Top 100 Rob Bell Quotes
#1. 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.
Rob Bell
#2. In every life there is an energy field created because we are energy, giving out energy, creating energy .
Rob Bell
#3. Christian' makes a poor adjective
Rob Bell
#4. Doctrine is a wonderful servant and a horrible master.
Rob Bell
#5. What we do comes out of who we believe we are.
Rob Bell
#6. Something is profoundly wrong and we are desperate for justice, for restoration and for somebody somewhere to do something about this.
Rob Bell
#7. We shape our God, and then our God shapes us.
Rob Bell
#8. Any time someone makes you feel guilty about how you are living, that is part of the old system (pre-Christ).
Rob Bell
#9. 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.
Rob Bell
#10. Enjoy mystery and speculation, but don't drift into dogma.
Rob Bell
#11. 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.
Rob Bell
#12. Your marriage will only be as healthy as the least healthy one of you.
Rob Bell
#13. It's the voices in your head that speak doubt and insecurity and fear and anxiety. Like a tape that's jammed on "repeat," these destructive messages will drain an extraordinary amount of your energies if you aren't clear and focused and grounded.
Rob Bell
#14. It is better to be fully present and rested and engaged for one thing than rushed, distracted, and scattered for ten.
Rob Bell
#15. Well, I affirm orthodox Christian faith. I affirm the Nicene Creed. I don't think I'm doing anything terribly new.
Rob Bell
#16. When someone wrongs us, we rarely (if ever) want to do the same thing back. Why? Because we want to do something more harmful. Likewise, when someone insults us, our instinct is to search for words that will be more insulting.
Revenge always escalates.
Rob Bell
#17. To elevate abstract doctrines and dogmas over living, breathing, embodied experiences of God's love and grace, then, is going the wrong direction. It's taking flesh and turning it back into words.
Rob Bell
#18. 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.
Rob Bell
#19. 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.
Rob Bell
#20. Everybody is following somebody. Everybody has faith in something and somebody. We are all believers.
Rob Bell
#21. I believe the discussion itself is divine.
Rob Bell
#22. 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.
Rob Bell
#23. Salvation is the entire universe being brought back into harmony with its maker.
Rob Bell
#24. Why would we ever be surprised when truth turns up in strange places?
Rob Bell
#25. 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.
Rob Bell
#26. You cannot bring a fresh, new word about human flourishing and expect the old, established systems of oppression and power to stand by passively. Or, as Jesus put it, "You can't put new wine into old wineskins.
Rob Bell
#27. The resurrection confronts our world with wonder, mystery, and miracles.
Rob Bell
#28. Being a Christian then is more about celebrating mystery than conquering it.
Rob Bell
#29. Jesus responds to almost every question he's asked with ... a question.
"What do you think? How do you read it?" he asks, again and again and again.
Rob Bell
#30. When you're fighting, it's absolutely crucial to keep remembering that they're trying to figure it out just like you are.
Rob Bell
#31. Jesus is God's way of refusing to give up his dream for the world.
Rob Bell
#32. Before anything else, you have received breath - the gift of life itself. The first word about you is GIFT.
Rob Bell
#33. We live in the midst of a creation that is groaning.
Rob Bell
#34. People received, affirmed and experienced grace in many different forms.
Rob Bell
#35. Whatever those things are that make you feel fully alive and like the universe is ultimately a good place and you are not alone, I need a faith that doesn't deny these moments but embraces them.
Rob Bell
#36. 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.
Rob Bell
#37. It's absolutely crucial that we come face to face with the power of our choices.
Rob Bell
#39. 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.
Rob Bell
#40. 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.
Rob Bell
#41. 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.
Rob Bell
#42. We cannot earn what we have always had. What we can do is trust that what God keeps insisting is true about us is actually true.
Rob Bell
#43. My parents were both very intellectually honest, straightforward, and for them, faith meant that you were fully engaged.
Rob Bell
#44. An image of God doesn't contain God, in the same way a word about God or a doctrine or a dogma about God isn't God; it only points to God.
Rob Bell
#45. 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.
Rob Bell
#46. We are not only working on our game, we are working on ourselves.
Rob Bell
#47. 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.
Rob Bell
#48. 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.
Rob Bell
#49. 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.
Rob Bell
#50. Over the years, I've realized that I have as much in common with the performance artist, the standup comedian, the screenwriter, as I do with the theologian. I'm in an odd world where I make things and share them with people.
Rob Bell
#51. For a staggering number of people in our world the for of the Jesus message has been buried under a massive pile of againsts. Somewhere
Rob Bell
#52. When we get to what happens when we die, we don't have any video footage. So let's at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are.
Rob Bell
#53. For many, 'desire' is a bad word, something we're supposed to 'give up for God.' That kind of thinking can be really destructive because it teaches people to deny their hearts, their true selves.
Rob Bell
#54. We are both large and small, strong and weak, formidable and faint, reflecting the image of the divine, and formed from dust.
Rob Bell
#55. What's interesting is, if you take the scientists and the theologians, the really good ones, they end up both filled with this wide-eyed sense of wonder and awe about look at this world we live in.
Rob Bell
#56. The first word about you is that you received this life ...
Rob Bell
#57. 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.
Rob Bell
#58. 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.
Rob Bell
#59. The cross is Gods way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments.
Rob Bell
#60. This is because conviction and humility, like faith and doubt, are not opposites; they're dance partners. It's possible to hold your faith with open hands, living with great conviction and yet at the same time humbly admitting that your knowledge and perspective will always be limited.
Rob Bell
#61. The great Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, "I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder."17
Rob Bell
#62. When the gospel is understood primarily in terms of entrance rather than joyous participation, it can actually serve to cut people off from the explosive, liberating experience of the God who is an endless giving circle of joy and creativity.
Rob Bell
#63. 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.
Rob Bell
#64. God is always present. We're the ones who show up.
Rob Bell
#65. 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.
Rob Bell
#66. The priest's work, the priest's service, was understoon as an act of worship. Theis was Gods desire at Sinai - thst everybody would understand their roles as priests. Thst everybody would worship God by serving each other.
Rob Bell
#67. If anybody didn't have a messiah complex, it was Jesus
Rob Bell
#68. Wherever you find truth, wherever you discover something new, affirm it, embrace it, enjoy it.
Rob Bell
#69. I get ideas about things I want to make and then I throw myself into it with everything I have.
Rob Bell
#70. People are rarely persuaded by arguments, but more often by experiences.
Rob Bell
#71. 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.
Rob Bell
#72. The thought of the word church and the word marketing in the same sentence makes me sick.
Rob Bell
#73. 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.
Rob Bell
#74. The life you want begins by embracing the life you have.
Rob Bell
#75. 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.
Rob Bell
#76. We're engaged more than ever by the possibilities of soul and spirit, and by the nagging suspicion that all of this may not be a grand accident after all; but God, an increasing number of people are asking - what does God have to do with that?
Rob Bell
#77. 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.
Rob Bell
#78. God has spoken, and everything else is commentary.
Rob Bell
#79. 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.
Rob Bell
#80. 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.
Rob Bell
#81. No one has the last word other than God.
Rob Bell
#82. I am for you.
I've got your back.
I am committed to your best.
Help me understand things from your perspective.
What can we do together to change things?
Rob Bell
#83. It is such a letdown to rise from the dead and have your friends not recognize you.
Rob Bell
#84. 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.
Rob Bell
#85. People aren't static; they're dynamic - endlessly complex and capable of tremendous surprise and change.
Rob Bell
#86. We need to return to the simplicity that God is love.
Rob Bell
#87. The historical orthodox Christian faith is extremely wide and diverse.
Rob Bell
#88. For many people, God is primitive, behind, trying to drag everything back to some prehistoric era as opposed to spirit, force, love, drawing us into a better future, which to me is - that story has done something in me and I've seen it do things in other people.
Rob Bell
#89. Catherine of Aragon said,"None get to God but through trouble.
Rob Bell
#90. All work is ultimately creative work because all of us are taking part in the ongoing creation of the world. There's
Rob Bell
#91. 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.
Rob Bell
#92. We need you to be you. We don't need a second anybody. We need the first you.
Rob Bell
#93. We're rediscovering Christianity as an Eastern religion, as a way of life.
Rob Bell
#94. Everybody is resting on a set of interpretations, and we need to be honest about it.
Rob Bell
#95. For Jesus, the question wasn't, "How do I get into heaven?" but "How do I bring heaven here?
Rob Bell
#96. When we don't throw ourselves completely into it and we hold back our best efforts because of what happened in the past, we are letting the past decide the future.
Rob Bell
#97. There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.
Rob Bell
#98. It often takes suffering and lost in order to remind us of how precious life is.
Rob Bell
#99. I believe our world desperately needs Good News.
Rob Bell
#100. God is bigger than the Christian faith.
Rob Bell
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