Rob Bell Quotes - Page 4

I feel like I've gotten an extraordinary opportunity to experience a sort of collective humanity. If you hug many people in such a short period of days you pick up on a communal energy, almost like feeling a giant heartbeat that everyone is beating together.

God then makes people whom he puts right in the middle of all this loaded creation. Commanding them to care for creation, to manage it, to lovingly use it, to creatively order it... They are environmentalists. Being deeply connected with their environment is who they are. For them to be anything else or to deny their divine responsibility to care for all that God has made would be to deny something that is at the core of their existence. This is why litter and pollution are spiritual issues.

I'm interested in painting the most beautifully compelling pictures and images and metaphors and stories and explanations possible that will put Jesus in language for a world that desperately needs to hear it.

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.

Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective

It's absurd and quite tragic the way people have managed to pit science against faith. They aren't in conflict at all - they're long lost dance partners. I don't divide the world up into Christians and other people - we are all human beings, brothers and sisters, and we embrace truth wherever we find it, whether that's in a lab, a field or a cathedral. Because sometimes you need a scientist and sometimes you need a poet.

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.

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

I actually think there is hell because we see hell every day.

The best team does not always win, it's the team that plays the best.

When people use the word hell, what do they mean? They mean a place, an event, a situation absent of how God desires things to be. Famine, debt, oppression, loneliness, despair, death, slaughter--they are all hell on earth. Jesus' desire for his followers is that they live in such a way that they bring heaven to earth. What's disturbing is when people talk more about hell after this life than they do about Hell here and now. As a Christian, I want to do what I can to resist hell coming to earth.

It often appears that those who talk the most about going to heaven when you die talk the least about bringing heaven to earth right now, as Jesus taught us to pray: 'Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' At the same time, it often appears that those who talk the most about relieving suffering now talk the least about heaven when we die.

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

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

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.

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

I like to say that I practice militant mysticism. I'm really absolutely sure of some things that I don't quite know.

You can set your intention to better understand your soul, your spirit, through daily practices like prayer, yoga and meditation, etc.

What you believe about the future shapes, informs, and determines how you live now.

The fundamental story arc of the Bible is God is passionate about rescuing this world, restoring it, renewing it.

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

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.

I got into pastoring because of the art form. I started a church, but I felt the art form needed to be freed for all people. A particular religion over others was never interesting to me. I wanted to talk to people about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.

Creating and sharing beautiful things has provided me with the inspiration that we can do things we never thought we could do and that we will get to see wonderful things we never thought we would see.

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