Rob Bell Quotes

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

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

If there is a divine being who made everything, including us, what would our experiences with this being look like? The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. We are dealing with somebody we made up. And if we made him up, then we are in control. And so in passage after passage, we find God reminding people that he is beyond and bigger and more.

Missions then is less about the transportation of God from one place to another and more about the identification of a God who is already there [...] You see God where others don't. And then you point him out. So the issue isn't so much taking Jesus to people who don't have him, but going to a place and pointing out to the people the creative, life-giving God who is already present in their midst.

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.

Agape doesn't love somebody because they're worthy.

Agape makes them worthy by the strength and power of its love.

Agape doesn't love somebody because they're beautiful.

Agape loves in such a way that it makes them beautiful.

First, the Bible has to be interpreted. When someone says they’re just doing what the Bible says to do, they didn’t greet you with a holy kiss, they’re probably wearing two kinds of fabric sewn together, and there’s a good chance they don’t have tassels sewn on the corners of their garments, all things commanded in the Bible. They don’t do those things because they don’t believe those commands are binding on them today. And they don’t believe that or practice those things because they’ve interpreted the Bible in a particular way. Or more likely, they’ve been influenced by someone who told them that is how the Bible is to be interpreted.

When you’re fighting, it’s absolutely crucial to keep remembering that they’re trying to figure it out just like you are.

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

Jesus didn’t talk about a God who wants to burn this place down and take us somewhere else; he talked about the renewing of this place, the only home we’ve ever had. Central to the story of the Bible is the affirmation of trees and seas and rocks and air and soil and blood and sweat and skin and all the materiality and diversity and creativity that we know to be central to our life in this world. Jesus talked about a coming time when God would restore and renew and reconcile and redeem and make things right, and he invites us to anticipate that day by doing our part to bring heaven to earth, here, now, today.

"As we experience this love, there is a temptation at times to become hostile to our earlier understandings, feeling embarrassed that we were so "simple" or "naive," or "brainwashed" or whatever terms arise when we haven't come to terms with our own story. These past understandings aren't to be denied or dismissed; they're to be embraced. Those experiences belong. Love demands that they belong. That's where we were at that point in our life and God met us there. Those moments were necessary for us to arrive here, at this place at this time, as we are. Love frees us to embrace all of our history, the history in which all things are being made new."

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.

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.

We are both large and small, strong and weak, formidable and faint, reflecting the image of the divine, and formed from dust.

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.