Quotes from Rob Bell

This story... blasts to pieces our biases and labels with a declaration that God is on everyone's side, extending grace and compassion to everyone, especially those we have most strongly decided are not on God's side.

But this lawyer, he can't even answer Jesus's question by saying the name. He simply replies the one . . . That's your neighbor. That's who you're called to love. That's where the eternal life is found. In showing kindness to the one you hate, the one you despise, the one you wish didn't exist, the one whose name you can't even say.

A Christian is not someone who expects to spend forever in heaven there. A Christian is someone who anticipates spending forever here, in a new heaven that comes to earth.

Be honest about your joy.

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

We are both large and small, strong and weak, formidable and faint, reflecting the image of the divine, and formed from dust.

At any moment in the day, you can only do one thing at a time. And the more intentional you are about knowing what your 1 is, the more present you will be.

When you're fighting, it's absolutely crucial to keep remembering that they're trying to figure it out just like you are.

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.