Top 201 Quotes & Sayings by Rob Bell - Page 3

I live with the understanding that truth is bigger than any religion and the world is God's and everything in it.

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.

I think that at the core of faith is trust.

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

God is bigger than the Christian faith.

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.

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.

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?

Resurrection is a belief and hope in restoring this world.

The first word about you is that you received this life.

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.

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

It often takes suffering and lost in order to remind us of how precious life is.

When Isaiah predicted that spears would become pruning hooks, that's a reference to cultivating. Pruning and trimming and growing and paying close attention to the plants and whether they're getting enough water and if their roots are deep enough. Soil under the fingernails, grapes being trampled under bare feet, fingers sticky from handling fresh fruit. It's that green stripe you get around the sole of your shoes when you mow the lawn. Life in the age to come. Earthy.

The ancient Hebrews had a word for this awareness of the importance of things. They called it kavod. Kavod originally was a business term, referring to the heaviness of something, which was crucial in weights and measures and the maintaining of fairness in transactions. Over time the word began to take on a more figurative meaning, referring to the importance and significance of something.

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.

The Bible itself is a book that constantly must be wrestled with and re-interpreted. ... Bible interpretation is colored by historical context, the reader's bias and current realities. The more you study the Bible, the more questions it raises. It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says.

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

If it is true, if it is beautiful, if it is honorable, if it is right, then claim it. Because it is from God. And you belong to God.

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

One truth is that suffering raises profound questions with the universe. The other truth is that grace, gift and generosity also raise profound questions.

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.

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.

I believe that God is with you, that there is a presence. I believe this God is for you. I don't think the universe is a cold, dead place that is indifferent.

Doctrine is a wonderful servant and a horrible master.

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.

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.

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

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.

God has spoken, and everything else is commentary.

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

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.

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

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.

[The Bible] has to be interpreted. And if it isn’t interpreted, then it can’t be put into action. So if we are serious about following God, then we have to interpret the Bible. It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says. We must first make decisions about what it means at this time, in this place, for these people.

Enjoy mystery and speculation, but don't drift into dogma.

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.

We often rush through the experiences that have the greatest shift.

Christian' makes a poor adjective

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.

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.

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.

The thought of the word church and the word marketing in the same sentence makes me sick.

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

Do we get what we want? Yes, we get what we want. God is that loving. If we want isolation, despair, and the right to be our own god, God graciously grants us that option. If we insist on using our God-given pwer to make the world in our image, God allows us that freedom; we have the kind of license to do that.that's how love works. It cant 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.

Faith can take many different forms and expressions.

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.

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.

There's nothing wrong with possessions; it's just that they have value to us only when we use them, engage them, and enjoy them. They're nouns that mean something only in conjunction with verbs. That's why wealth is so dangerous: if you're not careful you can easily end up with a garage full of nouns.

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

If this understanding of the good news of Jesus prevailed among Christians, the belief that Jesus’s message is about how to get somewhere else, you could possibly end up with a world in which millions of people were starving, thirsty, and poor; the earth was being exploited and polluted; disease and despair were everywhere; and Christians weren’t known for doing much about it. If it got bad enough, you might even have people rejecting Jesus because of how his followers lived. That would be tragic.

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

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.

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

The danger is that in reaction to abuses and distortions of an idea, we'll reject it completely. And in the process miss out on the good of it, the worth of it, the truth of it.

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

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

There are moments when we have to return to our roots.

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.

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