396 Quotes by Rob Bell

Grace is when you aren’t striving or controlling or trying to change or manipulate or make something happen. Grace is when you find yourself carried along, when all that’s left to do is receive. Grace is when you know you’re loved, exactly as you are. Grace is an entirely different way of experiencing life. Another word for grace is gift.

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.

It’s one thing to be in love; it’s another to act because of love. Love is a noun – a feeling you have – and it’s also a verb, something you do.

Look at the size of the universe and look at what we’re discovering about string theory. There’s a wide-eyed sense of we’re just getting started here.

It’s in that place that we’re reminded that true life comes when we’re willing to admit that we’ve reached the end of ourselves, we’ve given up, we’ve let go, we’re willing to die to all of our desires to figure it out and be in control. We lose our life, only to find it.

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.

To name is to order, to participate, to partner with God in taking the world somewhere.

But the first Christians didn’t see Jesus this way, as if God were somewhere else and then cooked up some way to solve the sin problem at the last minute by getting involved as Jesus. They believed that Jesus was somehow more, that Jesus had actually been present since before creation and had been a part of the story all along.

God is in the best, and also the worst. God is in the presence, and also in the absence. God is in the power, and also in the powerlessness.