Quotes from Rob Bell

Give the gift, and surrender the rest.

When the wealthy man walks away from Jesus, Jesus turns to his disciples and says to them, "No one who has left home or wife or brothers or sisters or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age, and in the age to come eternal life" (Luke 18).

Gospel is the announcement of who God insists you are. You're

I felt this new life surging up within me. I don't need people to be anywhere else. I can meet everybody where they are.

simply claims that whatever God is doing in the world to know and redeem and love and restore the world is happening through him. And so the passage is exclusive, deeply so, insisting on Jesus alone as the way to God. But it is an exclusivity on the other side on inclusivity.

Giving the gift is reward enough. That's where the life is. That's where the joy is.

So according to Jesus there is this age, this aion— the one they, and we, are living in— and then a coming age, also called "the world to come" or simply "eternal life.

By the way, when the writer John in the book of Revelation gets a current glimpse of the heavens, one detail he mentions about crowns is that people are taking them off [chap. 4]. Apparently, in the unvarnished presence of the divine a lot of things that we consider significant turn out to be, much like wearing a crown, quite absurd.)

what kept coming back to me was that one word gift. Receiving, and then passing it along. Opening up to power and force and energy way beyond me, letting it move through me.

You embrace your impotence, your powerlessness, your lack of control over the outcomes—you make peace with all that you can't do, with your limits, with all the people you can't help.

The workers all get paid the same because you can't divide the infinite

Why would anybody become a Christian?" That's a question lots of people have—educated, reasonable, modern people who find becoming a Christian an "explosive," not to mention an inconceivable, thing to do.