Quotes from Rob Bell

When people charge in with great insistence that this is God's word all the while neglecting the very real humanity of these books, they can inadvertently rob these writings of their sacred power. All because of starting in the wrong place. You start with the human. You ask those questions, you enter there, you direct your energies to understanding why these people wrote these books. Because whatever divine you find in it, you find the divine through and in the human, not around it.

Your marriage will only be as healthy as the least healthy one of you.

To fully appreciate the Bible, you have to let it be what it is.

everybody is resting on a set of interpretations, and we need to be honest about it.

Like a mirror, God appears to be more and more a reflection of whoever it is that happens to be talking about God at the moment.

When people stepped forward and said, "You have heard it interpreted this way, but I tell you it really means this," it was progressive for their day. They were making new claims about what it means to be true to the Bible. What is accepted today as tradition was at one point in time a break from tradition.

When a leader comes along who eliminates the tension and dodges the paradox and neatly and precisely explains who the enemies are and gives black-and-white answers to questions, leaving little room for the very real mystery of the divine, it should not surprise us when that person gains a large audience. Especially if that person is really, really confident.

Has God created millions of people over tens of thousands of years who are going to spend eternity in anguish? Can God do this, or even allow this, and still claim to be a loving God? Does God punish people for thousands of years with infinite, eternal torment for things they did in their few finite years of life?

But when we talk about God, we're talking about the very straightforward affirmation that everything has a singular, common source and is infinitely, endlessly, deeply connected.

God has to punish sinners, because God is holy, but Jesus has paid the price for our sin, and so we can have eternal life. However true or untrue that is technically or theologically, what it can do is subtly teach people that Jesus rescues us from God.

We cannot earn what we have always had. What we can do is trust that what God keeps insisting is true about us is actually true.

Grace is when you aren't striving or controlling or trying to change or manipulate or make something happen. Grace is when you find yourself carried along, when all that's left to do is receive. Grace is when you know you're loved, exactly as you are. Grace is an entirely different way of experiencing life.

The way of Jesus is a journey, not a destination.

Forgiveness is unilateral. God isn't waiting for us to get it together, to clean up, shape up, get up - God has already done it.

Better to have a stomach full of butterflies than to feel like your life is passing you by.

There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.

I saw how the Bible isn't a book about how to get into heaven, it's a library of poems and letters and stories about bringing heaven to earth now, about this world becoming more and more the place it should be. There is very, very little in the Bible about what happens when you die. That's not what the writers were focused on. Their interest, again and again, is on how this world is arranged.

Great artists know that it isn't just about what you add; sometimes the most important work is knowing what to take away. Removing clutter, excess, all the superfluous elements—and finding out in the process what's been in there the whole time.

We rob ourselves of immeasurable joy when we compare what we do know about ourselves with what we don't know about someone else.

In every life there is an energy field created because we are energy, giving out energy, creating energy .

We need you to be you. We don't need a second anybody. We need the first you.

You explore the possibilities because you can't steer a parked car.

When in doubt, assume that they're seeing something that you aren't.

Great marriages have an ease about them, a back-and-forth nonreactive, nondefensive, open, and ongoing flow in which you never stop talking and figuring it out together.