Rob Bell Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

Rob Bell
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.

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

Rob Bell
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
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
The fact that we are loved and accepted and forgiven in spite of everything we have done is simply too good to be true.

Rob Bell
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.

Rob Bell
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.

Rob Bell
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
Everybody is following somebody. Everybody has faith in something and somebody. We are all believers.

Rob Bell
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...

Rob Bell
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
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.

Rob Bell
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
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,

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

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

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

Rob Bell
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
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.

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

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

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

Rob Bell
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