Quotes from Rob Bell

Gospel is the divine announcement that you are loved and accepted exactly as you are, that everything has been taken care of, that everything you've been striving to earn has been yours the entire time, that you belong, in exactly this condition that you are currently in, nothing additional required or needed.

An image of God doesn't contain God, in the same way a word about God or a doctrine or a dogma about God isn't God; it only points to God.

When you create space for another to thrive, it always unleashes new energies.

If anybody didn't have a Messiah complex, it was Jesus.

Second, Jesus consistently affirmed heaven as a real place, space, and dimension of God's creation, where God's will and only God's will is done. Heaven is that realm where things are as God intends them to be.

We're all endlessly figuring it out because Spirit keeps doing something new. We can fight this, resist this, dig in our heels, wish things were the way they used to be, or we can embrace it. We can choose to see it with fear and frustration, or we can see it as thrilling and invigorating. Organizations can keep trying to relive their glory days, wishing things were like they were when they started.

This God disrupts the familiarity of the story by interrupting the sacrifice. Picture an early audience gasping. What? This God stopped the sacrifice? The gods don't do that! Second, the God in this story provides. Worship and sacrifice was about you giving to the gods. This story is about this God giving to Abraham. A God who does the giving? A God who does the providing?

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.

Often times when I meet atheists and we talk about the god they don't believe in, we quickly discover that I don't believe in that god either. So when we hear that a certain person has "rejected Christ," we should first ask, "Which Christ?

The point of the Abraham-and-Isaac story isn't that you should sacrifice your kid but that you can leave behind any notion of a god who demands that you sacrifice your kid.

God is not a question about what may or may not be up there or above or out there— God is what we're unquestionably in.

Jesus says, he "did not come to judge the world, but to save the world" (John 12). We can name Jesus, orient our lives around him, and celebrate