Quotes from Rob Bell

If you are filled with pride over how free and intelligent and enlightened you are in comparison to their backward, antiquated ways, your new knowledge has simply made you arrogant. Watch your heart carefully, because if you aren't more compassionate and more kind and more understanding, then you haven't grown at all.

My wife, Kristen, and I often talk about raising our kids in such a way that they have as little as possible to unlearn later on in life.

She understood heaven to be about partnering with God to make a new and better world, one with increasingly complex and expansive expressions and dimensions of shalom, creativity, beauty, and design.

This insistence that God will be united and reconciled with all people is a theme the writers and prophets return to again and again. They are very specific in their beliefs about who God is and what God is doing in the world, constantly affirming the simple fact that God does not fail.

Can you see why Jesus often began his teachings by saying "Repent!"? You know what repent means? It means to change your thinking, to see things in a new way, to have your mind renewed—all

We come up against our powerlessness and often our first response is If I were just more powerful Ã¢â'¬Â¦ But this isn't an obstacle we power through, it's a truth we make peace with. I was starting to learn that Ã¢â'¬Â¦

Is God our friend, our provider, our protector, our father—or is God the kind of judge who may in the end declare that we deserve to spend forever separated from our Father? Is God like the characters in a story Jesus would tell, old ladies who keep searching for the lost coin until they find it, shepherds who don't rest until that one sheep is back in the fold, fathers who rush out to greet and embrace their returning son, or, in the end, will God give up?

First, I'm a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God. I realize that for some people, hearing talk about Jesus shrinks and narrows the discussion about God, but my experience has been the exact opposite. My experiences of Jesus have opened my mind and my heart to a bigger, wider, more expansive and mysterious and loving God who I believe is actually up to something in the world.

How we respond to what happens to us—especially the painful, excruciating things that we never wanted and we have no control over—is a creative

What new and good thing is going to come out of even this? When you ask this question, you have taken something that was out of your control and reframed it as another opportunity to take part in the ongoing creation of the world.

because having too many options can easily lead to being stuck, disconnected from your life because there's no pressing need to do anything.

Heaven comforts, but it also confronts.

Suffering and loss have this extraordinary capacity to alert and awaken us to the gift that life is.

Failure, we see again and again, isn't final, judgment has a point, and consequences are for correction.

You go to a funeral and you sit there grieving the death of this person you loved but when you leave you realize that mixed in with your sadness is a strange sort of energy that comes from a renewed awareness that you're here and this is your life and it's good and it's a sacred gift.

And in trying to protect the image of God in them, we just might be protecting the image of God in ourselves in the process. Because with every decision, conversation, gesture, comment, action, and attitude, we're inviting heaven or hell to earth.

Now what? I realize now that those two words were forming a prayer. Now what? In a visceral way, prayer is naming what matters to you. Now what? is what mattered to me.

Begin whatever you're doing by remembering that you are here and you have been given a gift.

It's at the end of ourselves that new futures open up.

Boredom is lethal. Boredom says, There's nothing interesting to make here. Boredom reveals what we believe about the kind of world we're living in. Boredom is lethal because it reflects a static, fixed view of the world—a world that is finished.

The ancient sages said the words of the sacred text were black letters on a white page—there's all that white space, waiting to be filled with our responses and discussions and debates and opinions and longings and desires and wisdom and insights. We read the words, and then enter into the discussion that has been going on for thousands of years across cultures and continents.

Cynicism says, There's nothing new to make here. Often, cynicism presents itself as wisdom, but it usually comes from a wound.

It's possible to have emptied your savings account and be living in your friend's basement riding your bike everywhere because you can't afford a car and yet feel like you're bursting with vitality. It's also possible to have lots of money in the bank, living in the house you had custom built, going on expensive vacations to exotic places, and yet you're miserable.

While boredom can be fairly subtle and cynicism can appear quite intelligent and even funny, despair is like a dull thud in the heart. Despair says, Nothing that we make matters.