Best Rob Bell Quotes & Sayings

Wherever you find truth, wherever you discover something new, affirm it, embrace it, enjoy it. — Rob Bell

You can be very religious and invoke the name of God and be able to quote lots of verses and be well versed in complicated theological systems and yet not be a person who sees. It's one thing to sing about God and recite quotes about God and invoke God's name; it's another be aware of the presence in every taste, touch, sound, and embrace.
With Jesus, what we see again and again is that it's never just a person, or just a meal, or just an event, because there's always more going on just below the surface. — Rob Bell

One of the oldest aches in the bones of humanity is loneliness. I mean it's one of the things that goes way back; loneliness is not good for the world. And so, whoever you are, gay or straight, it is totally normal, natural, and healthy to want somebody to go through life with. It's central to our humanity. — Rob Bell

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

When the female voice is repressed and stifled, the entire community can easily find themselves cut off from the sacred feminine, depriving themselves of the full image of god. — Rob Bell

Fear wants us to become obsessed with some event or person in the future, a year, a month, even a day. It also wants us to look backwards not at our successes, but our short-comings and our failures. Fear losses it's grip when we stay in the now. — Rob Bell

Be patient. Don't force your experiences on others. The moving of spirit is a great mystery, and how or why or when certain people wake up is beyond us. Let people have their own experiences. — Rob Bell

It often appears that those who talk the most about going to heaven when you die talk the least about bringing heaven to earth right now, as Jesus taught us to pray: 'Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' At the same time, it often appears that those who talk the most about relieving suffering now talk the least about heaven when we die. — Rob Bell

I would say that the powerful, revolutionary thing about Jesus' message is that he says, 'What do you do with the people that aren't like you? What do you do with the Other? What do you do with the person that's hardest to love?' ... That's the measure of a good religion, is - you can love the people who are just like you; that's kind of easy. So what Jesus does is takes the question and talks about fruit. He's interested in what you actually produce. And that's a different discussion. How do we love the people in the world that are least like us? — Rob Bell

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. — Rob Bell

We're engaged more than ever by the possibilities of soul and spirit, and by the nagging suspicion that all of this may not be a grand accident after all; but God, an increasing number of people are asking - what does God have to do with that? — Rob Bell

Whatever those things are that make you feel fully alive and like the universe is ultimately a good place and you are not alone, I need a faith that doesn't deny these moments but embraces them. — Rob Bell

God has spoken, and everything else is commentary. — Rob Bell

You can be living in a big house, driving a nice car, going on exotic vacations and still be empty inside, crippled with fear and dread. — Rob Bell

I am for you.
I've got your back.
I am committed to your best.
Help me understand things from your perspective.
What can we do together to change things? — Rob Bell

What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists find Larry's tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? Could you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live? — Rob Bell

You cannot control how people are going to respond to you and your work in the world. Surrendering the outcomes does not mean that we don't care or we aren't emotionally involved or we are indifferent to the results. We want to connect with people and move them and inspire them - and we want more kids to learn to read. Surrendering the outcomes is making peace with our lack of control over how people respond to us and our work. Surrendering the outcomes is coming to terms with the freedom people have to react to us and our work however they want. — Rob Bell

God is in the best, and also the worst. God is in the presence, and also in the absence. God is in the power, and also in the powerlessness. — Rob Bell

Hope. People want hope. We crave hope. We long for hope. Hope has been present since the very beginning. And almost in the worst situations of human history, you often find the greatest amount of hope. The very nature of the situation, the way stepped-on people created within them even more hope than when things were going fine. Hope has always been around. — Rob Bell

When we don't throw ourselves completely into it and we hold back our best efforts because of what happened in the past, we are letting the past decide the future. — Rob Bell

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

Being a Christian then is more about celebrating mystery than conquering it. — Rob Bell

Far too often, we don't start because we can't get our minds around the entire thing. We don't take the first step because we can't figure out the seventeenth step. But you don't have to know the seventeenth step. You only have to know the first step. Because the first number is always 1. Start with 1. — Rob Bell

Questions are not scary. What is scary is when people don't have any. What is tragic is faith that has no room for them. — Rob Bell

The Psalms show us what healthy spiritual life looks like. You name everything that's happening inside of you. You give it language and expression, You articulate exactly what the desolation feels like. If you don't drag it up and give it words, then it's buried down in your being somewhere. And it will come out in other ways. Unhealthy, destructive ways. You'll keep it bottled up. And you'll be miserable. — Rob Bell

The joy is in the creation. So I've never had a target audience, it's always been about being true to the work as it emerges. — Rob Bell

What's interesting is, if you take the scientists and the theologians, the really good ones, they end up both filled with this wide-eyed sense of wonder and awe about look at this world we live in. — Rob Bell

Why would we ever be surprised when truth turns up in strange places? — Rob Bell

all of life matters, all work is holy, all moments sacred, all encounters with others encounters with the divine. — Rob Bell

Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective. — Rob Bell

The life you want begins by embracing the life you have. — Rob Bell

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

The best team does not always win, it's the team that plays the best. — Rob Bell

The first word about you is that you received this life ... — Rob Bell

You turn the light on, you get all kinds of bugs. — Rob Bell

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

I got into pastoring because of the art form. I started a church, but I felt the art form needed to be freed for all people. A particular religion over others was never interesting to me. I wanted to talk to people about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human. — Rob Bell

Listen to yourself You really expect me to believe that my brother is some kind of pixie with glitter dust and butterfly wings."

"Don't be stupid " Rob said mildly. "You have no idea what you're talking about. You're thinking 'Tinker Bell' which is a typical human response to the word faery. The real fey aren't like that at all. — Julie Kagawa

May you see drops like stars. — Rob Bell

It's in that place that we're reminded that true life comes when we're willing to admit that we've reached the end of ourselves, we've given up, we've let go, we're willing to die to all of our desires to figure it out and be in control. We lose our life, only to find it. — Rob Bell

God then makes people whom he puts right in the middle of all this loaded creation. Commanding them to care for creation, to manage it, to lovingly use it, to creatively order it ... They are environmentalists. Being deeply connected with their environment is who they are. For them to be anything else or to deny their divine responsibility to care for all that God has made would be to deny something that is at the core of their existence. This is why litter and pollution are spiritual issues. — Rob Bell

Most of the Bible is a history told by people living in lands occupied by conquering superpowers. It is a book written from the underside of power. It's an oppression narrative. The majority of the Bible was written by a minority people living under the rule and reign of massive, mighty empires, from the Egyptian Empire to the Babylonian Empire to the Persian Empire to the Assyrian Empire to the Roman Empire.
This can make the Bible a very difficult book to understand if you are reading it as a citizen of the the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. Without careful study and reflection, and humility, it may even be possible to miss central themes of the Scriptures. — Rob Bell