Podcast: “Love Is Love” vs. “God Is Love” (Sam Storms)

February 03, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Why God Is Love, and What That Means for Us

In this episode, Sam Storms explores the central, unshakable truth of God's steadfast love that is woven through the pages of the Bible and is revealed most profoundly in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He talks about what it really means when the Bible says that God is love, how we reconcile his love with the brokenness that we see all around us, and what we should do when we struggle to feel his love—even as we affirm it by faith.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:12 - What Is the Love of God?

Matt Tully
Sam, thanks so much for joining me on The Crossway Podcast today.

Sam Storms
I’ve been looking forward to this. I’m happy to be here.

Matt Tully
Probably the most well-known verses in all of the Bible, both for those inside the church and those outside the church, would be verses that directly relate, in some way, to the love of God. I think of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” I think of 1 John 4, where we read that God is love. Those concepts associating the Christian God with this idea of love are so foundational, even in the broader secular culture. And yet you open your new book talking about this recent story where you feel like you came to understand and even question or struggle with the reality of God’s love in a new and a fresh way. I wonder if you could start there by just sharing a little bit more about that story.

Sam Storms
Sure. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience, to be perfectly honest. Prior to this time, I have never—and this was a little over a year ago—never really struggled with my faith. I never doubted God’s goodness and his sovereignty. I still do obviously believe it very strongly in both, but there were a couple of events that really shook me. One was that 7.8 earthquake in Turkey that I think close to 60,000 people died. And then there were other events and tragedies in the lives of people I knew, and suddenly I was just confronted with this question of, “God, how can you be loving and allow these things to happen? I know you could have stopped it. Why didn’t you?” And in the past, whenever that kind of question came up, I was always able to just somehow tuck it away in the back of my head and not let it eat away at my heart. Because like I said, I know that God is sovereign and I know that he is good and loving, but I just felt this cognitive dissonance, this conflict between these two realities. And it really hit home hard. I never contemplated leaving the faith. I wasn’t on the path of deconstruction by any stretch of the imagination, but I was just befuddled. And I realized after a while that I had to go back to Romans 11:33, where it says, “How unsearchable are your judgments, how inscrutable your ways,” and realize I’m never going to understand how all these things fit together under God’s sovereignty and his love. And then just questioning the reality of God’s love drove me back into Scripture, just like you said, to those texts that are just pervasive in God’s word. I don’t know how many hundreds of times in the Psalms alone we read about the steadfast love of the Lord. Now, some translations render it loyal love, others call it mercy or kindness, but it’s the translation of the Hebrew word hesed. And I just immersed myself in that. And then also just numerous incidents in the life of Jesus, like when he touched a leper in Matthew 8, or when he extended forgiveness and kindness to that repentant prostitute in Luke’s Gospel. Or the story of John 13, where, in the midst of the pressure and all the events surrounding his betrayal by Judas and eventually his crucifixion, he loved his disciples so much he got on his knees and washed their feet in the upper room. The story in Luke’s Gospel where Peter, by God’s providence, was present when the rooster crowed in fulfillment of the prophecy of Jesus. And at that very moment, he saw Jesus and they locked eyes. And I thought, What kind of look did he get from Jesus? Was it like, “I knew you’d fail me just when I needed you”? But in fact, I really think it was a look of love. It was just the steadfast love that Jesus had for Peter that restored Peter and brought him to repentance. So I basically wrote the book as a way to preach to my own soul. I said, “I don’t have any other options. I’ve got to let the Spirit of God worked powerfully through the text, through these glorious assertions about God’s love, and trust that that will bring healing to my heart, even if I can’t resolve theologically the reality of evil in the world with God’s goodness and power”—which nobody ever has. We’ll wait until we get to heaven. But it was just the collective force of those verses that kept pressing in on my heart and gradually transforming me into, obviously, a very strong advocate, and all the more so, of the steadfast love of the Lord. And so that’s what this book is about. And it goes into a lot of detail. I share my own personal frustrations and my own challenges. And at the same time, I come out the other end more confident in God’s goodness and greatness than I ever was before.

Matt Tully
The love of God seems like it’s one of those topics that is just so familiar to us as Christians. It’s so basic to our understanding of God, and it’s so present throughout the whole Bible that it can be easy, I think, for us to start to take it for granted and to think, I know what this means. I know the implications of this for my life. And it often seems like it’s only when we are confronted with trials of some kind, or maybe we’re confronted with some kind of painful situation, that we then are kind of forced to ask ourselves, Well, wait. What is the love of God? What does that actually mean for me right now? You spent years as a pastor, ministering to and counseling people. Have you seen that pattern play out in people’s lives over the years?

Sam Storms
Absolutely. Yeah, very much. As you said, we tend to take it for granted because it’s so pervasive. We take that statement in John 4, where it says God is love, not just that God does loving things, but it’s his very nature. And then we try to reconcile that with all of the heartache and the tragedies that we confront every day. And I think there’s another factor. And we’ve seen this in the last, I don’t know, eight to ten years in the broader culture. It’s this idea that love is love. And I have an entire chapter in my book on that because I thought, We need to get straight about what love is and isn’t. For a while, you’d see on the back of the helmets of NFL players, “Love is love.” I remember when Amy Grant allowed a same-sex wedding (so called) to occur on her ranch. And the whole thing was, “Well, love is love. We have to love these people.” And I thought, There’s been a real redefinition of love on the part of society as a whole.

Matt Tully
What do you think that phrase, “Love is love,” that is so popular and widespread today, what definition of love is supporting that? How would you describe that definition?

Sam Storms
Of course, it’s very redundant, in the first place. Basically, what’s it’s become is love now is understood as not only the tolerance of differing views, not only the permission to believe what you want and behave as you want as long as you don’t do damage to somebody else; it has now become I must affirm the moral legitimacy of everything you believe and do. So no longer can you use the word wrong or false or misleading about a religious belief or an ethical behavior or anything else that happens. So if love is love, then that means I’m required to affirm things which the Bible says very explicitly put your soul in jeopardy of eternal damnation. And so I try to define love. Love is not recommending or endorsing or affirming certain beliefs and behavior that jeopardize your eternal welfare. Love is saying or doing whatever I need to do that will contribute most to your flourishing now and in an eternity future. For example, the whole thing about homosexuality or abortion or any other issue of that nature, we now are being told that, in fact, it’s not love; it’s hate. We have this new category called hate speech. Well, hate speech is basically saying to someone, “Your belief is wrong, and it has eternal consequences.” We can’t say that anymore because, after all, we’re supposed to love that person, and love is unequivocal, unconditional affirmation and acceptance of the legitimacy of every view that anybody takes. Well, of course, logically, that just doesn’t make sense. There’s a view that’s right, and there’s a view that’s wrong. But to be loving today, you can’t say that. And so that’s infiltrated the church to some extent, and I think it’s affected the decisions that some make about whether or not they’re going to attend a same sex wedding or whether or not they’re going to permit and even facilitate transgender surgeries and other such matters. And in fact, it seems to me that what people are calling love is in fact hate. If you endorse or affirm something that is going to work to their ultimate demise for eternity, it’s hateful for you not to say so. It’s hateful for you to say, “Oh well. Love is love, so you do what you do, I’ll do what I do, and we’ll just live and learn together.” That’s tragic. But that’s that mindset has overtaken our society, and unfortunately, it’s influencing the church.

10:22 - Love Is Love?

Matt Tully
So obviously, if love is love and that represents the broader cultural attitude towards love—that love is, as you said, this unqualified, unlimited affirmation and acceptance of what anybody wants to do or say or believe about anything—you’ve kind of talked a little bit about how that might impact how Christians view other people around them, how they think about horizontal love with other humans. But how could that influence how we view God’s love? Speak a little bit to that and how these cultural assumptions and definitions about love could then lead us to try to define the love of God in a certain way.

Sam Storms
Well, sure. I think what people have done is they have projected onto God this concept or definition of love. And so they say, “Well, God would never condemn anybody for their lifestyle choices. God would never speak ill of a particular belief. If somebody doesn’t want to believe that Jesus is God incarnate and that there is salvation only through him and his work on the cross, well, God will understand that. He’s not going to impose himself on you. He’s going to endorse your views, because after all, if he is love, then he can’t be found to denounce something as evil. He can’t be in a place where he would say that your particular view is just simply wrong. It’s philosophically, metaphysically, theologically wrong.” So it has caused people to recast their understanding of who God is and what he’s like. So given this new concept of what love is, when somebody says God is love (1 John 4), that means that God has to accept everybody on the same terms, unconditionally. And that the idea that there is an exclusivity to the Christian claims, that only through faith in Jesus do you attain salvation or the knowledge of God, to their way of thinking, that’s unloving.

12:10 - “God Is Love”

Matt Tully
So it can’t be true of God then. Let’s talk about that verse. In 1 John 4, there are two verses where we see this phrase “God is love” show up there. And you’ve already referenced this a little bit, but how should we be understanding those verses? Because I’ve heard some people make the case that love is this unique attribute of God where it is so true of who he is in a unique way that Scripture can actually speak of him being love. It’s not just that he’s loving towards other people. Is there merit to that? Is this revealing something uniquely central to God’s identity? And then how should we understand what’s being said here by John?

Sam Storms
Like you said, it’s not simply saying that God does loving things, although that’s true, or that God showers his love upon us in Christ. That’s true. But it’s saying that at the very core of God’s nature, the nature of his nature (if I can use that language) is love. Now that doesn’t mean he isn’t also holy and just and pure and powerful and righteous.

Matt Tully
So it’d be a mistake to set love against some of these other characteristics.

Sam Storms
Right. You can’t reduce the character of God to one attribute. I think probably we will discover when we get there that there is almost an infinity of attributes. We’ve only touched or scratched the surface that the human mind is capable of grasping. But I think what he wants us to understand is that love always drives God’s decisions. He never does anything unloving. And of course, people say, “Wait a minute. How can God consign people to hell if his very nature is love?”

Matt Tully
Right. Is God loving the person that he’s sending to hell? How would you answer that question?

Sam Storms
He’s loving in the sense that he has issued an invitation for them that they don’t need to go to hell. It’s the invitation of John 6: “Whoever comes to me, I will in no wise cast out.” That’s a universal application. I believe in the indiscriminate, universal, sincere offer of the gospel. The mere fact that a person is alive and breathing is an expression of God’s love. We call it common grace. It says in Matthew’s Gospel that the Lord causes the sun to rise on the good and the evil, and so we are to express that in our relationships with them. So love is expressed in a variety of different forms, and I talk a little bit about this in the book. There’s God’s love for himself, which is the primary motivation for the creation and redemption of mankind. There’s God’s love for Israel. There’s God’s love for the elect. There’s God’s love for the non-elect in common grace. So God is kind and patient. His long suffering, the fact that he doesn’t consign every unbeliever to hell right now, is an expression of love. It’s called long suffering, patience, kindness. So yes, I do think God’s love is distinctive. I think there is an expression of God’s love for the elect that nobody else receives. That’s why he calls the elect the beloved of God. Now, that really upsets some people because they want to think that God loves everybody equally in the same way.

Matt Tully
Right. And the only difference is our response to that love.

Sam Storms
Yes.

Matt Tully
But you would say that there is a unique way that God sovereignly loves his chosen people, those he has ordained to be saved?

Sam Storms
Absolutely. In fact, there’s a very interesting passage, and you just brought it to mind as you said that, in one of the seven letters to the seven churches in Revelation. In the letter to Philadelphia in Revelation 3, Jesus says this: “Behold, I will make those of the synagogue of Satan who say that they are Jews and are not, but lie—behold, I will make them come and bow down before your feet, and they will learn that I have loved you.” I mean, so obviously there’s a distinguishing element in God’s love. In Amos, I think it’s chapter 3, he says, “You, Israel, of all the nations have I loved.” It’s the same thing in Deuteronomy 10. So God’s love is not monolithic. It’s not universally the same in all of its expressions or its objects. But that in no way undermines the reality that God’s nature is love. But God’s nature is also holy and just, and those are perfectly compatible in the nature of God, so that he can hold accountable people who sin. In fact, all of us are hell-deserving sinners, and yet God chooses to bestow his saving mercy on some. Why he does it that way, I don’t know, but evidently it’s what will bring him the greatest glory.

16:43 - How Do I Experience the Love of God?

Matt Tully
And that’s where we get back to some of the mystery that you even started with, where we can spend a lifetime, as you have, as a Christian studying God’s word, probing the depths of this theology and still come to the limit to what we can really truly understand. That leads to another question I have. I wonder if you could speak to the person listening who would say, “I agree with you in all of this. I love the theology that you’ve just been explaining, and I affirm that wholeheartedly. But how do I actually experience the love of God? I know intellectually that I have it, but I don’t feel it in my day to day life.” What would you say to somebody who’s in that position?

Sam Storms
And I think a lot of people are, and I understand that. I have to go back to Scripture, because I think the answers are found there. For example, meditating at length on Zephaniah 3:17, not just reading it and memorizing it but letting the truth of all those statements bathe your soul. Where it says that God’s love for you and his joy in you is so deep and so profound that he breaks out singing over you. The imagery there is so powerful. And praying as you read that Don’t just read it, but you say, “Spirit of God, you moved Zephaniah to write this. I know it reflects the attitude of the Father toward me. It’s mind boggling. I don’t feel it in the depths of my soul, but would you quicken my heart? Would you take each of these words and press them in upon me in a way that no sermon that I hear can do, no book that I read can accomplish?” And then you have, for example, Ephesians 3. It’s my favorite prayer in the Bible, where Paul prays, “That the Spirit would strengthen you in your inner being so that you might know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.” Well, if it surpasses knowledge, then he’s talking about something other than just intellectual grasp of the love of God; he’s talking about something profoundly experiential, that there’s a sensation, a delight in the depths of your heart and soul and your affections in being aware of God’s love. Romans 5:5: the Holy Spirit has been poured out into our hearts through him who loved us. Second Thessalonians 3, where Paul prays, “May the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God.” So the way it’s happened, we have to avail ourselves of the means of grace: reading Scripture, meditating on it, proclaiming it back to our own souls, the corporate gathering of God’s people, mutual encouragement, the elements of the Lord’s table, prayer. All of these things are means of grace. They are ways in which—instruments, if I can say it that way—through which the sanctifying grace of God comes to us. Because the bottom line is, I could sit here all day and tell you reasons why you should believe and feel that God loves you, but ultimately I cannot accomplish that. Only God can enable the human heart to believe and feel that he is loved by God. God alone can do that. So we have to avail ourselves of the many ways in which the Scripture sets forth. It’s very similar, in a sense, to that the book that John Piper wrote as an afterthought—that’s probably not fair—to Desiring God called When I Don’t Desire God. He asked the question, What happens if I don’t find myself passionately desiring and pursuing God? And John lays out all of the steps you can take—the things you shouldn’t do, the things you should do—that will facilitate the experience, the felt reality of God’s affection.

Matt Tully
Because I think that’s maybe the danger on both sides, right? On the one hand, we can only be interested in these affectional experiences. We can always be seeking the next one and think there’s something fundamentally wrong if we don’t, tomorrow when I have my Bible study, feel this overwhelming sense. But on the other hand, we can maybe downplay all of that and just think, Well, I have the theology right, and that’s good enough. It sounds like you’re saying we definitely need both of those things, and we shouldn’t be satisfied with either merely one or the other.

Sam Storms
I love the way Jonathan Edwards put it in a sermon he did on Song of Solomon. He said, “We are responsible to lay ourselves in the way of allurement.” And what he meant by that is we are to posture our souls in those activities and those places in life where we are more likely to encounter the power of God’s love in a life-changing way. I’ve used a silly illustration to make this point. If somebody came to me and said, “You know, I’ve never been struck by lightning. I think I’d like to find out what that feels like. Sam, can you help me?” I would say, “Well, yeah, sure. Get yourself a long steel rod. Go up on the top of a hill. Find a tree and wait for a thunderstorm. Climb up in it and hold that rod up in the air.” Now, that doesn’t guarantee you’re going to be struck by lightning, but it certainly increases the chances. But of course, we’re talking about doing those things that will put us in a position, a state of mind and soul, in which we are more likely to experience the life-changing presence of God’s love. I think of Jude’s statement: “Keep yourselves in the love of God.” I think he’s saying, “Take those steps that are necessary for you to encounter God’s love in a life-changing way.” Now, having said that, I want to say one more thing. If you do not feel God’s love, that doesn’t mean that you aren’t loved. In other words, the proof that God loves you isn’t in your emotions or your feelings. The proof of God’s love is the cross of Christ. Ultimately, what you need to do is simply go back over and over and over again to what God did for us in Jesus. Read Romans 5:6–11 repeatedly, and pray that the Spirit will cause there to come alive in your heart a renewed sense of the magnitude of God’s kindness and mercy in giving his Son to die for us. So I don’t want people to think that they can’t function in life or they can’t live a God-exalting experience simply because they don’t feel his affection. I think God wants us to feel that, but if we don’t, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love us.

22:42 - What Good Is God’s Love If It Doesn’t Protect Me from Harm?

Matt Tully
And there are ups and downs in life. We’re not going to always feel it to the same extent all the time. And maybe speak to another kind of person. Even the way that this question might be posed is intense, but I think it’s true to sometimes how we feel. I’m thinking of the person who is in the midst, even right now, of some deep trials. They just feel beat down. Maybe there’s a broken relationship, maybe there’s the death of a loved one, maybe there’s sickness, and the suffering is intense and deep. And they might be wondering, What good is God’s love to me if it doesn’t mean he’s going to protect me from this terrible thing that I’m struggling with right now? What does God’s love even mean if he would be willing to put me through this as his beloved child?

Sam Storms
I get that question all the time over the years. Let me just give you an illustration of one way to answer it, and then I’ll even go deeper. There was a family in a small town in Oklahoma where I pastored for eight years, and their son, I think he was in his early teenage years, literally dropped dead on the golf course. He was dead before he hit the ground. They were not part of my church, but about a month or two had passed and they called to make an appointment with me, because I think they probably counseled with every pastor in town, looking for answers. And when they came in, we talked about it. I talked to them about the love of God, the sovereignty of God. I talked about Romans 8:28, how God works all things together for good to those that love him and are called according to his purpose. And at the end of it, I could see the look on their faces and I said, “Let me ask you all a question. Let’s just assume that when you came in that I perfectly resolved the mystery in your mind about why your son died this way, and I answered every objection that was raised up, and I gave you a portrayal of God that absolutely convinced you that what happened to your son was ultimately for his and your good and the glory of God. In other words, I put to rest all of your objections. Would it diminish the pain in your heart?” And they looked at me and they both said, “No.” So sometimes we need to be careful that we think that somehow convincing somebody of the truth of a Bible verse is going to banish the pain and the distress and the confusion that they’ve gone through. I think God is too caring and kind to expect that of us, because he knows it’s not going to happen. So somebody who is going through that kind of trial or tragedy and they can’t make sense of it, I don’t know where else to go but to the text of Scripture that assures me that God causes all things to work together for good to those that love him and are called according to his purpose. Now, again, that’s not a universal promise; it’s for those who love God and are called. But when all other explanations and all other solutions fall and fail, I have to fall back on that truth. So I don’t want Romans 8:28 to be like a pacifier—somebody comes in crying, you stick it in their mouth.

Matt Tully
It doesn’t take the pain away, like you were saying.

Sam Storms
No, it doesn’t. But it also prevents somebody from falling into despair. Doubt is one thing. Unresolved questions is one thing. Despair is something that the word of God is designed to prevent ever happening in the life of a believer. So I think sometimes, and this may sound strange, I think sometimes answers are way overrated. I don’t think they do what we think they will do. If I could just know why and how God’s using this and what might I might’ve done to contribute to it, then I could live with it without the pain. No, you couldn’t. No, you couldn’t. So finally, I fall back on Romans 11:33: “God’s ways are unsearchable. His judgments are inscrutable. Who has known the mind of the Lord?” Not me! I can assure you of that. But I have to believe that as Paul closes that out: “From him are all things, and through him are all things, and to him are all things. To God be glory forever and ever.” If I don’t rest ultimately in that, what is the option? What alternatives do I have? Deconstruction? Repudiation of my faith? Embracing of atheism? Immersing myself in a life of sin and rebellion and immorality and idolatry? Is that really going to solve the pain or reduce the anguish of my heart? No. I think God says, “Hold on to me, but know that the only reason you do is because I’m holding on to you.”

Matt Tully
It makes me think of that famous line from Peter. After Jesus has been teaching some hard things and a lot of the people who were following him left him, and then he turns to his disciples and he says, “Do you want to leave as well?” And Peter has those famous words. Maybe you can quote them for us.

Sam Storms
He says, “To whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life.” I really do think that people need to challenge themselves by saying, “All right, what are my alternatives? I could live in this corrosive doubt and despair for the rest of my life—this constant fear that the Bible isn’t true and that God is a liar. Or I could completely abandon it all and go into atheism, or I’ll just try to numb and anesthetize my pain through sin, drugs, alcohol, immoral sex, whatever it is.” And when you look at all the possible alternatives, the only one that makes any sense that holds out any hope is that we continue to cling to God, to the promises that he’s made in Scripture, the nature of God as revealed in his word, and then wait as patiently as we can for the new heavens and the new earth, when all questions will be answered. In fact, you go back to Job, and Job throws all these questions and objections at God. And when God finally opens his mouth to respond, there are no apologies. There are no explanations. He doesn’t say, “Well, you need to understand that Satan came to me and challenged your integrity, and I had to put up a fight and prove him wrong.” God gives no account for why what happened happened. What does he do? He says, “Job, sit down. I want to ask you some questions. Where were you when I created the world? Where were you when I orchestrated the animal kingdom and created such diversity and beauty and harmony? Can you explain how the stars appear and are held in space?” And it’s just like Job is thrown back on his heels, and he realizes the only answer to the horrible suffering and loss that I’ve endured is that God really is God and he is who he says he is, and he’s my only hope and he’s my only solution to this struggle that I’m in. And I think that’s ultimately what we have to rely upon.

Matt Tully
That’s always been encouraging and a help to me is the simple recognition that the Bible contains so many stories like the story of Job, where people did have to face this unexplained, horrible suffering of different kinds. And so God understands that. Scripture understands that that’s part of our lives as humans, and he isn’t afraid to, in the midst of that, call us to faith, call us to confidence in things not yet seen.

Sam Storms
I’ve discovered over the years, and I think Scripture would uphold this, that of all the reasons why we doubt God’s steadfast love, there are two that stand out: suffering and shame. Suffering is the greatest threat to our confidence in God’s goodness. We cannot account for why it happened to us or to somebody we loved, and we question whether God is really loving. And the second one is shame. How could God possibly love somebody like me who’s done so many horrible things and then repeated them over and over again? And the guilt and the condemnation and the shame that weighs in on the human soul just snuffs out the light of knowing that God is love. And we think, Well, maybe he is for somebody else, but he certainly couldn’t be for me. Look what I’ve done.

Matt Tully
That’s a whole other topic and a whole other conversation that we could have about fighting to believe that God could actually love us as sinners. Sam, thank you so much for taking the time today to help us understand this, again, seemingly very basic and elementary idea—this doctrine that God is love. And yet, as we talk about it, it’s so clear that this is something that we all could grow in our understanding and appreciation for.

Sam Storms
Sure. And I would just leave them with this thought from Lamentations 3: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. It’s new every morning.” And just taking that and preaching that back to your soul. And if you do, I really believe the Spirit of God will cause that to take root in your heart, and it will enlighten your mind, it will ignite your affections, and it will restore whatever joy you had in your relationship with the Lord that may have been lost.

Matt Tully
Thank you, Sam.

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