Quotes from Rob Bell

And in response, I had stored up reserves of I'll show you anger. That's a particular kind of anger. When you feel like someone wouldn't let you be you, it strikes at the core of who you are. And that sacred wound can animate all kinds of action. There's a ton of activating energy there.

Our eschatology shapes our ethics. Eschatology is about last things. Ethics are about how you live. What you believe about the future shapes, informs, and determines how you live now.

It is your responsibility to stop listening to voices that hinder your ongoing growth and maturity.

If you believe that you're going to leave and evacuate to somewhere else, then why do anything about this world? A proper view of heaven leads not to escape from the world, but to full engagement with it, all with the anticipation of a coming day when things are on earth as they currently are in heaven.

I saw that there's no word for spiritual in the Hebrew scriptures (also called the Old Testament). So basic, and yet so revolutionary. There's no word for spiritual, because to call something spiritual would be to imply that other things aren't. In the Bible, everything is spiritual. All of life.

Jesus did not use hell to try and compel "heathens" and "pagans" to believe in God, so they wouldn't burn when they die. He talked about hell to very religious people to warn them about the consequences of straying from their God-given calling and identity to show the world God's love.

The writers of the scriptures consistently affirm that we're all part of the same family. What we have in common—regardless of our tribe, language, customs, beliefs, or religion—outweighs our differences.

Tragically, Solomon's

She understood heaven to be about partnering with God to make a new and better world, one with increasingly complex and expansive expressions and dimensions of shalom, creativity, beauty, and design.

This insistence that God will be united and reconciled with all people is a theme the writers and prophets return to again and again. They are very specific in their beliefs about who God is and what God is doing in the world, constantly affirming the simple fact that God does not fail.

Can you see why Jesus often began his teachings by saying "Repent!"? You know what repent means? It means to change your thinking, to see things in a new way, to have your mind renewed—all

Is God our friend, our provider, our protector, our father—or is God the kind of judge who may in the end declare that we deserve to spend forever separated from our Father? Is God like the characters in a story Jesus would tell, old ladies who keep searching for the lost coin until they find it, shepherds who don't rest until that one sheep is back in the fold, fathers who rush out to greet and embrace their returning son, or, in the end, will God give up?