love Your Neighbor and Your Enemy
Read: Luke 10:25–37; Matthew 5:43–48
By the middle of the week, the plan moves from definition to demand. Jesus does not leave love as a warm aspiration. He turns it into a command with teeth — and then expands it past the point where most of us are comfortable.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan answers the lawyer’s attempt to narrow the definition of “neighbor” to the point of convenience. Jesus answers with a story in which the hero is from a hated ethnic group, which was offensive to his original audience, and closes with a question that inverts the one that opened the conversation. The lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus asked, “Which of these three was a neighbor?” The shift is intentional. Biblical love is not about identifying the people you are required to love. It is about becoming the kind of person who loves.
Then comes the harder passage. Matthew 5 takes the concept somewhere that the natural heart rebels against entirely:
“But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.” — Matthew 5:44–45 (NKJV)
There is no softening this. Jesus explicitly identifies the people who have wronged you, who oppose you, who wish you harm — and commands love toward them. His rationale is not sentimental. It is theological: this is how God loves. God sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. If we only love those who love us back, we are not reflecting anything distinctively divine. We are simply mirroring the world.
This highest form of love — agape — is described as “unconditional, sacrificial love and biblically refers to a love that God is (1 John 4:8, 16)” and that God shows (John 3:16; 1 John 4:19). It is a love of choice, a love that serves others with humility.
Today’s question: Is there someone in your life you have been exempting from the category of “neighbor”? What would it look like to actually pray for them this week?
Day 4: The Model — How Jesus Loved
Read: John 13:1–17; John 15:9–17
Halfway through the week, it helps to move from abstract principle to concrete example. There is no better teacher than watching Jesus himself demonstrate what he commanded.
John 13 opens the Farewell Discourse with an act that would have been jarring to everyone in the room. On the night he was to be betrayed, knowing full well what was coming — knowing Judas would betray him, knowing Peter would deny him, knowing the others would scatter — Jesus got up, wrapped a towel around his waist, and washed their feet. Not the feet of strangers. The feet of men he knew would fail him before the night was over.
“So when He had washed their feet, taken His garments, and sat down again, He said to them, ‘Do you know what I have done to you? You call Me Teacher and Lord, and you say well, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.'” — John 13:12–14 (NKJV)
Love, as Jesus models it, is not reserved for those who have earned it. It does not wait until people are trustworthy. It does not require reciprocity. He washes Judas’s feet.
Then in John 15, he says what may be the most sobering thing ever spoken about love: “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends” (v. 13 NKJV). And he is not speaking theoretically. He is speaking hours before the cross.
For a closer look at the patterns of love that run through Jesus’s ministry, the examples of Jesus showing love in the Bible resource traces these moments with care.
Today’s question: Who in your life needs you to serve them in a tangible, inconvenient way — and have you been waiting for conditions to be better before doing it?
Day 5: The Depth — God’s Love in the Old Testament
Read: Deuteronomy 7:6–9; Hosea 11:1–11; Lamentations 3:22–33
One of the most common misreadings of Scripture is the idea that the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath while the God of the New Testament is a God of love. This is not only bad theology — it is a misreading of the actual text.
The Old Testament uses the Hebrew word hesed — often translated “lovingkindness” or “steadfast love” — more than 240 times. There is no perfect English equivalent, but it combines loyalty, covenant faithfulness, and mercy in a way that is actually more demanding than most uses of “love” in modern English. Deuteronomy 7 captures it clearly: Israel did not earn God’s love. They were not larger or more impressive than their neighbors. God chose them purely because he chose them — and because of a covenant he had made with their fathers.
Hosea 11 is perhaps the most tender passage in all the prophets. God speaks to Israel as a parent speaks of a wandering child:
“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son. As they called them, so they went from them; they sacrificed to the Baals, and burned incense to carved images. I taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by their arms; but they did not know that I healed them.” — Hosea 11:1–3 (NKJV)
Israel abandoned him again and again. He kept pursuing them. This is not sentiment. This is the love that eventually sends a Son.
Lamentations 3, written in the rubble of Jerusalem’s destruction, still manages to arrive at one of the great anchoring truths of Scripture: “Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness” (vv. 22–23 NKJV). Love that survives catastrophe is not romantic love. It is hesed.
Today’s question: Where in your own story has God’s steadfast love pursued you past the point where you deserved it?
Day 6: The Practice — Love in Community
Read: Romans 12:9–21; Colossians 3:12–17
Five days of theology are now ready to land in the real, specific, difficult work of actually loving people in community. Paul is relentlessly practical here, and he does not let love remain abstract.
Romans 12:9 opens with a warning most of us need: “Let love be without hypocrisy.” The Greek word is anypokritos — literally, without a mask. Paul has seen what religious love looks like when it is performed for reputation rather than offered from the heart. He wants none of it.
What follows is a list so dense with practical direction that it is worth reading slowly, twice:
“Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honor giving preference to one another; not lagging in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer; distributing to the needs of the saints, given to hospitality.” — Romans 12:10–13 (NKJV)
Then, following the same pattern as Jesus in Matthew 5, Paul pushes directly into enemy territory again: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse” (v. 14).
Colossians 3 adds the phrase that ties everything together: “But above all these things put on love, which is the bond of perfection” (v. 14). Love is not one virtue among many, like an item in a wardrobe. It is the garment that holds the entire outfit together. Without it, everything else is just performance.
The what makes a Bible study on love life-changing vs. forgettable article explores how to take exactly this kind of passage from information to transformation — worth reading as you approach the final day of the plan.
Today’s question: Which of Paul’s specific commands in Romans 12 do you find most practically difficult in your current relationships — and what would it look like to choose one of them deliberately this week?
Day 7: The Eternal — Love That Outlasts Everything
Read: 1 Corinthians 13:8–13; Revelation 21:1–5; Romans 8:35–39
The reading plan ends where it must: with the future. One of the most staggering claims in all of Scripture is that love is not temporary. It does not belong to this age alone. Paul closes his great love chapter with the reminder that prophecy will fail, tongues will cease, knowledge will pass away — but love will not:
“Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away.” — 1 Corinthians 13:8 (NKJV)
Everything we experience in this life — gifts, roles, capacities, even our current partial understanding of God — is scaffolding. Love is what remains when the scaffolding comes down.
Revelation 21 gives us a glimpse of what that looks like: God dwelling with his people, wiping away every tear, making all things new. The entire arc of Scripture — from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 — is the story of a God whose love would not rest until it had recovered what was lost, healed what was broken, and brought his people home.
And then Paul’s great climax in Romans 8, which I find myself returning to again and again when the news is hard and the world feels brittle:
“For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” — Romans 8:38–39 (NKJV)
Nothing. Not the worst season of your life. Not your worst failure. Not your most persistent doubt. Not the hardest relationship. Nothing in all of creation can sever the tether that God’s love has placed around you in Christ.
Today’s question: What in your life are you currently allowing to make you feel separated from God’s love — and what does today’s passage say directly to that fear?
What to Do After Day Seven
A week is a beginning, not a destination. Here is how to carry this forward:
- Return to the passages that stopped you. One verse that genuinely disrupts you is worth more than ten you read efficiently. Go back to wherever the reading slowed you down.
- Choose one person to love more intentionally this week. Not someone easy. Someone specific, and possibly someone difficult.
- Read it together. Sharing what you learn with other Christians — joining a Bible study, asking a friend for accountability — deepens both understanding and practice. If you want to take this topic further with a group, the Bible study on love at AnsweredFaith offers a full curriculum.
- Study the four types of love. The four types of love in the Bible — eros (romantic), storge (familial), phileo (brotherly affection), and agape (God’s divine love) — each serve a distinct purpose in Christian life. Understanding them will change how you read every love passage in Scripture. The 4 types of love in the Bible article walks through each with care.
A Word About How This Changes You
I want to be honest about something. A seven-day reading plan will not fix a difficult marriage, heal a fractured friendship, or instantly dissolve the habit of loving only on your own terms. That kind of transformation takes longer and goes deeper than any plan can carry you.
What a week like this can do is reset your theological imagination. It can remind you that love in the biblical sense is not first a feeling that arrives uninvited but a decision rooted in the character of a God who chose to love even when it cost him everything. It can show you that the same Spirit who enabled Peter to preach agape love after Pentecost lives in you. It can give you language for the gap between how you are loving and how you are called to love.
That gap is not a reason for shame. It is an invitation to ask the One who is love to fill what is insufficient in you.
“We love Him because He first loved us.” — 1 John 4:19 (NKJV)
That is where it always starts. Not with our performance, but with his initiative. Every act of genuine love in your life is ultimately a response to something he did first.
Take the Next Step
If this reading plan stirred something in you and you want to go deeper, here are a few ways to continue:
- Bible Study on Love — AnsweredFaith’s full topical study
- Why Every Christian Needs to Do a Dedicated Study on Love at Least Once
- Bible Reading Plan on Love — additional reading plan resources
- How Going Deep on Agape Love Will Change the Way You Treat Everyone Around You
- What a Deep Dive into Biblical Love Actually Looks Like Week by Week
Resources
- American Bible Society — Daily Bible Reading Guide 2026 — Research on the spiritual and practical benefits of consistent Scripture reading
- Learn Religions — 4 Types of Love in the Bible — Overview of eros, storge, phileo, and agape with biblical examples
- Christianity.com — Greek Words for Love — Accessible theological introduction to agape, phileo, storge, and eros
- Your Marriage God’s Way — Agape, Phileo, Storge, and Eros — Applied study on how the different Greek words shape our understanding of love in marriage and relationship
- Desiring God — Maximize Your Daily Bible Reading — John Piper’s practical guidance for reading Scripture in a way that produces genuine transformation
- Like an Anchor — Agape and Philia: Overlapping Dimensions of God’s Love — Scholarly treatment of how agape and phileo function together in the New Testament
Duke Taber
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