Rob Bell Quotes

The question, then, the art, the task, the search, the challenge, the invitation is for you and me to become more and more the kind of people who are aware of the divine presence, attuned to the ruach,

Questions are not scary. What is scary is when people don't have any. What is tragic is faith that has no room for them.

Resurrection is a belief and hope in restoring this world.

Because with every action, comment, conversation, we have the choice to invite Heaven or Hell to Earth.

Jesus is bigger than any one religion. He didn't come to start a new religion, and he continually disrupted whatever conventions or systems or establishments that existed in his day. He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain and name him, especially the one called Christianity.

It often appears that those who talk the most about going to heaven when you die talk the least about bringing heaven to earth right now, as Jesus taught us to pray: 'Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' At the same time, it often appears that those who talk the most about relieving suffering now talk the least about heaven when we die.

I think what's happened in the modern world, there's a lot of people that sound very smart and it's very compelling and alluring, but it leaves you empty.

Jesus doesn't divide the world up into the common and the sacred; he gives us eyes to see the sacred in the common.

The question is: Why have these poems and prayers endured? Why, thousands of years later, do we still have them? And the answer you'll return to again and again is: They speak to our human experience.

What would it look like for you to approach tomorrow with a sense of honor and privilege, believing that you have work to do in the world, that it matters, that it's needed, that you have a path and you're working your craft?

The joy is in the creation. So I've never had a target audience, it's always been about being true to the work as it emerges.

Look at the size of the universe and look at what we're discovering about string theory. There's a wide-eyed sense of we're just getting started here.

I think that grace and love always rattle people.

We need to return to the simplicity that God is love.

In those moments when the two of you see things differently, you can hold on to your view, defending it and protecting it and arguing for its superiority, or you can allow your perspective to be broadened, enriched, expanded, and deepened.

Many of the most significant moments in our lives come not because it all went right but because it all fell apart

To make it really clear and simple, let's call this movement across history we see in passages like the ones we just looked at from Exodus and Deuteronomy clicks. What we see is God meeting people at the click they're at, and then drawing them forward.When they're at F, God calls them to G.When we're at L, God calls us to M.And if we're way back there at A, God meets us way back there at A and does what God always does: invites us forward to B.

The life that you want begins the moment you embrace the life you have because all of it is a miracle.

That may sound a big vague, but what has struck me in city after city is that despite our differences and diversity, there's a common humanity we all share. In many ways we're all searching and longing for the same things ...

When you forgive somebody, when you are generous, when you withhold judgment, when you love and when you stand up to injustice, you are, in that moment, bringing heaven to earth.

When the lab rats hear the bell ringing, they freeze. That's what fear does to you - fear stops you dead in your tracks. Fear can keep you from harm, but fear can also rob you of your potential. Fear can rob you of an experience. Fear can rob you of happiness. Fear can rob you of real life ... Darkness has a way of scaring us ...

Often the people most concerned about others going to hell when they die seem less concerned with the hells on earth right now, while the people most concerned with the hells on earth right now seem the least concerned about hell after death.

It's in that place that we're reminded that true life comes when we're willing to admit that we've reached the end of ourselves, we've given up, we've let go, we're willing to die to all of our desires to figure it out and be in control. We lose our life, only to find it.

The interactions I have are with people who are very kind and very grateful and they say very overwhelming things to me. Somebody who doesn't like what I do or doesn't understand it, then it wasn't for them.

Bitterness is not your friend. It's easy to become cynical, focusing your energies on them and endlessly wondering why they aren't more evolved and why they are still stuck back there, repeating the same slogans and going through the same motions. If you are filled with pride over how free and intelligent and enlightened you are in comparison to their backward, antiquated ways, your new knowledge has simply made you arrogant. Watch your heart carefully, because if you aren't more compassionate and more kind and more understanding, then you haven't grown at all.

What is God like? Because millions and millions of people were taught that the primary message - the center of the Gospel of Jesus - is that God is going to send you to hell, unless you believe in Jesus. And so, what gets, subtlely, sort of caught and taught is that Jesus rescues you from God. But what kind of God is that; that we would need to be rescued from this God? How could that God ever be good; how could that God ever be trusted? And how could that ever be good news.

Decide now that you will not spend your precious energy speculating about someone else's life and how it compares with yours.

I embrace the term 'evangelical,' if by that we mean a belief that we together can actually work for change in the world, caring for the environment, extending to the poor generosity and kindness, a hopeful outlook. That's a beautiful sort of thing.

I feel like I've gotten an extraordinary opportunity to experience a sort of collective humanity. If you hug many people in such a short period of days you pick up on a communal energy, almost like feeling a giant heartbeat that everyone is beating together.

Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it.

I got into pastoring because of the art form. I started a church, but I felt the art form needed to be freed for all people. A particular religion over others was never interesting to me. I wanted to talk to people about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.

The lesson that has been hardest for me to learn: there is nothing to prove.

Your deepest, darkest sins and your shameful secrets are simply irrelevant when it comes to the counterintuitive, ecstatic announcement of the gospel. So are your goodness, your rightness, your church attendance, and all of the wise, moral, mature decisions you have made and actions you have taken.

Wherever you find truth, wherever you discover something new, affirm it, embrace it, enjoy it.

I am for marriage. I am for fidelity. I am for love, whether it's a man and woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man. I think the ship has sailed and I think the church needs
I think this is the world we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are.

People received, affirmed and experienced grace in many different forms.

If you are working on something, about to deliver it, moments from opening the doors, an hour from everybody arriving, a week from the release date, two minutes from getting the results back, and you have butterflies in your stomach, be grateful.

You are in a wonderful place.
Nerves are God's gift to you, reminding you that your life is not passing you by.

Make friends with the butterflies.
Welcome when they come, revel in them, enjoy them, and if they go away, do whatever it takes to put yourself in a position where they return.

Better to have a stomach full of butterflies than to feel like your life is passing you by.

To me some of the greatest writing is when somebody puts something in words that you felt and experienced and you go, that's it.

And a lot of times, the religious discussion is almost a masquerade for the real question, is what stories that we tell ourselves and that we tell each other and what convictions and beliefs actually have the capacity to make us the kind of people who together can make the world the kind of world we all want it to be?

You can be very religious and invoke the name of God and be able to quote lots of verses and be well versed in complicated theological systems and yet not be a person who sees. It's one thing to sing about God and recite quotes about God and invoke God's name; it's another be aware of the presence in every taste, touch, sound, and embrace.
With Jesus, what we see again and again is that it's never just a person, or just a meal, or just an event, because there's always more going on just below the surface.

It's all - let's use a very specific word here - miraculous. You, me, love, quarks, sex, chocolate, the speed of light - it's all miraculous, and it always has been.

The scorecard is rooted in resentment, and the space between you is highly responsive to resentment. The scorecard is lethal because its rooted in fear - fear that we're on our own, that we're not going to be taken care of, that we're not going to get what we need ... In order to get rid of scorecard, you have to choose to act in love instead of fear. To get rid of your scorecard, someone has to move toward the other first.

It's as if Thomas Kinkade and Dante were at a party, and one turned to the other sometime after midnight and uttered that classic line You know, we really should work together sometime ...

As a pastor, you get invited into the most poignant moments of people's lives. Whether it's a wedding or a funeral or a hospital visit, you get invited into the center of the event, whether or not you know the people.

I get ideas about things I want to make and then I throw myself into it with everything I have.

People are rarely persuaded by arguments, but more often by experiences.

When I talk about the God who is with us, for us, and ahead of us, I'm talking about our facing that which most terrifies us about ourselves, embracing it and fearing it no longer, refusing to allow it to exist separate from the rest of our being, resting assured that we are loved and we belong and we are going to be just fine.

For Jesus, the question wasn't, "How do I get into heaven?" but "How do I bring heaven here?

We can choose the way of compassion, the way of forgiveness, the way of generosity. Or we can choose other paths and those have very real consequences in the world. This is absolutely crucial.

Well, I affirm orthodox Christian faith. I affirm the Nicene Creed. I don't think I'm doing anything terribly new.

If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody.

I thought that Christian was a noun, a person looking for authenticity. I never understood that idea that a band could be Christian or something could be Christian. But it just can be and is.

Like a mirror, God appears to be more and more a reflection of whoever it is that happens to be talking about God at the moment.

We are only as sick as our secrets.

When people argue for the existence of a supernatural God who is somewhere else and reaches in on occasion to do a miracle or two, they're skipping over the very world that surrounds us and courses through our veins and lights up the sky right here, right now.

This is why for thousands of years Christians have found the cross to be so central to life. It speaks to us of God's suffering, God's pain, God's broken heart. It's God making the first move and then waiting for our response.

Far too often, we don't start because we can't get our minds around the entire thing. We don't take the first step because we can't figure out the seventeenth step. But you don't have to know the seventeenth step. You only have to know the first step. Because the first number is always 1. Start with 1.

If we want hell,
if we want heaven,
they are ours.
That's how love works. It can't be forced, manipulated, or coerced.
It always leaves room for the other to decide.
God says yes,
we can have what we want,
because love wins.

There's way too much wonder and mystery all around us to not stay open to more that's going on here. You can wake up, and sense and feel and taste and hear a whole world right here within this one, right here in this breath you're about to take.

Many people confuse religion with God and walk away from them both. The point isn't Christianity, the point is being a Christian.

We live in a world where we have friends, neighbors, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, people we journey with for years who are gay. And we need to love, affirm and all of us together work on the real problems that we have in the world.

I'm on your side

It is better to be fully present and rested and engaged for one thing than rushed, distracted, and scattered for ten.

Think about some of the words that are used in these kinds of discussions, one of the most common being the phrase "open-minded." Often the person with spiritual convictions is seen as close-minded and others are seen as open-minded. What is fascinating to me is that at the center of the Christian faith is the assumption that this life isn't all there is. That there is more to life than the material. That existence is not limited to what we can see, touch, measure, taste, hear, and observe. One of the central assertions of the Christian worldview is that there is "more" – Those who oppose this insist that this is all there is, that only what we can measure and observe and see with our eyes is real. There is nothing else. Which perspective is more "closed-minded?" Which perspective is more "open?

This is how you remember God: you bless those who need it the most in the same way that God blessed you when you needed it the most.

I'm very comfortable in a room with thousands of people.

Love is what God is, love is why Jesus came, and love is why he continues to come, year after year to person after person ... May you experience this vast, expansive, infinite, indestructible love that has been yours all along. May you discover that this love is as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart no one else knows about, and may you know, deep in your bones, that love wins.

On the Sabbath- we are reminded that we are not human doings, but human beings.

People aren't static; they're dynamic - endlessly complex and capable of tremendous surprise and change.

God then makes people whom he puts right in the middle of all this loaded creation. Commanding them to care for creation, to manage it, to lovingly use it, to creatively order it ... They are environmentalists. Being deeply connected with their environment is who they are. For them to be anything else or to deny their divine responsibility to care for all that God has made would be to deny something that is at the core of their existence. This is why litter and pollution are spiritual issues.

For Jesus, heaven and hell were present realities. Ways of living we can enter into here and now. He talked very little of the life beyond this one ...

Great marriages have an ease about them, a back-and-forth nonreactive, nondefensive, open, and ongoing flow in which you never stop talking and figuring it out together.

Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does

No one has the last word other than God.

Jesus is supracultural. He is present within all cultures, and yet outside of all cultures. He is for all people, and yet he refuses to be co-opted or owned by any one culture. That includes any Christian culture. Any denomination. Any church. Any theological system. We can point to him, name him, follow him, discuss him, honor him, and believe in him - but we cannot claim him to be ours any more than he's anyone else's.

If there's any place where you would express your deepest doubts, it would be church.

A lot of Christians have been taught a story that begins in chapter 3 of Genesis, instead of chapter 1. If your story doesn't begin in the beginning, but begins in chapter 3, then it starts with sin, and so the story becomes about dealing with the sin problem. So Jesus is seen as primarily dealing with our sins.

Why blame the dark for being dark? It is far more helpful to ask why the light isn't as bright as it could be.

It's absolutely crucial that we come face to face with the power of our choices.

My interest is in what's true, where is the life, where is the heart and what inspires.

The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.

I am for love, whether it's a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man.

God doesn't wait for us to get ourselves polished, shined, proper, and without blemish - God comes to us and meets us and blesses us while we are still in the middle of the mess we created.

What does happen constantly with all kinds of people I meet is they say "I had this encounter with Jesus, can you help me understand it ... " The labels, more than ever, simply aren't big enough to contain what the cosmic Christ is up to in the world.

Boredom, cynicism, and despair are spiritual diseases because they disconnect us from the most primal truth about ourselves - that we are here.

God is bigger than the Christian faith.

It's important to embrace several truths about yourself and those around you, beginning with this one: who you AREN'T isn't interesting.

Once again, God has a purpose. A desire. A goal. And God never stops pursuing it. Jesus tells a series of parables in Luke 15 about a woman who loses a coin, a shepherd who loses a sheep, and a father who loses a son. The stories aren't ultimately about things and people being lost; the stories are about things and people being found. The God that Jesus teaches us about doesn't give up until everything that was lost is found. This God simply doesn't give up. Ever.

Your life is a gift. Before anything else can be said about you, for some reason the universe (or God, or being, or force, or reality, or whatever you name it) chose to give you life.

Churches and religious communities and organizations can claim to speak for God while at the same time actually being behind the movement of God that is continuing forward in the culture around them ...
without their participation.

Take faith, for example. For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren't opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it's alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren't opposites, they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.

Hope. People want hope. We crave hope. We long for hope. Hope has been present since the very beginning. And almost in the worst situations of human history, you often find the greatest amount of hope. The very nature of the situation, the way stepped-on people created within them even more hope than when things were going fine. Hope has always been around.

I actually think there is hell because we see hell every day.

Confession is like really, really healthy vomit. It may smell and get all over the front of your shirt, but you feel better - you feel cleansed - when you're done.

God has spoken, and everything else is commentary.

One of the oldest aches in the bones of humanity is loneliness. I mean it's one of the things that goes way back; loneliness is not good for the world. And so, whoever you are, gay or straight, it is totally normal, natural, and healthy to want somebody to go through life with. It's central to our humanity.

And this reality extends beyond this life. Heaven is full of forgiven people. Hell is full of forgiven people. Heaven is full of people God loves, whom Jesus died for. Hell is full of forgiven people God loves, whom Jesus died for. The difference is how we choose to live, which story we choose to live in, which version of reality we trust.

I believe that God is love. I believe that Jesus came to show us this love, to give us this love, to teach us about this love, so that we could live in this love and extend it to others.

The world is desperately in need of people who will break themselves open and pour themselves out for the reconciliation of all things- that's what the world needs.

Craft is when you meet up with someone else who's serious about her craft and you talk for hours about the subtle nuances and acquired wisdom of the work. Craft is when you realize you're building muscles and habits that are helping you do better whatever it is you do. Craft is when you have a deep respect for the form and shape and content of what you're doing. Craft is when you're humbled because you know that no matter how many years you get to do this, there will always be room to learn and grow.