Quotes from Rob Bell

Find me one person who's doing something interesting in the world who hasn't felt the hot sting of a NO.

One of the only violent images Jesus ever uses is when he speaks about those who cause children to stumble. With a shockingly hyperbolic flourish, he declares that the only fitting punishment is to tie a giant stone around their neck and throw them into the sea (Matt. 18). Death by drowning—Jesus's idea of punishment for those who lead children astray. A haunting warning if there ever was one about the spongelike nature of a child's psyche.

I point out these details because we are tactile creatures. Fabric, leather, graphics, paint, paper—these substances and surfaces we surround ourselves with powerfully affect us.

Find me one person who's doing something interesting in the world who hasn't felt the hot sting of a NO. Or a door slammed in the face. Or boos. Or a rejection letter. Or a tepid reception. Or bankruptcy. Or gotten fired.

And whenever people claim that one group is in, saved, accepted by God, forgiven, enlightened, redeemed- and everybody else isn't- why is it that those who make this claim are almost always part of the group that's in?

heaven is not forever in the way that we think of forever, as a uniform measurement of time, like days and years, marching endlessly into the future. That's not a category or concept we find in the Bible. This is why a lot of translators choose to translate aion as "eternal." By this they don't mean the literal passing of time; they mean transcending time, belonging to another realm altogether.

Paul's insistence here is that what God is doing in Christ is for everybody, every nation, every ethnic group, every tribe. Paul uses the expansive word "Gentiles"—a first-century way of saying "everybody else.

We surrender the outcomes because we cannot control how people are going to respond to us and our work in the world.

Jesus is said to be a priest in the order of Melchizedek, a priest of God Most High who is a priest not on the basis of a regulation as to his ancestry but on the basis of the power of an indestructible life.

As obvious as it is, then, Jesus is bigger than any one religion.

When the man asks about getting "eternal life," he isn't asking about how to go to heaven when he dies. This wasn't a concern for the man or Jesus. This is why Jesus doesn't tell people how to "go to heaven." It wasn't what Jesus came to do. Heaven, for Jesus, was deeply connected with what he called "this age" and "the age to come.

To say it again, eternal life is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of life lived now in connection to God.

He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain and name him, especially the one called "Christianity.

Give the gift, and surrender the rest.

When the wealthy man walks away from Jesus, Jesus turns to his disciples and says to them, "No one who has left home or wife or brothers or sisters or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age, and in the age to come eternal life" (Luke 18).

If you are looking for a particular response to bring you joy, that response may never come. The joy comes from being fully present in this moment. The reward is in throwing yourself into it right here and now.

Gospel is the announcement of who God insists you are. You're

I felt this new life surging up within me. I don't need people to be anywhere else. I can meet everybody where they are.

simply claims that whatever God is doing in the world to know and redeem and love and restore the world is happening through him. And so the passage is exclusive, deeply so, insisting on Jesus alone as the way to God. But it is an exclusivity on the other side on inclusivity.

Giving the gift is reward enough. That's where the life is. That's where the joy is.

So according to Jesus there is this age, this aion— the one they, and we, are living in— and then a coming age, also called "the world to come" or simply "eternal life.

By the way, when the writer John in the book of Revelation gets a current glimpse of the heavens, one detail he mentions about crowns is that people are taking them off [chap. 4]. Apparently, in the unvarnished presence of the divine a lot of things that we consider significant turn out to be, much like wearing a crown, quite absurd.)

what kept coming back to me was that one word gift. Receiving, and then passing it along. Opening up to power and force and energy way beyond me, letting it move through me.

Too many people have a job and they get a paycheck and that's it. Few things will inject more meaning and even, at times, joy into your work than you seeing yourself working your craft. Whatever it is you do all day, do you see it as a craft?