Quotes by Rob Bell

“Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God's ways for us. We can have all the hell we want.”

“Does God get what God wants?Thats a good question. An interesting question. And its an important question that has given us much to discuss. But theres a better question. One that we actually can a...”

“Love is giving up control. Its surrendering the desire to control the other person. The twolove and controlling power over the other personare mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving som...”

“Freedom is not having everything we crave, it's being able to go without the things we crave and being OK with it. ”

“The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.”

“Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, "God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea ...”

“As we experience this love, there is a temptation at times to become hostile to our earlier understandings, feeling embarrassed that we were so "simple" or "naive," or "brainwashed" or whatever ter...”

“Jesus is God's way of refusing to give up his dream for the world.”

“If it is true, if it is beautiful, if it is honorable, if it is right, then claim it. Because it is from God. And you belong to God.”

“If anybody didn't have a messiah complex, it was Jesus”

“If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody. And this is because the most powerful things happen when the church surrenders its desire to convert people and con...”

“because God has spoken, and everything else is commentary.”

“Some communities don't permit open, honest inquiry about the things that matter most. Lots of people have voiced a concern, expressed a doubt, or raised a question, only to be told by their family,...”

“Take faith, for example. For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren't opposites. Doubt ...”

“What we do comes out of who we believe we are.”

“The danger is that in reaction to abuses and distortions of an idea, we'll reject it completely. And in the process miss out on the good of it, the worth of it, the truth of it.”

“As obvious as it is, then, Jesus is bigger than any one religion. He didn't come to start a new religion, and he continually disrupted whatever conventions or systems or establishments that existed...”

“If we want hell, if we want heaven, they are ours. That's how love works. It can't be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide. God says yes, we can have what ...”

“You turn the light on, you get all kinds of bugs.”

“God has to punish sinners, because God is holy, but Jesus has paid the price for our sin, and so we can have eternal life. However true or untrue that is technically or theologically, what it can d...”