By Duke Taber
There is a passage I come back to every few years, and it never lands the same way twice. It is 1 Corinthians 13 — the so-called “love chapter” — the one read at weddings, printed on greeting cards, and recited so often that we have learned, almost by instinct, to stop actually hearing it. Paul wrote those words to a church that was gifted, energetic, and deeply divided. A church that could speak in tongues and prophesy and perform acts of spectacular ministry — and yet could not manage to love each other well. Sound uncomfortably familiar?
I have been a pastor for a long time, and if I had to name the single most common failure I have witnessed in Christian life and Christian community, it would not be lack of faith, or prayerlessness, or theological confusion. It would be this: people who genuinely believe they understand love, and have never seriously studied what the Bible actually teaches about it.
That gap — between what we assume we know and what Scripture actually says — is where marriages fracture, where friendships go cold, where churches split, and where believers quietly burn out trying to give what they have never really received or understood.
A dedicated study on love is not a sentimental exercise. It is an act of spiritual survival.
We Have Inherited a Counterfeit
Before you can understand why a serious biblical study on love matters, you have to reckon honestly with what most of us were taught love is. We grew up in a culture — and, often, a church culture — that treated love primarily as a feeling. Something that happens to you. Something that rises and falls with circumstances and emotion. Something that, when it fades, gives you permission to stop trying.
That definition is everywhere. It is in our music, our films, our social media, and, if we are not careful, in the unexamined corners of our own hearts. And it is almost entirely foreign to the New Testament.
The Greek language that gives us the New Testament drew careful distinctions between types of love — distinctions our one English word cannot carry. There is eros, the passionate desire between lovers. There is phileo, the warm affection of friendship. There is storge, the natural bond of family. And then there is agape — the word the New Testament reserves for the love of God and the love God calls his people to practice toward one another.
Agape is a category of love unlike the others. It is not based on the worthiness of its object. It does not depend on feeling. It initiates rather than waits. It gives rather than demands. It is, as one ministry leader at Brenwood Baptist summarized it, “sincerely desiring God’s best for another and doing what you can to see that accomplished.” That is not what most of us learned to call love. And until we study it carefully, we tend to operate on the counterfeit without ever knowing it.
The Commandment That Changes Everything
When the religious experts of his day tried to catch Jesus in a theological trap, they asked him which commandment was the greatest of all. His answer was unambiguous.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” — Matthew 22:37–40 (NKJV)
This is not a suggestion. It is not one item on a long list of spiritual disciplines. Jesus placed love at the structural center of everything — the hinge on which the entire revelation of God hangs. Paul makes the same argument in Romans when he writes that love is the fulfillment of the law. John goes even further, insisting that without love, a claim to know God is simply a lie.
“He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” — 1 John 4:8 (NKJV)
That is a striking thing to sit with. Not: he who does not love is not yet mature. Not: he who does not love needs more growth. He who does not love does not know God. Love is not an advanced topic for spiritually seasoned believers. It is the baseline of Christian life. And yet most of us have spent far more hours studying prophecy, spiritual gifts, eschatology, or church history than we have spent in a focused, deliberate, unhurried study of what love actually means — in its full biblical breadth.
Why a Surface Reading Is Not Enough
You may be thinking: I know 1 Corinthians 13. I have read it many times. I know what love is.
I understand that feeling. I had it too. But there is a difference between encountering a text and studying it — between reading words and letting them interrogate you. A structured study on a single biblical theme works differently than devotional reading, precisely because it creates space to sit long enough for the text to push back.
When you study 1 Corinthians 13 slowly, for example, you begin to notice that Paul does not describe love as a feeling at all. He describes it as a series of behaviors and choices. Love is patient — present tense, ongoing, active. Love is kind. Love does not seek its own. The Greek word Paul uses for “seeks its own” (zētei ta heautēs) is the language of self-interest, of placing your own comfort and agenda at the center. That is the daily default of the human heart. And Paul says love — real love, agape — moves in the opposite direction by choice, not by emotion.
That single observation, when you sit with it long enough, begins to reframe every important relationship in your life.
Bible engagement research bears this out. The Center for Bible Engagement found that engaging Scripture most days of the week is the single most powerful predictor of spiritual growth among all the spiritual disciplines studied — more than prayer, fasting, church attendance, or small groups. And spiritual growth, by definition, includes growing in love: the first and most visible fruit of the Spirit’s work in a believer’s life. You cannot separate the two. Deep Word engagement produces deeper love. The research simply confirms what Scripture has always said.
The Scope of What You Will Actually Discover
Here is what I find most remarkable: even longtime believers are often surprised by how vast the biblical landscape of love turns out to be. They come in expecting to be reminded of things they already know. They leave having encountered something genuinely new.
A thorough study on love will take you through the nature of God’s own love — not just as a doctrine but as a lived, narrative reality, displayed across every book of Scripture. You will trace the Hebrew word hesed, often translated “lovingkindness” or “steadfast love,” through the Psalms and the Prophets. Hesed is covenant love — the love God shows not because his people deserve it but because he has bound himself to them. It is relentlessly faithful. It does not withdraw when the relationship becomes painful or costly. Understanding hesed alone will reshape how you read the Old Testament and how you approach your own commitments.
“I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.” — Jeremiah 31:3 (NKJV)
You will study examples of agape love across the biblical narrative — Ruth’s covenant faithfulness to Naomi, Jonathan’s selfless friendship with David, the prodigal’s father running to meet his returning son while he was still a great way off. Each of these stories is a window into what God’s love looks like when it takes human form.
You will spend time in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus raises the stakes on love higher than any previous teacher dared to go: love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, do good to those who hate you. The Beatitudes begin to make sense not as a checklist of virtues but as a portrait of a person shaped by love from the inside out.
And you will spend time in 1 John — arguably the most concentrated treatment of love’s theology outside of 1 Corinthians 13. John writes as an old man who has seen it all: churches planted and fractured, believers who burned bright and burned out, the steady erosion that comes when love is preached but not practiced. His conclusion, repeated with almost stubborn insistence throughout four chapters, is this: you cannot love God without loving people, and you cannot truly love people without being rooted in God’s love for you.
Love That Costs Something
There is a version of love-talk in Christian circles that costs nothing. It fills sermon illustrations and worship lyrics and social media captions. It feels warm and true. But it does not require anything from you on a Tuesday afternoon when the person you need to love has just said something that cut you to the bone.
Biblical love, as Jesus defines it, is not that kind. His own description of it is stark:
“Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” — John 15:13 (NKJV)
The Greek word translated “lay down” (tithēmi) is the same word used when Jesus talks about setting something aside, of deliberately putting your own life on the table for the sake of another. That is the love modeled on the cross. That is the love we are called to practice — not perfectly, but genuinely, in the ordinary, unglamorous moments of daily life.
A dedicated study on love will inevitably bring you here: to the uncomfortable realization that love, done biblically, will cost you something. It will cost you your right to hold on to an offense. It will cost you your comfort when a neighbor or a prodigal or an enemy needs something from you. Forgiveness and love are so inseparably bound in Scripture that you cannot study one without being confronted by the other.
This is not discouraging news. It is liberating. Because once you understand that love is a settled choice of the will — something you do, not only something you feel — you are no longer at the mercy of your emotions. You do not have to wait until you feel like loving someone. You can choose it now, with God’s grace supplying what your natural strength cannot.
A 2021 Barna Group study found that 66% of practicing Christians identify loving others as the most important evidence of spiritual growth — and yet the same research community consistently finds that most churchgoers feel they are not growing spiritually. The knowledge is there. The aspiration is there. What is often missing is the deep, structured engagement with Scripture that moves love from an idea to a practice.
What This Study Does to Your Relationships
I want to be specific here, because the stakes are concrete.
Marriages are transformed when both partners do a serious study on love — not a study about marriage, but a study on love itself. When a husband discovers what it means to love his wife as Christ loved the church — sacrificially, consistently, not contingently — it changes how he shows up on an ordinary evening. When a wife grasps the depth of covenant love modeled in hesed, it reshapes what it means to stand by someone through seasons that feel barren. The Bible has much more to say about what love in marriage actually looks like than most couples have ever explored in depth.
Friendships deepen. When you understand covenant friendship in the biblical sense, the shallow acquaintance-collecting of modern life starts to feel inadequate. You begin to hunger for the kind of friendship Jonathan and David modeled — love that covers, that corrects, that stays.
And communities — churches, small groups, families — are healed when people who have genuinely studied love begin to practice it with intention. A Lifeway Research survey found that 56% of churchgoers intentionally tried to show love to someone they disagreed with in the past year — which is encouraging. But it also means nearly half did not. The gap between knowing love is commanded and actually choosing it across difference is exactly where a serious study makes its mark.
How to Actually Do It
A dedicated study on love does not require a seminary degree or a perfectly arranged schedule. It requires intentionality and a willingness to go slowly.
Start with 1 Corinthians 13, but read it in segments rather than in a single sitting. Sit with verses 4 through 7 for a full week. Apply each characteristic — patience, kindness, not seeking its own, bearing all things — to a specific relationship in your life. Let it become diagnostic before it becomes aspirational.
Then move to 1 John, reading it as a sustained argument rather than a collection of verses. Notice how John weaves together the love of God, our love for one another, and confidence before God into a single, unbreakable cord.
From there, trace love through the Gospels. Watch how Jesus demonstrates love — through touch, through presence, through the willingness to be interrupted, through the radical decision to eat with the wrong people. Notice who he loved that his culture said he should not. Let that pattern challenge your own instinct to love only those who are convenient or similar or safe.
Use a journal. Write out what you are learning, where you are resisting, where you feel the text pressing against something in you that you have been reluctant to examine. Journaling as part of Bible study is not a personality type — it is a discipline that slows you down enough to actually hear what Scripture is saying rather than what you expected it to say.
If you are part of a small group or a marriage, do this study together. What happens when people study the Bible together on a topic this foundational is genuinely different from what happens alone — there is accountability, there is the mirror of watching another person wrestle honestly with the same text, and there is the grace of practicing love in real time with the very people you are studying it beside.
The World Is Watching
Jesus did not leave his disciples many organizational instructions. He did not tell them how to structure a service or what size church was healthy or how to build a brand. But he did give them one defining mark — one sign by which the world would know they were his:
“By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” — John 13:35 (NKJV)
In a cultural moment when the church’s credibility is under serious scrutiny, when people inside and outside the faith are watching to see whether what Christians confess on Sunday actually shapes who they are on Monday, that sign matters enormously. Not polished programming. Not social media presence. Not doctrinal statements, as important as those are.
Love. Visible, costly, stubborn, cross-shaped love.
That kind of love does not appear by accident. It is grown — slowly, through the Word, through prayer, through practice, through failure and repentance and getting back up and trying again. A dedicated study on love is one of the most important investments you can make in becoming the kind of person and community that the watching world cannot explain away.
A Word Before You Begin
If you are reading this in a season of relational pain — if love has cost you something recently, or if you are struggling to extend it to someone who has hurt you — I want to say something directly to you.
This study is not going to shame you for finding love hard. The Bible itself is full of people who found it hard. The disciples argued about who was greatest even on the night of the Last Supper. Peter, who walked on water with Jesus, denied knowing him three times. John, whom tradition calls “the apostle of love,” had a nickname early in his ministry: Son of Thunder. The arc of his life is itself a study in how a person is gradually shaped by the love they keep encountering in Christ.
You are not expected to arrive at the beginning of this study with love already mastered. You are expected to arrive as you are — and to let Scripture, with all its honesty and all its grace, meet you there.
“We love Him because He first loved us.” — 1 John 4:19 (NKJV)
That is where it always begins. Not with our capacity to love, but with the recognition of how thoroughly and irreversibly we have been loved first.
Take the Next Step
If this resonated with you, here is what I would encourage you to do:
- Commit to a structured study on love — not a single devotional reading, but a season of deliberate engagement with the biblical theme in all its depth
- Use a journal to record what you are learning and where you are being challenged
- Invite someone to do it with you — a spouse, a close friend, a small group
- Come back to 1 John 4:19 every morning for the first week, and let your study begin there: with being loved
You can get started right now with our Bible study on love or work through our 13-lesson love study series available as a downloadable resource. For those in a marriage, the couples’ Bible study on love is a powerful way to do this work together.
The greatest commandment is not waiting for you to feel ready. It is waiting for you to begin.
— Duke Taber
Resources
- AnsweredFaith.com — Bible Study on Love — A comprehensive starting point for a dedicated love study
- AnsweredFaith.com — The 4 Types of Love in the Bible — Understanding agape, phileo, eros, and storge
- Center for Bible Engagement — Bible Engagement as the Key to Spiritual Growth — Research on how Scripture engagement shapes spiritual formation
- Love Worth Finding Ministries — 7 Keys to Healthy Relationships — Practical biblical principles for relationships rooted in love
- Share the Struggle — How to Grow in Love as a Christian — Applied guidance on growing in biblical love
- Brenwood Baptist — Five Biblical Principles About Love — A concise theological grounding for a love study
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