To love (in a social or moral sense)
Reading a lexicon entry
What this page is: Each lexicon entry shows the original Hebrew or Greek word behind the English translation: its meaning, its range of use, and where it appears in Scripture.
Strong's number: The Strong's code (H- or G-) is the standard reference number for this word. It connects this entry to chapter and passage language tabs.
Where it appears: The witness passages show where this word is used in context. Click any to open the study page for that passage.
This lexicon entry is part of our ongoing editorial review. If you notice missing content, unclear wording, or a possible correction, please send us a note through the Connect page. Screenshots are helpful.
ἀγαπάω (agapao) is the verb form of agape, and it carries all the weight of the NT's most distinctive word for love. It is indexed locally at 143 occurrences and denotes love that is chosen, active, and directed toward its object regardless of the object's merit.
Reader summary
Full entry for ἀγαπάω (G25) · Open the biblical lexicon
ἀγαπάω (agapao) is the verb form of agape, and it carries all the weight of the NT's most distinctive word for love. It is indexed locally at 143 occurrences and denotes love that is chosen, active, and directed toward its object regardless of the object's merit.
The BSB source-word alignment has 143 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include Love (36), loved (17), loves (17), does not love (5), to love (5).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Matthew 5:43. Its strongest book concentrations include John (37), 1 John (28), Luke (13), Ephesians (10).
This entry includes 5 verse guides that explain exact original-language forms in context.
ἀγαπάω (agapao) is the verb form of agape, and it carries all the weight of the NT's most distinctive word for love. It is indexed locally at 143 occurrences and denotes love that is chosen, active, and directed toward its object regardless of the object's merit. The noun agape (G26) has already been curated; agapao is the verbal engine that drives everything agape describes — it is love as something you do, not merely something you feel.
John 3:16 is the locus classicus: 'For God so loved (egapesen) the world that he gave his only Son.' The verb here is aorist — a completed, decisive act. God's agapao is not a standing disposition that waits for worthy objects; it is an act of self-giving that happened at a specific point in history, at the cross. The world God loved is not a world that had earned love or demonstrated worthiness; it is a world under judgment. This establishes the pattern: agapao in the NT always moves from the stronger to the weaker, from the worthy to the unworthy.
John 13:34 gives the verb its community shape: 'A new commandment I give to you, that you love (agapate) one another: just as I have loved (egapesa) you, you also are to love (agapate) one another.' The command to agapao each other is grounded in and measured by Christ's own agapao — which will be demonstrated within hours at Calvary. 'Just as I have loved you' sets the standard: cruciform, self-emptying, consistent regardless of the recipient's response.
First John works through the implications systematically: 'Beloved, let us love (agapomen) one another, for love (agape) is from God, and whoever loves (agapon) has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love (agape)' (1 Jn 4:7-8). The agapao capacity is not natural to human beings in their fallen state; it is a fruit of new birth. The person who agapao-s demonstrates by that love that they have been born of God.
For the preacher, ἀγαπάω is the word that insists love is a verb — not a feeling to be cultivated but an action to be chosen, calibrated not by the worthiness of the recipient but by the love of Christ as the measure.
ἀγαπάω (agapao) is indexed locally at 143 occurrences in the NT. John's Gospel and Epistles are the richest concentration — nearly half of all NT occurrences are in Johannine literature. The Synoptics use it primarily for the love commands. Paul uses it for both God's love and the community's mutual love. The verb consistently describes love as an action that has a source (God), a model (Christ's self-giving), and a direction (toward others regardless of merit).
For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.
The definitive statement of divine agapao: God loved (egapesen — aorist, completed act), and the evidence is the giving of the Son. The object of God's love is 'the world' — not Israel only, not the righteous, not those who had sought God, but the world in its lostness. The agapao here is not response to anything in the world but pure initiative from God. This verse is the theological ground of every NT command to agapao: the love God commands is the love God has demonstrated.
A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also must love one another.
The community command, given on the night of the arrest, measures the required agapao by Christ's own: 'just as I have loved you.' The newness of the commandment is not in the idea of loving others (Lev 19:18 already required that) but in the standard: the love of Christ crucified. The disciples are to love with the same self-giving, others-centered, cost-bearing agapao that Jesus is about to demonstrate at the cross. This is the calibration point for all NT community ethics.
Beloved, let us love one another, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.
The source of the agapao capacity: God. The person who agapao-s demonstrates that they have been born of God. This is not moralism — it is ontology. The love is not something the believer produces through ethical effort; it flows from the new birth. The inability to love is therefore not simply a moral failure but a sign of the absence of new life. First John uses agapao as one of the primary tests of genuine faith throughout the letter.
Jesus declared, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
The first and great commandment uses agapao for the total orientation of the person toward God. 'With all your heart, soul, and mind' covers the whole person — the affective, volitional, and intellectual dimensions. Agapao here is not an emotion but a whole-self orientation. The verb encompasses everything the person is and does, directed toward God as the supreme object.
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.
The ground of confidence in suffering: Christ's agapao. Paul has listed the worst the world can throw at the believer (tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, sword — v. 35), and the answer to all of it is not the believer's strength but Christ's love. 'Through him who loved us' — the agapao of Christ is the power that makes the believer more than a conqueror. The love was demonstrated at the cross (v. 32); it remains the permanent reality that no circumstance can undo.
We love because He first loved us.
The sequence that governs all NT agapao: God first. The believer's love for God is not the origin but the response — it flows from receiving God's prior agapao. This undoes every form of spirituality that makes human love for God the starting point. God's love initiates; the believer's love responds. And by extension, the believer's love for others is itself a participation in the divine love that originated in God: 'if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another' (v. 11).
BSB source-word alignment connects this entry to exact verse rows, English rendering, source form, transliteration, and parsing.
How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Verse-level guides showing how this original-language form works in its specific context, including grammar, verse function, and guarded interpretation.
Greek word. to love (in a social or moral sense)
Textus Receptus witness, full corpus Greek token appearances from Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus in the full New Testament corpus.
16 of 142 Greek text appearances shown. Linked morphology labels have verse guides.
I love
Read verseI love
Read verseI love
Read verseI love
Read verseI love
Read verseI love
Read verseI love
Read verseI love
Read verseI love
Read verseI love
Read verseI love
Read verseI love
Read verseI love
Read verseI love
Read verseI love
Read verseI love
Read verseFull New Testament corpus: 260 chapters, 7,957 verses, 140,628 tokens. Data source: honza/textus-receptus (data only), with authority check against byztxt/greektext-textus-receptus.
How mood, tense, and voice shift the force of this verb in context.
This verb appears through different tense, voice, mood, or stem patterns. Those forms help readers see how the action is presented in context.
How this verb appears across 143 occurrences in the NT discourse index (MACULA Greek SBLGNT).
Aspect reflects grammatical form — not authorial emphasis. Participles and infinitives are verbal adjectives and nouns respectively.
Clause data: MACULA Greek (Clear Bible, CC BY 4.0) · SBLGNT (Logos/SBL, CC BY 4.0)
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 8 selected witnesses from 143 lexical occurrence verses.
Highlights the steadfast love of Christ that secures believers.
Defines covenant devotion.
Expresses continuous covenant love.
Affirms delay does not negate love.
Defines covenant community identity.
Standard of devotion Christ seeks.
Defines the nature of Christian love. John 15:12–17
Serves as the visible evidence that the light of Christ has transformed the believer. Luke 6:27–36
Defines the ethical expression of new life rooted in Christ’s sacrifice.
Hebrew roots and equivalents that share conceptual or etymological ground with this Greek word.
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
ἀγαπάω (agapao) is the verb that demands love be treated as action, not affect. The NT does not say 'feel agape toward one another'; it says 'agapao one another' — do it, choose it, perform it, maintain it regardless of how you feel about the person or how the person has treated you. The standard is set once and for all in John 13:34: 'just as I have loved you.'
That means the calibration point for all Christian agapao is the cross — the love that kept moving toward its objects even when those objects were hostile, indifferent, or asleep in a garden. First John makes the test stark: the person who claims to love God but does not agapao the brother or sister they can see has exposed themselves as self-deceived (1 Jn 4:20).
The command is not to have warm feelings about difficult people; it is to act toward them with the same initiative, consistency, and cost-bearing that characterized Christ's love. The preacher who wants to help a congregation actually love — not sentimentally but in the NT sense — must set the cross as the picture of what love looks like and refuse the comfort of treating love as a feeling that arrives when conditions are favorable.
Jhn.3.16
ἀγαπάω (agapao) is a verb of the alpha-contract class. Its noun counterpart is agape (G26), which has already received a companion entry. The verb appears more frequently than the noun in the Gospels; the noun dominates in Paul. Together they are the NT's primary vocabulary for the defining quality of God's character and the primary obligation of the Christian community.
The Greek verb-family also includes agapetos (beloved, G27), which appears frequently in the Epistles as an address ('beloved'). The relationship between agapao and phileo (to love/be fond of, G5368) has been debated since antiquity; both appear in John 21:15-17 in Jesus' exchange with Peter. The most defensible reading is that agapao and phileo overlap in John's usage rather than marking a sharp distinction, though agapao carries the stronger sense of chosen, covenant-oriented love.
The OT background for agapao is primarily the Hebrew aheb (to love, H157), which is used for God's love of Israel (Deut 7:8 — 'because the Lord loved you'), for human love of God (Deut 6:5 — 'you shall love the Lord your God'), and for covenant loyalty between people. The Shema (Deut 6:4-5) is quoted in the great commandment exchange (Mat 22:37) with agapao rendering aheb.
The covenant context of OT love is significant: God's love for Israel is not merely affective but covenantal — it commits to the object and maintains that commitment through Israel's repeated failures. The NT's agapao inherits this covenant structure and intensifies it through Christ's cross. Isaiah 43:4 — 'you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you' — gives the OT's most direct divine love declaration, the ground of which the NT reads as Calvary.
MorphGNT Strong's Dictionary XML — CC0 1.0 Public Domain
Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible (morphhb/OSHB) — CC BY 4.0
Open Scriptures Hebrew Lexicon — CC BY 4.0
Berean Standard Bible (BSB) source-word alignment - CC0 Public Domain