Quotes from Rob Bell

You can capture a butterfly, and pin its wings down to study the colors and shape and design, but the moment that butterfly is still and you're able to make the most precise and detailed observations about that butterfly is the moment the butterfly can't fly anymore.

The priest's work, the priest's service, was understood as an act of worship. This was God's desire at Sinai - that everybody would understand their roles as priests. Thst everybody would worship God by serving each other.

So when we talk about God we're using language, language that employs a vast array of words and phrases and forms to describe a reality that is fundamentally beyond words and phrases and forms.

Gospel is the divine announcement that you are loved and accepted exactly as you are, that everything has been taken care of, that everything you've been striving to earn has been yours the entire time, that you belong, in exactly this condition that you are currently in, nothing additional required or needed.

An image of God doesn't contain God, in the same way a word about God or a doctrine or a dogma about God isn't God; it only points to God.

When you create space for another to thrive, it always unleashes new energies.

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

Second, Jesus consistently affirmed heaven as a real place, space, and dimension of God's creation, where God's will and only God's will is done. Heaven is that realm where things are as God intends them to be.

We're all endlessly figuring it out because Spirit keeps doing something new. We can fight this, resist this, dig in our heels, wish things were the way they used to be, or we can embrace it. We can choose to see it with fear and frustration, or we can see it as thrilling and invigorating. Organizations can keep trying to relive their glory days, wishing things were like they were when they started.

This God disrupts the familiarity of the story by interrupting the sacrifice. Picture an early audience gasping. What? This God stopped the sacrifice? The gods don't do that! Second, the God in this story provides. Worship and sacrifice was about you giving to the gods. This story is about this God giving to Abraham. A God who does the giving? A God who does the providing?

God is in the best, and also the worst. God is in the presence, and also in the absence. God is in the power, and also in the powerlessness.

Often times when I meet atheists and we talk about the god they don't believe in, we quickly discover that I don't believe in that god either. So when we hear that a certain person has "rejected Christ," we should first ask, "Which Christ?

The point of the Abraham-and-Isaac story isn't that you should sacrifice your kid but that you can leave behind any notion of a god who demands that you sacrifice your kid.

God is not a question about what may or may not be up there or above or out there— God is what we're unquestionably in.

Jesus says, he "did not come to judge the world, but to save the world" (John 12). We can name Jesus, orient our lives around him, and celebrate

There is an energy in the world, a spark, an electricity that everything is plugged into. The Greeks called it zoe, the mystics call it "Spirit," and Obi-Wan called it "the Force.

Third, it is our responsibility to be extremely careful about making negative, decisive

Your ikigai is a work in progress because you are a work in progress. Knowing your ikigai, then, takes patience and insight, and courage, and honesty.

What you find in the Bible are stories accurately reflecting the dominant consciousness of the day, and yet right in among and sometimes even within those very same violent stories, you find radically new ideas about freedom, equality, justice, compassion, and love. New ideas sit side by side with old ideas. Vicious violence is right there next to new understandings of peace and justice. (Kind of like now.)

To name is to order, to participate, to partner with God in taking the world somewhere.

Being a Christian then is more about celebrating mystery than conquering it.

The Bible was written by Jewish people who belonged to a Jewish minority living under the oppression of a succession of massive military superpowers who had conquered them: The Egyptians, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans. These

Because when you can't hear the cry, when you stop caring for the widow, the orphan, and the refugee among you, it always leads to the diminishing of your empire. History

When you get married you're starting a conversation that never ends