Quotes from Rob Bell

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

This participation is important, because Jesus and the prophets lived with an awareness that God has been looking for partners since the beginning, people who will take seriously their divine responsibility to care for the earth and each other in loving, sustainable ways.

There are those, like the church websites quoted at the beginning of this chapter, who put it quite clearly: "We get one life to choose heaven or hell, and once we die, that's it. One or the other, forever." God in the end doesn't get what God wants, it's declared, because some will turn, repent, and believe, and others won't.

The scorecard is rooted in resentment, and the space between you is highly responsive to resentment. The scorecard is lethal because its rooted in fear - fear that we're on our own, that we're not going to be taken care of, that we're not going to get what we need...In order to get rid of scorecard, you have to choose to act in love instead of fear. To get rid of your scorecard, someone has to move toward the other first.

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?

Arguing about how it literally happened can be an easy way to avoid facing the people in your life you need to forgive. For the people who first heard this story, the story would have had a provocative, unsettling effect. The Assyrians? The Assyrians were like a huge, gaping, open wound for the Israelites. Bless the Assyrians? The story is extremely subversive because it insists that your enemy may be more open to grace and love than you are.

for a staggering number of people in our world the for of the Jesus message has been buried under a massive pile of againsts. Somewhere

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

The great Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, "I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder."17

as the king rose from his seat, Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king's belly. Even the handle sank in after the blade, and his bowels discharged. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it. (That's in the Bible. Word for word.)

When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.

There's a line in the Bible about the God who is above all and through all and in all. Just one line, but so massive. Above all and through all and in all.