Quotes from Rob Bell

saw how in the story about Moses and the burning bush, Moses doesn't take his sandals off because suddenly the ground becomes holy. The ground had been holy the whole time. The story is about Moses becoming aware of it.

Your days in power are numbered because the deepest forces of the universe are on the side of the oppressed, the underdog, and the powerless

Curiosity is underrated. In many ways, it's the engine of life. You get these questions, and they don't go away. And so you follow them, you set out to answer them.

Boredom, cynicism, and despair are spiritual diseases because they disconnect us from the most primal truth about ourselves—that we are here.

And you get answers. And those answers, of course, lead to new questions. And on and on it goes.

read the story in the book of Genesis about Jacob waking up from a dream and saying, Surely God was in this place, and I, I wasn't aware of it. Jacob is waking up from a dream, but he's waking up in a larger sense as well, to the divine presence in all of life.

All work is ultimately creative work because all of us are taking part in the ongoing creation of the world. There's

read in the Psalms, The earth is the LORD's and everything in it.

Agape doesn't need a reason.

That academic work had a static dimension to it, like we were studying from a distance, analyzing and scrutinizing, making distinctions about distinctions. In that world I got points for precision, for my ability to parse and exegete and summarize. I was rewarded for how well I could pin the butterfly.

This is a pattern. Something bonded with something like it, and that introduced something new, something more complex, something that previously didn't exist. Something the universe had never seen before. All because of a drive. A drive to bond, to unite, to come together. Where does this drive come from? It comes from within. This

It's very common to hear talk about heaven framed in terms of who "gets in" or how to "get in." What we find Jesus teaching, over and over and over again, is that he's interested in our hearts being transformed, so that we can actually handle heaven.

There was a giant paradox there, hiding in that love. She didn't make any demands, but what that did was make me want to be a better person. She loved me exactly as I was, but what that produced in me was a tremendous desire to live up to that love.

We crave coming together and connecting with others because this is what the entire universe has been doing for billions and billions and billions of years.

it's through Moses that God makes four promises to these slaves. I will take you out. I will rescue you. I will redeem you. I will take you to me. There's a reason why these four promises are so significant – they're the promises a Jewish groom makes to a Jewish bride. This is wedding language.

Connection is an engine of creation.

heaven has the potential to be a kind of starting over. Learning how to be human all over again. Imagine living with no fear.

This is why loneliness creates such a deep ache in our bones. It's holding up—and working against—the direction the universe has been heading for over thirteen billion years. Same with racism. Regardless of where we come from or what we look like, we're all humans, and when humans fail to bond and unite and connect with other humans, that's going against the direction the universe has been going for thirteen billion years.

Jesus called disciples—students of life—to learn from him how to live in God's world God's way. Constantly learning and growing and evolving and absorbing. Tomorrow is never simply a repeat of today.

It's like there's a scale from 1 to 10, and you always would have sworn that someone or something mattered to you with a 10. But then you almost (or you actually do) lose her or him or it or them, and suddenly your heart is filled with a 17 or a 39 or a 4,291 kind of mattering. New capacities, ones you didn't know were possible before, open up inside of you.

In that ancient Genesis poem, this animating energy is called Spirit. And in that poem, Spirit enters and animates forms, which then create new forms.

This is the opposite of brainwashing. This is the opposite of Just believe and don't ask questions. He keeps inviting people to think critically, to examine, question, doubt, test, struggle. To own it for themselves. I came across this line in the New Testament: Test everything. I love that line. It's

Particles couldn't contain the fullness of Spirit, and that led to something new.

That's what Spirit does, it brings about new creation. And what was true thirteen billion years ago is true now.