Agape Love
Renewing Your Mind
Ligonier Ministries
4.8 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As recipients of the Lord's redeeming love, Christians must manifest the love of God in our relationships and our behavior in the world. Today, R.C. Sproul discusses "agape," the Bible's supreme concept of love.
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Meet Today's Teacher:
R.C. Sproul (1939–2017) was founder of Ligonier Ministries, first minister of preaching and teaching at Saint Andrew's Chapel, first president of Reformation Bible College, and executive editor of Tabletalk magazine.
Meet the Host:
Nathan W. Bingham is vice president of media for Ligonier Ministries, executive producer and host of Renewing Your Mind, and host of the Ask Ligonier podcast.
Renewing Your Mind is a donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Explore all of our podcasts: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The supreme concept of love that we find in the New Testament is this word agape, which has its ground and foundation in the character of God himself. |
| 0:12.5 | And it is this kind of love that is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost. |
| 0:29.6 | I've mentioned this week that there is confusion when we speak of love. The world's definition and the Bible's definition are often at odds with each other. |
| 0:34.6 | And one of the reasons that confusion exists is because in English, |
| 0:39.4 | we only have one word for love, but that's not true in the Greek of the New Testament. This is the |
| 0:46.9 | Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham. Well, today we conclude this study on the |
| 0:53.4 | love of God. And as this is the final |
| 0:55.7 | message you'll hear from the series, it's also the final time to request the complete |
| 1:00.8 | 11-part series when you donate at renewingyourmind.org. Simply give your gift before midnight |
| 1:08.0 | tonight. The Greek language has several words for love and different kinds of love. |
| 1:13.6 | Well, here's R. C. Sprold to explain some of their New Testament uses and nuances. |
| 1:19.6 | There are three ways in which we speak about God's love, his love of benevolence, his love of beneficence, |
| 1:28.4 | and thirdly, his love of complacency. |
| 1:31.2 | Now we ought not to confuse those three types of love with what every Christian has heard |
| 1:39.4 | at some time or another from the pulpit of the three words for love that are found in the Greek language. |
| 1:48.3 | I mean, that's a common theme that you hear that when the Bible speaks of love, we have to be |
| 1:53.9 | careful to distinguish among the different kinds of love that are articulated in ancient Greek. And today we're going to look at those |
| 2:04.3 | three words for love and the significance of them. The first one is the noun eros. The second is a noun |
| 2:14.3 | that comes from the verb, phalan or phalene, and the third is the noun that most |
| 2:21.5 | have heard of, agape. So these are the three words for love that one can find in the ancient |
| 2:29.1 | Greek language. Now, the best tool for word studies that we have in biblical Greek is the massive undertaking |
| 2:40.0 | under the editorship of Gerhardt's Kittal called Kittles Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, |
... |
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