Francis Chan on the Love He Struggled to Believe

Season 14 of the Candace Cameron Bure Podcast opens with a guest who has been part of Candace's faith story for years. pastor Francis Chan joins for a six-week series anchored in his book Beloved, which explores what it means to actually receive God's love, not just know it exists. This first conversation takes in Francis's childhood, the theology behind Beloved, the challenge of sitting still with God, and a listener question about Moses, divine anger, and what prayer actually does.

A Friendship With History

Candace traces her introduction to Francis back to her late teenage years, when a close mutual friend named Shalene encouraged her to start attending Cornerstone Church. She describes those years as a turning point, when her faith moved from background belief to something she took seriously, and hearing Francis preach was part of what sparked that shift. Francis remembers meeting Candace during that period and admits he initially thought she was much younger than she was. The connection has continued across decades, and Francis says one of the things that drew him to do the podcast was watching Candace, her husband Val, and their family continue to grow in faith over the years, something he notes isn't a given for people he knew from that era.

The Book and the Question Behind It

Candace tells Francis that reading Beloved surprised her. She has followed his teaching for years, which she describes as direct and unafraid on the subjects of holiness, sin, and judgment, things she values precisely because many preachers avoid them. When Beloved arrived and Francis acknowledged that he had spent most of his life understanding God's power and authority far better than he understood God's personal love for him, it hit as both unexpected and relatable.

Francis explains that this wasn't an overstatement. The idea of a holy, sovereign God who holds the right to judge came naturally to him, almost logically. What he found harder to absorb was the idea that this same God was personally and deeply for him, looking at him with desire and wanting closeness. He describes that as requiring a different kind of faith than he was used to.

A Childhood That Shaped a Theology

Much of the episode focuses on Francis's early life. His mother died giving birth to him, and his father, unable to cope with the loss, gave him up. He was raised by his grandmother in Hong Kong, then sent back to his father in the United States at age five. His father had remarried and had other children, and Francis describes feeling like an interruption in their lives. He arrived not speaking English, with older siblings who didn't want him there. His stepmother died in a car accident when he was seven. His father died when he was twelve, and Francis says there was relief in that, alongside confusion, because coming home had always felt like a threat.

He doesn't tell this story with bitterness. He says he has no regrets about his childhood and means it. He looks back and sees God's faithfulness in the specific people placed in his path and the way loss pushed him toward seriousness about faith. He quotes Psalm 90 on numbering your days and says that was never abstract for him. He knew from experience what it meant not to know what tomorrow held.

The connection he draws to Beloved is this: the idea of any authority figure loving him was foreign to him. The idea of a holy God loving him required real work to believe.

A Different Kind of Distance

Candace comes at the same subject from a different direction. She describes her father as a genuinely loving presence in her life, and says that while that was a gift, it also meant she absorbed God's love almost by default without pressing into it. She's always believed God loves her but hasn't given much thought to the depth of that love because it felt settled. Francis responds that this is its own kind of distance, and that he sometimes worries about his own children for a similar reason. He loves them so much that he wonders if they'll ever experience the particular dependence on God that came from having no one else to rely on.

On Productivity and Sitting Still

Francis and Candace talk about the challenge of stopping long enough to receive anything. Francis describes the pull of productivity, the satisfaction of checking things off a list, and how meditating on God's love can feel like a waste of time by comparison. He uses the image of sitting with his wife on a beach, not accomplishing anything, just being present with each other, and says that's closer to what this kind of time with God looks like. He points to Psalm 27 and the psalmist's desire to dwell in the house of the Lord and gaze at His beauty, describing it as someone who had tasted something and couldn't stop wanting more of it.

On Prayer, God's Anger, and What Moses Was Doing

Vicky, a listener, sends in a question about the passage in Exodus where God threatens to destroy the Israelites after the golden calf incident and Moses intercedes. She asks how a sovereign God who already knows everything can be genuinely angry about things He knew would happen, and whether Moses actually changed the outcome. She says the passage frightens her and makes it hard to hold God's love and God's anger together.

Francis starts with Isaiah 55, where God tells Israel that His thoughts and ways are not their thoughts and ways, as far as the heavens are above the earth. He says that has to be the starting point, not as a way of avoiding the question, but as a real acknowledgment that some things won't resolve cleanly at the human level. He notes that God's anger is one of those things he personally finds difficult to sit with, and says so directly.

He then addresses the Moses passage more specifically. He doesn't think the narrative is showing God surprised or mechanically changing course. He thinks the purpose of the story is to communicate something about prayer and intercession, the same thing James communicates when he says the prayers of a righteous person are powerful and effective. Within a sovereign framework, prayer still matters and still works. How that all fits together isn't something Francis claims to resolve. He says the point isn't a tidy explanation. The point is that Moses prayed, something happened, and readers are meant to take that seriously rather than explain it away.

Sponsors mentioned in this episode: Grand Canyon University at gcu.edu. International Fellowship of Christians and Jews at ifcj.org. Lovebird cereal at lovebirdfoods.com/bure, use code bure for 25% off. Toops and Co at toopsandco.com/candace, use code candace for 25% off your first order.