Quotes from Rob Bell

that matters is how you respond to Jesus. And that answer totally resonates with me; it is about how you respond to Jesus. But it raises another important question: Which Jesus?

So is it not only that a person has to respond, pray, accept, believe, trust, confess, and do—but also that someone else has to act, teach, travel, organize, fund-raise, and build so that the person can know what to respond, pray, accept, believe, trust, confess, and do?

If you don't have that, you will die apart from God and spend eternity in torment in hell. The problem, however, is that the phrase "personal relationship" is found nowhere in the Bible.

We spend so much time searching and longing for solid ground, only to discover it's better than that. There's Spirit. You try this, you try that. You throw yourself into it, and you hold it loosely. You give it everything you have as you acknowledge that this is what we're doing now, who knows what will come next?

So if that's it, if that's the point of it all, if that's the ticket, the center, the one unavoidable reality, the heart of the Christian faith, why is it that no one used the phrase until the last hundred years or so?

First, I'm a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God.

But maybe all of these questions are missing the point. Let's set aside all of the saying and doing and being and cutting holes in roofs and assume it's more simple than that. As some would say, "Just believe.

And now here's the twist, the mystery, the unexpected truth about admitting that takes us back to the counterintuitive power of gospel: 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.

The truth is, you want risk. Not too much that it overwhelms you, but some. You want some risk in your life. Risk is where the life is.

The first thing you have to do is throw yourself into whatever it is you're doing.

Heaven, for Jesus, wasn't less real, but more real.

Throwing yourself into it begins with being grateful that you even have something to throw yourself into.