396 Quotes by Rob Bell

Gospel is the announcement of who God insists you are. You’re a child of God, not because of how great you are but because God has all kinds of kids and you’re one of them.

But when I’m talking about God, I’m talking about the divine being who can’t be located tangibly with the kind of evidence that the rationalism of reductionism demands in the same way that you cannot be located in your eyelashes or spine or shoulder.

Find your rituals, develop your routines, create those practices that ground and center you. Stick to them, don’t apologize for them, treat them, even the small things, like they’re big things.

When the gospel is understood primarily in terms of entrance rather than joyous participation, it can actually serve to cut people off from the explosive, liberating experience of the God who is an endless giving circle of joy and creativity.

This is how you remember God: you bless those who need it the most in the same way that God blessed you when you needed it the most.

When we don’t throw ourselves completely into it and we hold back our best efforts because of what happened in the past, we are letting the past decide the future.

When a leader comes along who eliminates the tension and dodges the paradox and neatly and precisely explains who the enemies are and gives black-and-white answers to questions, leaving little room for the very real mystery of the divine, it should not surprise us when that person gains a large audience. Especially if that person is really, really confident.

I saw how the Bible isn’t a book about how to get into heaven, it’s a library of poems and letters and stories about bringing heaven to earth now, about this world becoming more and more the place it should be. There is very, very little in the Bible about what happens when you die. That’s not what the writers were focused on. Their interest, again and again, is on how this world is arranged.

This story... blasts to pieces our biases and labels with a declaration that God is on everyone’s side, extending grace and compassion to everyone, especially those we have most strongly decided are not on God’s side.