Rob Bell Quotes

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

God is bigger than the Christian faith.

We're rediscovering Christianity as an Eastern religion, as a way of life.

The modern world has created airports and hospitals and put 10,000 songs in our pocket. It has built gleaming buildings and computers and advances and innovations that blow our minds. But we have soul, and spirit, and consciousness, and the modern world hasn't done so well at helping us name and understand what it means to be thriving and fully alive with a full heart.

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

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.

Being a pastor for 20 years I realized that the labels, agnostic, atheist, believer, everybody's human and everybody wants to know what kind of universe we're living in, and everybody's living according to a story.

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.

When someone sets out to be controversial or provocative or shocking as an end in itself, I don't think that's a noble goal.

Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two—love and controlling power over the other person—are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.

When people use the word hell, what do they mean? They mean a place, an event, a situation absent of how God desires things to be. Famine, debt, oppression, loneliness, despair, death, slaughter--they are all hell on earth. Jesus' desire for his followers is that they live in such a way that they bring heaven to earth. What's disturbing is when people talk more about hell after this life than they do about Hell here and now. As a Christian, I want to do what I can to resist hell coming to earth.

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.

We all want to make a difference, to live in peace, to have joy each morning that we get to live this day and see what it brings.

The Bible tells a story. A story that isn’t over. A story that is still being told. A story that we have a part to play in.

I would say that the powerful, revolutionary thing about Jesus' message is that he says, 'What do you do with the people that aren't like you? What do you do with the Other? What do you do with the person that's hardest to love?' . . . That's the measure of a good religion, is - you can love the people who are just like you; that's kind of easy. So what Jesus does is takes the question and talks about fruit. He's interested in what you actually produce. And that's a different discussion. How do we love the people in the world that are least like us?

Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective

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.

God gives us what we want. For people who want nothing to do with peace, joy, reconciliation and peace... God will give you what you want. I see people make unbelievably destructive choices.

Jesus is God's way of refusing to give up his dream for the world.

I think the church needs – I think this is the world we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are.

Many people need a new rewiring of their heart and mind.

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

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

Faith can take many different forms and expressions.

A good sermon is going to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. It inspires you. It provokes you. It should make your soul soar.

Fear wants us to become obsessed with some event or person in the future, a year, a month, even a day. It also wants us to look backwards not at our successes, but our short-comings and our failures. Fear losses it's grip when we stay in the now.

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.

We need a childlike trust that God is good... ultimately we are OK. That is a simple, beautiful pure thing that can be complicated ferociously by all sorts of intellectual categories.

Something is profoundly wrong and we are desperate for justice, for restoration and for somebody somewhere to do something about this.

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

So this is reality, this forgiveness, this reconciliation, is true for everybody. Paul insisted that when Jesus died on the cross, he was reconciling "all things, in heaven and on earth, to God." All things, everywhere. ...This reality then isn't something we make come true about ourselves by doing something. It is already true. Our choice is to live in this new reality or cling to a reality of our own making.

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

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

What we do comes out of who we believe we are.

Before anything else, you have received breath - the gift of life itself. The first word about you is GIFT.

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

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.

To say it again, eternal life is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of life now in connection to God. Eternal life doesn't start when we die; it starts now. It's not about a life that begins at death; it's about experiencing the kind of life now that can endure and survive even death.

Freedom is not having everything we crave, it's being able to go without the things we crave and being OK with it.

I believe God gives people the right to say no, to resist, to refuse, to reject, to cling to their sins, to cling to their version of their story.

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.

The cross is Gods way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments.

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?

The best team does not always win, it's the team that plays the best.

Suffering is traumatic and awful and we get angry and we shake our fists at the heavens and we vent and rage and weep. But in the process we discover a new tomorrow, one we never would have imagined otherwise.

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.

Celebrity seems totally at odds with authentic community and honest, real sorts of relationships.

What we believe about heaven and hell is incredibly important because it exposes what we believe about who God is and what God is like.