Bible verses about loving your enemies record one of the most surprising things Jesus ever taught: to love, bless and pray for those who oppose us. This was not a new idea invented in the Gospels, since the Old Testament law and Proverbs already asked for kindness toward enemies, but Jesus lived it fully on the cross. These passages explain what enemy love is, why it matters and how it reflects God’s own heart.
Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
Matthew 5:43-45 (KJV)
Jesus overturns the idea of hating enemies and calls His followers to love and pray for them, like their Father in heaven.
For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
Matthew 5:46-48 (KJV)
Loving only those who love us back is ordinary; Jesus calls His disciples to something greater.
But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.
Luke 6:27-28 (KJV)
Love enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you and pray for mistreaters.
For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same. And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.
Luke 6:32-36 (KJV)
Jesus explains that lending and doing good without expecting return reflects a Father who is kind to the unthankful.
But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
Matthew 5:39 (KJV)
Instead of striking back, Jesus teaches His followers not to repay insult with retaliation.
Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not.
Romans 12:14 (KJV)
Paul echoes Jesus: bless those who persecute you, and do not curse them.
Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men. If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
Romans 12:17-19 (KJV)
Do not repay evil for evil; live peaceably where possible and leave vengeance to God.
Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.
Romans 12:20-21 (KJV)
Feeding a hungry enemy and overcoming evil with good is Paul’s picture of practical enemy love.
If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink: For thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head, and the Lord shall reward thee.
Proverbs 25:21-22 (KJV)
Long before Paul, this proverb told readers to give an enemy bread and water when in need.
If thou meet thine enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt surely bring it back to him again. If thou see the ass of him that hateth thee lying under his burden, and wouldest forbear to help him, thou shalt surely help with him.
Exodus 23:4-5 (KJV)
The law told Israelites to return an enemy’s straying animal and help lift one fallen under its load.
Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth: Lest the Lord see it, and it displease him, and he turn away his wrath from him.
Proverbs 24:17-18 (KJV)
We are warned not to gloat or rejoice when an enemy stumbles.
Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots.
Luke 23:34 (KJV)
On the cross, Jesus prays for forgiveness for the very people crucifying Him.
And they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep.
Acts 7:59-60 (KJV)
As he is stoned, Stephen follows his Lord and asks God not to hold the sin against his killers.
Not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing: but contrariwise blessing; knowing that ye are thereunto called, that ye should inherit a blessing.
1 Peter 3:9 (KJV)
Believers are called to answer evil and insults with blessing instead of revenge.
For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.
Romans 5:10 (KJV)
God reconciled us to Himself while we were His enemies, the model for our own love.
See that none render evil for evil unto any man; but ever follow that which is good, both among yourselves, and to all men.
1 Thessalonians 5:15 (KJV)
Make sure no one repays wrong for wrong, but always seek what is good for everyone.
When a man’s ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.
Proverbs 16:7 (KJV)
When our ways please the Lord, He can bring even our enemies to be at peace with us.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus quotes the common saying, love your neighbour and hate your enemy, and then replaces it: love your enemies, bless those who curse you and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:43-45). His reason is that God sends sun and rain on both the good and the evil. Loving enemies is a way of resembling our Father in heaven.
This teaching is rooted in the Old Testament too. Exodus 23:4-5 told Israelites to help an enemy’s animal, and Proverbs 25:21-22 said to give a hungry enemy bread. Paul quotes that proverb in Romans 12:20-21 and adds the key principle: do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Vengeance belongs to God, which frees us from carrying it.
Jesus showed what this looks like when He prayed from the cross, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34). Stephen did the same as he died (Acts 7:60). Enemy love does not mean pretending wrong is right or staying in danger; it means refusing hatred and revenge, and seeking the good of others because God first loved us when we were His enemies (Romans 5:10).
Matthew 5:44’s direct instruction to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you” is one of Scripture’s clearest challenges to natural human instinct.
If you want to keep reading, Bible Verses For True Love and Bible Verses For Loneliness sit close to this topic.
Scripture quotations follow the King James Version; Blue Letter Bible lets you read each one alongside its chapter.
Readers of this page often go on to Bible Verses About Grace or Bible Verses About Healing.
Bible Verses About Being Thankful and Bible Verses About Strength and Hope explore related themes.
Bible Verses About Forgiveness and Healing and Bible Verses About Having Faith are good companions to this page.
For a related angle, see Bible Verses About Marriage and Love or Bible Verses For Loving Your Enemies.
If the KJV wording feels unfamiliar, Bible Gateway lets you set it beside a modern translation.
To trace a verse through the rest of Scripture, the cross-references on Bible Hub are useful.
Loving enemies is one of Scripture’s most demanding commands, directly opposing the instinct toward retaliation.
These verses were never meant to sit on a page as decoration \u2014 they’re meant to shape how you actually respond the next time someone has genuinely wronged you and loving them feels impossible right now.
You don’t need polished or formal language for it \u2014 an honest, plainly worded sentence is enough, something as simple as telling God directly for the strength to love someone you’d rather not.
Long before the Sermon on the Mount, David showed what it looks like to refuse revenge. King Saul hunted him for years out of jealousy, chasing him through the wilderness. In 1 Samuel 24, Saul walked alone into the very cave where David and his men were hiding. David’s men urged him to strike, but he only cut off the skirt of Saul’s robe. He told his men he would not stretch out his hand against the LORD’s anointed. Few people in Scripture put the Bible verses about loving your enemies into practice as vividly as he did.
Two chapters later the scene repeats. In 1 Samuel 26, David stood over the sleeping king with a spear within reach and again held back, leaving Saul’s life in God’s hands. When Saul later died in battle, David did not celebrate. He wrote a lament that honored both Saul and Jonathan (2 Samuel 1:17-27). Read alongside the verses, David’s story shows that mercy is often a series of choices made again and again, not a single warm feeling.
This is the balance many Bible verses about loving your enemies ask for: wise boundaries, honest trust in God’s justice, and a heart that refuses to wish harm on the one who has done harm.
Jonah is a short book with a hard question at its center: what if God shows mercy to the people you most want Him to judge? Nineveh was a great city of Assyria, an empire feared for its cruelty and a constant threat to Israel. When God told Jonah to preach there, he boarded a ship going the other way. After the storm and the great fish, he finally went, the people of Nineveh repented in sackcloth, and God spared the city.
Jonah’s response is honest and uncomfortable. He was angry, and he admitted why he had run: “for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil” (Jonah 4:2). He did not doubt God’s character. He resented it being shown to his enemies. The book closes with God’s gentle question about sparing a city full of people who could not discern between their right hand and their left (Jonah 4:11).
Jonah helps explain why the passages here feel so difficult. The problem is rarely that we misunderstand mercy. It is that we want mercy for ourselves and our friends but not for those who hurt us. The story ends without Jonah’s answer, so each reader has to answer God’s question personally. Among the Bible verses about loving your enemies, few are as searching as that final question, which invites us to see our enemies as people God cares about too.
Jesus pointed back to this story when He said that “a greater than Jonas is here” (Matthew 12:41). Where Jonah ran from his enemies, Jesus came toward His, eating with sinners and dying for people who rejected Him. That contrast gives the verses on this page their deepest reason. We are asked to show others the same patient mercy that reached us while we were still far from God, and Jonah’s reluctance becomes a mirror in which we can recognize our own.
Because these commands are so demanding, they are easy to misread. Some misunderstandings make the Bible verses about loving your enemies sound impossible, while others make them sound harmful. Scripture itself corrects both.
Holding these truths together keeps enemy love from becoming either a burden no one can carry or an excuse for staying silent about real harm.
When the wound is recent, start small. Luke 23:34 reminds you that Jesus prayed for His enemies while He was still suffering. Romans 12:21 gives a simple next step: answer evil with one concrete act of good. These Bible verses about loving your enemies do not ask you to feel healed today. They ask you to take the next faithful step and trust God with the rest. If someone has seriously harmed you, talking with a pastor or trained counselor is wise alongside prayer.
These questions work for a Bible study, a family conversation or a personal journal. Read Matthew 5:43-48 and Luke 6:27-36 aloud first, then take your time. Working through these verses with other believers often shows that everyone struggles with them, and honest answers are welcome.
End the time by praying for one person by name, even if the prayer is short. To carry these passages into daily choices, the companion collection of Bible verses for loving your enemies in everyday life focuses on practical steps. When the main concern is safety rather than forgiveness, these Bible verses about protection from enemies offer comfort. Returning to the passages here again and again is how their message slowly moves from the page into the heart.
Few people in Scripture had a better claim to revenge than Joseph. His brothers threw him into a pit, sold him to traders for twenty pieces of silver, and let their father believe he was dead. Years later, famine drives them to Egypt, and the boy they discarded is standing over the grain supply with the power of Pharaoh behind him. One word from him and they would have been finished. The brothers know it. When their father dies, they panic and send a message begging for mercy.
Joseph weeps when he hears it. His answer in Genesis 50:19-20 is worth reading slowly: “Fear not: for am I in the place of God? But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.” He does not pretend the pit was nothing. He says plainly that they meant evil. What he refuses to do is sit on the judge’s seat. Notice also that this forgiveness did not arrive overnight. The story spends years and several tests of the brothers’ character before the tears come. Mercy toward an enemy can be a slow thing, and that is allowed.
The king of Syria kept losing his battle plans to Israel, and he blamed a spy. The spy turned out to be Elisha, whose God told him what was said in the Syrian bedchamber. So the king sent horses, chariots and a large force to surround the town of Dothan overnight. In 2 Kings 6 the prophet’s servant wakes, sees the ring of soldiers, and nearly faints. Elisha prays, and the Lord strikes the Syrians blind and the prophet leads them, helpless, to Samaria, straight into the hands of the Israelite king.
The king is delighted and asks if he should strike them down. Elisha says no, and what he orders instead is startling. Verse 22 has him say to feed them, “set bread and water before them, that they may eat and drink, and go to their master.” The king prepares a great feast. They eat, they drink, they go home. Then comes a line any strategist would find odd: “so the bands of Syria came no more into the land of Israel.” We should not turn that into a formula, since kindness does not always settle a conflict so tidily. But it does show an older root of what Jesus later taught. A hungry enemy at your table is a different problem from a dead one.
Romans 12:20 is probably the most misread line in this whole subject: “Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.” Plenty of people hear a sly threat in it, as if kindness were a delayed punishment. Be nice, and he’ll burn with shame, and you win. Read that way, the verse turns love into a weapon, which is the exact opposite of what Paul is saying.
The next verse settles it: “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” Paul quotes Proverbs 25:21-22, and most careful readers take the image to point toward softening or melting, the way a metal worker uses heat to make a hard thing workable. The goal is the enemy’s change of heart, not his humiliation. If you catch yourself feeding someone mainly to feel superior, the motive has gone sour, and it is worth stopping to pray about it.
In practice this might mean a sandwich for a rival who is skipping lunch during a bad week, or a brief, civil word to a relative who has not spoken to you since the funeral. Small acts. They do not erase the wrong, and they do not oblige you to reopen every wound. They simply refuse to let bitterness have the last word.
Acts 9 contains a scene that gets less attention than it deserves. Saul of Tarsus, who had been arresting believers and approving of Stephen’s death, is lying blind in a house on Straight Street. The Lord speaks to a disciple in Damascus named Ananias and tells him to go and lay hands on Saul. Ananias objects, and I do not blame him. He has heard exactly what this man has done to the church. His answer is basically: Lord, are you sure you have the right person?
The Lord does not argue the point. He simply repeats the instruction, and Ananias goes. When he walks in, the first words out of his mouth are in Acts 9:17: “Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost.” Brother. He calls his enemy brother before Saul has done a single thing to earn it.
It takes courage to do what Ananias did, and it likely felt wrong in his stomach as he walked down that street. Yet the man he feared turned out to be the apostle Paul, who later wrote much of the New Testament. Sometimes the person you least want to help is a person God is about to change. You cannot know that in advance. You can only decide whether to knock.
A word of care belongs here, because some readers come to this topic from real harm. Loving an enemy does not mean staying in reach of someone who keeps hurting you. Paul puts a limit inside the command itself in Romans 12:18: “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.” If it be possible. As much as lieth in you. Those phrases admit that peace takes two people, and that you are only responsible for your half.
You can forgive in your heart, pray for a person by name and still keep your distance, change your phone number, keep a record, speak to a counsellor or involve the authorities. Jesus himself slipped away from crowds that wanted to hurt him. Wisdom and mercy are not rivals. If you are living with abuse or ongoing threats, please reach out to a pastor, a trained counsellor or a local support service, and put your safety first.
For enemies who are less dangerous and more simply painful, a short prayer can be a start: Lord, I do not feel loving toward this person. I am asking you to do something in me that I cannot do on my own. Loosen my grip on the offence, show me one small, honest act of goodness I can offer, and keep me from becoming bitter while I wait. Amen.
Keep exploring with these related pages: Bible Verses For Loving Your Enemies, Bible Verses For Enemies, Bible Verses About Loving Your Neighbor, Bible Verses About Loving Others and Bible Verses About Protection from Enemies.
For deeper study, Bible Gateway, Bible Hub and Bible Study Tools are all free to use.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus quotes the common saying, love your neighbour and hate your enemy, and then replaces it: love your enemies, bless those who curse you and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:43-45).
This page brings together 18 King James Version references about loving Your Enemies, drawn from 10 different books of the Bible.
Matthew 5:43 is one of the verses about loving Your Enemies referenced in this collection, alongside Exodus 23:4.
Yes, the verses referenced on this page, including Matthew 5:43, are quoted according to the King James Version (KJV), and are suitable for daily reading, memorization, or devotional use.
Beyond the references highlighted on this page, loving Your Enemies appears throughout Scripture in books such as Matthew, Exodus, Proverbs, Romans, Luke; this collection focuses on some of the clearest examples.
