Quotes from Rob Bell

What this particular religious system that I was working in did was ever so subtly divide the world up into two spheres Ã¢â'¬Â¦ the spiritual, and then the rest of life. As if spiritual is a dimension of life that some people have, and some don't. As if spiritual means less real than the stuff of everyday life like money and bodies and kids and houses and jobs. As if spiritual is about another time and another place when you die and leave this place.

Do you believe that God is for you? Do you believe that God's desire is that you flourish, thrive, shine? Do you believe that God wants you to be everything you could possibly be as you become more and more and more your true self?

Of course Jonah is angry. When you haven't forgiven someone who has wronged you and then something good happens to them—when they are blessed or shown mercy or experience favor—it's infuriating.

It is far more helpful to ask why the light isn't as bright as it could be.

that matters is how you respond to Jesus. And that answer totally resonates with me; it is about how you respond to Jesus. But it raises another important question: Which Jesus?

So is it not only that a person has to respond, pray, accept, believe, trust, confess, and do—but also that someone else has to act, teach, travel, organize, fund-raise, and build so that the person can know what to respond, pray, accept, believe, trust, confess, and do?

If you don't have that, you will die apart from God and spend eternity in torment in hell. The problem, however, is that the phrase "personal relationship" is found nowhere in the Bible.

We spend so much time searching and longing for solid ground, only to discover it's better than that. There's Spirit. You try this, you try that. You throw yourself into it, and you hold it loosely. You give it everything you have as you acknowledge that this is what we're doing now, who knows what will come next?

So if that's it, if that's the point of it all, if that's the ticket, the center, the one unavoidable reality, the heart of the Christian faith, why is it that no one used the phrase until the last hundred years or so?

First, I'm a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God.

when people object to the idea of God, to the idea that there is more beyond our tangible, provable-with-hard-evidence observations and experiences of the world, they aren't taking the entire world into account.

The moment you pin down the butterfly so that you can carefully study it is the exact moment in which that butterfly can no longer fly. It's the motion, the movement, the flying, that makes a butterfly a butterfly.

But maybe all of these questions are missing the point. Let's set aside all of the saying and doing and being and cutting holes in roofs and assume it's more simple than that. As some would say, "Just believe.

And now here's the twist, the mystery, the unexpected truth about admitting that takes us back to the counterintuitive power of gospel: When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.

The truth is, you want risk. Not too much that it overwhelms you, but some. You want some risk in your life. Risk is where the life is.

We want a little risk in our lives because it keeps things interesting. It wakes us up, it gives us a sense that we're alive and breathing and doing something with our lives.

The first thing you have to do is throw yourself into whatever it is you're doing.

Heaven, for Jesus, wasn't less real, but more real.

Throwing yourself into it begins with being grateful that you even have something to throw yourself into.

Sometimes we don't throw ourselves into it because we believe the small things are beneath us. What we don't understand is that what appear to be the small things are actually the big things. They're where it starts, and throwing yourself into them inevitably creates new opportunities for you.

Instead of speculating about the end times and writing terrible novels about people being left behind and preaching ridiculous sermons connecting Iran to the book of Daniel, it's better if people agree that we aren't going to worry about what we can't control and we are going to become far more intentional about what we can control—loving our neighbor, becoming people of character and integrity, taking better care of the earth.

Sometimes we hold back from throwing ourselves into it because we think that the only work worth doing is something completely original that's never been done before.

may have been done or said by someone else. That's a distinct possibility. It may have been done or said before. But it hasn't been done or said by you. It hasn't come through your unique flesh and blood, through your life, through your experience and insight and perspective.

The actor Mark Ruffalo went to six hundred auditions before he got his first break. Six hundred NOs before the first YES.