Quotes By Author: Rob Bell

“Goals and plans are fine, and they can often be effective motivators, but success promises something it can’t deliver. As soon as you reach your goal, success creates a new one, which creates new anxieties and stresses.”

“There are always two risks. There’s the risk of not trying something new, and there’s the risk of not trying it. . . . Either way, there’s risk. And sometimes stepping out and trying something new is actually the less risky thing to do.”

“Whenever you create anything, you take a risk. And that includes your life. It may work out, it may not. It may be well received, it may not be. . . . It’s always a risk to take action. It might not work, it might blow up in your face, you might lose money, you might fail. No one may get it. But that’s not the only risk. There’s another risk: the risk of not trying it. How is not trying a risk? You risk settling and continuing in the same direction in the same way, wondering about other paths and possibilities, believing that this is as good as it gets while discontent gnaws away at your soul.”

“You turn the light on, you get all kinds of bugs.”

“As obvious as it is, then, Jesus is bigger than any one religion. He didn’t come to start a new religion, and he continually disrupted whatever conventions or systems or establishments that existed in his day. He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain him, especially the one called ‘Christianity’.”

“If we want hell, if we want heaven, they are ours. That’s how love works. It can’t be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide. God says yes, we can have what we want, because love wins.”

“Take faith, for example. For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren’t opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it’s alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren’t opposites, they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.”

“Some communities don’t permit open, honest inquiry about the things that matter most. Lots of people have voiced a concern, expressed a doubt, or raised a question, only to be told by their family, church, friends, or tribe: “We don’t discuss those things here.”I believe the discussion itself is divine. Abraham does his best to bargain with God, most of the book of Job consists of arguments by Job and his friends about the deepest questions of human suffering, God is practically on trial in the book of Lamentations, and Jesus responds to almost every question he’s asked with…a question.”

“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.”

“because God has spoken, and everything else is commentary.”

“Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two—love and controlling power over the other person—are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.”

“What we do comes out of who we believe we are.”

“Success is when you’re seduced into thinking that your joy and satisfaction are not here but there–somewhere in the future, at some moment when you accomplish X or you win Y.Success can never get enough. It makes your head spin, because you get that thing you were desperately working for, for all those years, and when you get it, you realize that it isn’t what you thought it was.”

“If anybody didn’t have a messiah complex, it was Jesus”

“As we experience this love, there is a temptation at times to become hostile to our earlier understandings, feeling embarrassed that we were so “simple” or “naive,” or “brainwashed” or whatever terms arise when we haven’t come to terms with our own story. These past understandings aren’t to be denied or dismissed; they’re to be embraced. Those experiences belong. Love demands that they belong. That’s where we were at that point in our life and God met us there. Those moments were necessary for us to arrive here, at this place at this time, as we are. Love frees us to embrace all of our history, the history in which all things are being made new.”