Rob Bell famous quotes

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

#Heaven #Forgiving #Earth

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

#Years #Giving #People

What we do comes out of who we believe we are.
-- Rob Bell

#Believe

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.
-- Rob Bell

#Writing

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

#Heaven #Choices #Earth

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

#Grateful #People #Kind

Love is what God is, love is why Jesus came, and love is why he continues to come, year after year to person after person...May you experience this vast, expansive, infinite, indestructible love that has been yours all along. May you discover that this love is as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart no one else knows about, and may you know, deep in your bones, that love wins.
-- Rob Bell

#Jesus #Heart #Winning

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

#Heaven #Suffering #Fists

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

#Dark #Light #Helpful

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.
-- Rob Bell

#Jesus #Jobs #Believe

The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.
-- Rob Bell

#God #Faith #Jesus

opening up your soul to someone, letting them into your spirit, thoughts, fears, future, hopes, dreams ... that is being naked.
-- Rob Bell

#Dream #Opening Up #Soul

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.
-- Rob Bell

#Beautiful #Claims #Honorable

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

#Inspiring #Miracle #Want

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.
-- Rob Bell

#Cutting #Voice #Community

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.
-- Rob Bell

#Hurt #Blood #Sky

Your deepest, darkest sins and your shameful secrets are simply irrelevant when it comes to the counterintuitive, ecstatic announcement of the gospel. So are your goodness, your rightness, your church attendance, and all of the wise, moral, mature decisions you have made and actions you have taken.
-- Rob Bell

#Wise #Taken #Decision

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?
-- Rob Bell

#Jesus #Powerful #People

It is trusting that I am loved. That I always have been. That I always will be. I don't have to do anything. I don't have to prove anything, or achieve anything, or accomplish one more thing. That, exactly as I am, I am totally accepted, forgiven, and there is nothing I could ever do to lose this acceptance.
-- Rob Bell

#Acceptance #Achieve #Accepted

God is bigger than the Christian faith.
-- Rob Bell

#Christian #Bigger #Christian Faith

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.
-- Rob Bell

#Risk #Gains #Needs

The world is desperately in need of people who will break themselves open and pour themselves out for the reconciliation of all things- that's what the world needs.
-- Rob Bell

#People #Needs #World

For a lot of people in our world today, God has become about believing the right stuff so you don't get in trouble.
-- Rob Bell

#Believe #Our World #People

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.
-- Rob Bell

#Believe #Giving #People

If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody.
-- Rob Bell

#News

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

#Harmony #Salvation #Makers

Well, I affirm orthodox Christian faith. I affirm the Nicene Creed. I don't think I'm doing anything terribly new.
-- Rob Bell

#Christian #Thinking #Creeds

Jesus is bigger than any one religion. He didn't come to start a new religion, and he continually disrupted whatever conventions or systems or establishments that existed in his day. He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain and name him, especially the one called "Christianity.
-- Rob Bell

#Jesus #Names #Cages

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.
-- Rob Bell

#Quality #Vitality #Connections

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. I think the ship has sailed and I think the church needs -- I think this is the world we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are.
-- Rob Bell

#Men #Thinking #People

The Christian faith is mysterious to the core. It is about things and beings that ultimately can't be put into words. Language fails. And if we do definitively put God into words, we have at that very moment made God something God is not.
-- Rob Bell

#Christian #Mysterious #Language

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.
-- Rob Bell

#Jesus #Struggle #Divorce

Grace is when you know you're loved exactly as you are.
-- Rob Bell

#Grace

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.
-- Rob Bell

#Jesus #Issues #People

Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does
-- Rob Bell

#Reading #Israel #Doe

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

#Dream #Jesus #Giving Up

The historical orthodox Christian faith is extremely wide and diverse,
-- Rob Bell

#Christian #Historical #Orthodox

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

I embrace the term 'evangelical,' if by that we mean a belief that we together can actually work for change in the world, caring for the environment, extending to the poor generosity and kindness, a hopeful outlook. That's a beautiful sort of thing.
-- Rob Bell

#Beautiful #Kindness #Mean

If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody. And this is because the most powerful things happen when the church surrenders its desire to convert people and convince them to join. It is when the church gives itself away in radical acts of service and compassion, expecting nothing in return, that the way of Jesus is most vividly put on display.
-- Rob Bell

#Jesus #Powerful #Compassion

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.
-- Rob Bell

#Men #Men And Women #Fidelity

If anybody didn't have a messiah complex, it was Jesus.
-- Rob Bell

#Jesus #Godly #Messiah

For Jesus, heaven and hell were present realities. Ways of living we can enter into here and now. He talked very little of the life beyond this one…
-- Rob Bell

#Jesus #Reality #Heaven

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

#Way #Christianity #Eastern

Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective
-- Rob Bell

#Christian #Nouns #Adjectives

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

#Light #Bugs #Kind

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

#Moments #Significant #Significant Moments

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

#Christian #Pain #Moving

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.
-- Rob Bell

#People #Toxic #Pastor

The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, Me too.
-- Rob Bell

#Jesus #Blood #Flesh

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.
-- Rob Bell

#Jobs #Needs #Fresh Start

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

#Loving Someone #Desire #Serious

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

#Sabbath #Humans #Doings

Often times when I meet atheists and we talk about the god they don’t believe in, we quickly discover that I don’t believe in that god, either.
-- Rob Bell

#Atheist #Believe

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

No one has the last word other than God.
-- Rob Bell

#Lasts #Last Words

To make it really clear and simple, let's call this movement across history we see in passages like the ones we just looked at from Exodus and Deuteronomy clicks. What we see is God meeting people at the click they're at, and then drawing them forward.When they're at F, God calls them to G.When we're at L, God calls us to M.And if we're way back there at A, God meets us way back there at A and does what God always does: invites us forward to B.
-- Rob Bell

#Simple #Drawing #People

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.
-- Rob Bell

#Beautiful #Jesus #Mean

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

#Video #Honest #Being Honest

To be honest with you, I am passionate about all the people out there who want to know Jesus, they want to know God, and they are sick of a system that is hung up on a bunch of things that have nothing to do with the love of God.
-- Rob Bell

#Jesus #Sick #People

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

#Revenge #Insulting #Want

What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists find Larry's tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? Could you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live?
-- Rob Bell

#Christian #Religious #Jesus

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

#Jesus #Strong #Weak

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

#Doubt #Church #Would Be

I'm very comfortable in a room with thousands of people.
-- Rob Bell

#People #Rooms