396 Quotes by Rob Bell

If the gospel isn’t good news for everybody, then it isn’t good news for anybody.

Jesus did not use hell to try and compel “heathens” and “pagans” to believe in God, so they wouldn’t burn when they die. He talked about hell to very religious people to warn them about the consequences of straying from their God-given calling and identity to show the world God’s love.

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.

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.

When people stepped forward and said, “You have heard it interpreted this way, but I tell you it really means this,” it was progressive for their day. They were making new claims about what it means to be true to the Bible. What is accepted today as tradition was at one point in time a break from tradition.

Many in the modern world fell for the myth that we’re living in a static, fixed, flat reality of just material things.

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.

The question is: Why have these poems and prayers endured? Why, thousands of years later, do we still have them? And the answer you’ll return to again and again is: They speak to our human experience.

Sociologically, large groups of people don’t generally have massive changes in their belief instantaneously.