Rob Bell Quotes - Page 7

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

Christian' makes a poor adjective

The thought of the word church and the word marketing in the same sentence makes me sick.

At the center of the Christian tradition since the first church have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins and all will be reconciled to God.

My parents were both very intellectually honest, straightforward, and for them, faith meant that you were fully engaged.

When someone sets out to be controversial or provocative or shocking as an end in itself, I don't think that's a noble goal.

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

I believe God gives people the right to say no, to resist, to refuse, to reject, to cling to their sins, to cling to their version of their story.

The ancient Hebrews had a word for this awareness of the importance of things. They called it kavod. Kavod originally was a business term, referring to the heaviness of something, which was crucial in weights and measures and the maintaining of fairness in transactions. Over time the word began to take on a more figurative meaning, referring to the importance and significance of something.

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

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.

We live in a world where we have friends, neighbors, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, people we journey with for years who are gay. And we need to love, affirm and all of us together work on the real problems that we have in the world.

There's nothing wrong with possessions; it's just that they have value to us only when we use them, engage them, and enjoy them. They're nouns that mean something only in conjunction with verbs. That's why wealth is so dangerous: if you're not careful you can easily end up with a garage full of nouns.

It's as if Thomas Kinkade and Dante were at a party, and one turned to the other sometime after midnight and uttered that classic line "You know, we really should work together sometime.

As a pastor, you get invited into the most poignant moments of people's lives. Whether it's a wedding or a funeral or a hospital visit, you get invited into the center of the event, whether or not you know the people.

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

If this understanding of the good news of Jesus prevailed among Christians, the belief that Jesus’s message is about how to get somewhere else, you could possibly end up with a world in which millions of people were starving, thirsty, and poor; the earth was being exploited and polluted; disease and despair were everywhere; and Christians weren’t known for doing much about it. If it got bad enough, you might even have people rejecting Jesus because of how his followers lived. That would be tragic.

I think the church needs – I think this is the world we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are.

We often rush through the experiences that have the greatest shift.

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.

To me some of the greatest writing is when somebody puts something in words that you felt and experienced and you go, that's it.

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

Something is profoundly wrong and we are desperate for justice, for restoration and for somebody somewhere to do something about this.

I get ideas about things I want to make and then I throw myself into it with everything I have.

Enjoy mystery and speculation, but don't drift into dogma.