Rob Bell Quotes

I have met countless people who call themselves Christians who don't appear to have any living breathing vibrant connection with the resurrected Christ and I've met countless people from every religious background including atheists that tell me of their very personal and real experiences of the living Christ. I don't have people asking me why they should believe something - that's starting off on the wrong foot to say the least.

You want people who are both great fans and supporters and believers of your work and people who are also ruthlessly honest. People who will tell you the truth about it. Over the years I've picked up some friends and I know who to show what to and they'll give me the proper read.

It takes quite a spine to turn the other cheek. It takes phenomenal fortitude to love your enemy. It takes firm resolve to pray for those who persecute you. (with reference to Matthew 5)

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

That breath that you just took, that's a gift!

If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.

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.

The vibrant, real historic Christian faith is very wide and leaves lots and lots of room for varying perspectives. It's very diverse and wide, that's part of it's strength, life and vibrancy.

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 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.

Salvation is the entire universe being brought back into harmony with its maker.

Some communities don't permit open, honest inquiry about the things that matter most. Lots of people have voiced a concern, expressed a doubt, or raised a question, only to be told by their family, church, friends, or tribe: "We don't discuss those things here." I believe the discussion itself is divine. Abraham does his best to bargain with God, most of the book of Job consists of arguments by Job and his friends about the deepest questions of human suffering, God is practically on trial in the book of Lamentations, and Jesus responds to almost every question he's asked with...a question.

You turn the light on, you get all kinds of bugs.

The hardness of the human heart makes no sense.

Two of the most powerful words you can hear someone say are ‘me too.’

Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God's ways for us. We can have all the hell we want.

You're here, you're breathing, you are the recipient of an extraordinary act of generosity called life.

We shape our God, and then our God shapes us.

Love frees us to embrace all of our history, the history in which all things are being made new.

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.

It is such a letdown to rise from the dead and have your friends not recognize you.

When we deny the spiritual dimension to our existence, we end up living like animals. And when we deny the physical, sexual dimension to our existence, we end up living like angels. And both ways are destructive, because God made us human.

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

God has spoken, and everything else is commentary.

In one of the accounts of Jesus's death we read that the curtain in the temple of God-the one that kept people out of the holiest place of God's presence-ripped.One New Testament writer said that this ripping was a picture of how, because of Jesus, we can have new, direct access to God.A beautiful idea.But the curtain ripping also means that God comes out, that God is no longer confined to the temple as God was previously.

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.

I think that at the core of faith is trust.

I would hope that wherever I go I bring good news - that's what that word means, right? It began with the first followers of Jesus taking a Roman military propaganda term and co-opting it for their own subversive purposes, insisting that the world isn't made better through coercive military violence but through sacrificial love. How great is that!? Unfortunately this word has been hijacked in several years for other purposes but no worries, we're taking it back.

No one has the last word other than God.

Times change. God doesn’t, but times do. We learn and grow, and the world around us shifts, and the Christian faith is alive only when it is listening, morphing, innovating, letting go of whatever has gotten in the way of Jesus and embracing whatever will help us be more and more the people God wants us to be.

Many in the modern world fell for the myth that we're living in a static, fixed, flat reality of just material things.

If your faith is threatened by something that's true, then it wasn't much of a faith to begin with, was it?

Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, "God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea what I'm going through. You don't have a clue how much this hurts." The cross is God's way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments. The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, "Me too.

At the center of the Christian tradition since the first church have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins and all will be reconciled to God.

This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.

The great German scholar Helmut Thielicke once said that a person who speaks to this hour’s need will always be skirting the edge of heresy, but only the person who risks those heresies can gain the truth.

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.

The resurrection confronts our world with wonder, mystery, and miracles.

I have been told that I need to believe in Jesus. Which is a good thing. But what I am learning is that Jesus believes in me.

When the female voice is repressed and stifled, the entire community can easily find themselves cut off from the sacred feminine, depriving themselves of the full image of god.

Christian' makes a poor adjective

My experience as a pastor is lots of people have really toxic, dangerous, psychologically devastating images of God in their head, images of a God who's not good.

Swords appear strong, but they're actually quite weak. Jesus appears weak, but he's actually quite strong.

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.

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.

Any time someone makes you feel guilty about how you are living, that is part of the old system (pre-Christ).

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

The peace we are offered is not a peace that is free from tragedy, illness, bankruptcy, divorce, depression, or heartache. It is peace rooted in the trust that the life Jesus gives us is deeper, wider, stronger, and more enduring than whatever our current circumstances are, because all we see is not all there is and the last word about us and our struggle has not yet been spoken.