Quotes from Rob Bell

Before anything else, you have received breath - the gift of life itself. The first word about you is GIFT.

We're rediscovering Christianity as an Eastern religion, as a way of life.

Your life is a gift. Before anything else can be said about you, for some reason the universe (or God, or being, or force, or reality, or whatever you name it) chose to give you life.

Over the years, I've realized that I have as much in common with the performance artist, the standup comedian, the screenwriter, as I do with the theologian. I'm in an odd world where I make things and share them with people.

The first word about you is that you received this life.

It often takes suffering and lost in order to remind us of how precious life is.

My interest is in what's true, where is the life, where is the heart and what inspires.

I'm very comfortable in a room with thousands of people.

Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does

To be honest with you, I am passionate about all the people out there who want to know Jesus, they want to know God, and they are sick of a system that is hung up on a bunch of things that have nothing to do with the love of God.

Any time someone makes you feel guilty about how you are living, that is part of the old system (pre-Christ).

It takes quite a spine to turn the other cheek. It takes phenomenal fortitude to love your enemy. It takes firm resolve to pray for those who persecute you. (with reference to Matthew 5)

Celebrity seems totally at odds with authentic community and honest, real sorts of relationships.

I think that at the core of faith is trust.

We need a childlike trust that God is good... ultimately we are OK. That is a simple, beautiful pure thing that can be complicated ferociously by all sorts of intellectual categories.

I believe that God is love. I believe that Jesus came to show us this love, to give us this love, to teach us about this love, so that we could live in this love and extend it to others.

We need to return to the simplicity that God is love.

I live with the understanding that truth is bigger than any religion and the world is God's and everything in it.

One truth is that suffering raises profound questions with the universe. The other truth is that grace, gift and generosity also raise profound questions.

The danger is that in reaction to abuses and distortions of an idea, we'll reject it completely. And in the process miss out on the good of it, the worth of it, the truth of it.

The life that you want begins the moment you embrace the life you have because all of it is a miracle.

This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.

Love frees us to embrace all of our history, the history in which all things are being made new.

To elevate abstract doctrines and dogmas over living, breathing, embodied experiences of God's love and grace, then, is going the wrong direction. It's taking flesh and turning it back into words.