Top 250 Rob Bell Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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.”

— Rob Bell

152. “Many people confuse religion with God and walk away from them both. The point isn’t Christianity, the point is being a Christian.”

— Rob Bell

153. “Because when you can’t hear the cry, when you stop caring for the widow, the orphan, and the refugee among you, it always leads to the diminishing of your empire.”

— Rob Bell

154. “People have a view of a God who is terrible that they can’t even imagine being loving or wanting anything to do with.”

— Rob Bell

155. “Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it.”

— Rob Bell

156. “To be honest with you, I am passionate about all the people out there who want to know Jesus, they want to know God, and they are sick of a system that is hung up on a bunch of things that have nothing to do with the love of God.”

— Rob Bell

157. “Once again, God has a purpose. A desire. A goal. And God never stops pursuing it. Jesus tells a series of parables in Luke 15 about a woman who loses a coin, a shepherd who loses a sheep, and a father who loses a son. The stories aren’t ultimately about things and people being lost; the stories are about things and people being found. The God that Jesus teaches us about doesn’t give up until everything that was lost is found. This God simply doesn’t give up. Ever.”

— Rob Bell

158. “Jesus is supracultural. He is present within all cultures, and yet outside of all cultures. He is for all people, and yet he refuses to be co-opted or owned by any one culture. That includes any Christian culture. Any denomination. Any church. Any theological system. We can point to him, name him, follow him, discuss him, honor him, and believe in him – but we cannot claim him to be ours any more than he’s anyone else’s.”

— Rob Bell

159. “It’s in that place that we’re reminded that true life comes when we’re willing to admit that we’ve reached the end of ourselves, we’ve given up, we’ve let go, we’re willing to die to all of our desires to figure it out and be in control. We lose our life, only to find it.”

— Rob Bell

160. “I believe that God is with you, that there is a presence. I believe this God is for you. I don’t think the universe is a cold, dead place that is indifferent.”

— Rob Bell

161. “Grace is when you aren’t striving or controlling or trying to change or manipulate or make something happen. Grace is when you find yourself carried along, when all that’s left to do is receive. Grace is when you know you’re loved, exactly as you are. Grace is an entirely different way of experiencing life. Another word for grace is gift.”

— Rob Bell

162. “When you’re fighting, it’s absolutely crucial to keep remembering that they’re trying to figure it out just like you are.”

— Rob Bell

163. “What the gospel does is confront our version of our story with God’s version of our story. It is a brutally honest, exuberantly liberating story, and it is good news. It begins with the sure and certain truth that we are loved. That in spite of whatever has gone horribly wrong deep in our hearts and has spread to every corner of the world, in spite of our sins, failures, rebellion, and hard hearts, in spite of what’s been done to us or what we’ve done, God has made peace with us.”

— Rob Bell

164. “As a pastor, you get invited into the most poignant moments of people’s lives. Whether it’s a wedding or a funeral or a hospital visit, you get invited into the center of the event, whether or not you know the people.”

— Rob Bell

165. “Can your story be retold? Can all of the various things that have happened to you and the things you have done you’d prefer to never think about again and the embarrassing parts and the painful parts – can all of it be retold in such a way that the worst parts become the most powerful, poignant parts?”

— Rob Bell

166. “The Bible is a library of books reflecting how human beings have understood the divine. People at that time believed the gods were with them when they went to war and killed everyone in the village. What you’re reading is someone’s perspective that reflects the time and the place they lived in. It’s not God’s perspective – it’s theirs. And when they say it’s God’s perspective, what they’re telling you is their perspective on God’s perspective. Don’t confuse the two.”

— Rob Bell

167. “I can’t find one place in the teachings of Jesus, or the Bible for that matter, where we are to identity ourselves first and foremost as sinners.”

— Rob Bell

168. “When in doubt, assume that they’re seeing something that you aren’t.”

— Rob Bell

169. “Your marriage will only be as healthy as the least healthy one of you.”

— Rob Bell

170. “This is a book about seeing, about becoming more and more alive and aware, orienting ourselves around the God who I believe is the ground of our being, the electricity that lights up the whole house, the transcendent presence in our tastes, sights, and sensations of the depth and dimension and fullness of life, from joy to agony to everything else.”

— Rob Bell

171. “When people charge in with great insistence that this is God’s word all the while neglecting the very real humanity of these books, they can inadvertently rob these writings of their sacred power. All because of starting in the wrong place. You start with the human. You ask those questions, you enter there, you direct your energies to understanding why these people wrote these books. Because whatever divine you find in it, you find the divine through and in the human, not around it.”

— Rob Bell

172. “Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.”

— Rob Bell

173. “If there’s any place where you would express your deepest doubts, it would be church.”

— Rob Bell

174. “The fact that we are loved and accepted and forgiven in spite of everything we have done is simply too good to be true.”

— Rob Bell

175. “Be patient. Don’t force your experiences on others. The moving of spirit is a great mystery, and how or why or when certain people wake up is beyond us. Let people have their own experiences.”

— Rob Bell

176. “People wrote these stories down because they found in them something that helped restore their dignity; the stories gave them a sense of identity; they helped give voice to their pain.”

— Rob Bell

177. “There are more atoms than molecules, but a molecule is more complex than an atom. There are more molecules than cells, but a cell is more complex than a molecule. And so on up the hierarchy it goes, with increasingly complex levels of organization at each higher level.”

— Rob Bell

178. “I have been told that I need to believe in Jesus. Which is a good thing. But what I am learning is that Jesus believes in me.”

— Rob Bell

179. “I think what’s happened in the modern world, there’s a lot of people that sound very smart and it’s very compelling and alluring, but it leaves you empty.”

— Rob Bell

180. “Faith can take many different forms and expressions.”

— Rob Bell

181. “Gospel is the announcement of who God insists you are. You’re a child of God, not because of how great you are but because God has all kinds of kids and you’re one of them.”

— Rob Bell

182. “Enjoy mystery and speculation, but don’t drift into dogma.”

— Rob Bell

183. “God is always present. We’re the ones who show up.”

— Rob Bell

184. “But when we talk about God, we’re talking about the very straightforward affirmation that everything has a singular, common source and is infinitely, endlessly, deeply connected.”

— Rob Bell

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

— Rob Bell

186. “So as a Christian, I am free to claim the good, the true, the holy, wherever and whenever I find it. I live with the understanding that truth is bigger than any religion and the world is God’s and everything in it.”

— Rob Bell

187. “This story... blasts to pieces our biases and labels with a declaration that God is on everyone’s side, extending grace and compassion to everyone, especially those we have most strongly decided are not on God’s side.”

— Rob Bell

188. “The Bible was written by Jewish people who belonged to a Jewish minority living under the oppression of a succession of massive military superpowers who had conquered them: The Egyptians, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans. These.”

— Rob Bell

189. “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.”

— Rob Bell

190. “I saw how the Bible isn’t a book about how to get into heaven, it’s a library of poems and letters and stories about bringing heaven to earth now, about this world becoming more and more the place it should be. There is very, very little in the Bible about what happens when you die. That’s not what the writers were focused on. Their interest, again and again, is on how this world is arranged.”

— Rob Bell

191. “I think the church needs – I think this is the world we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are.”

— Rob Bell

192. “Before anything else, you have received breath – the gift of life itself. The first word about you is GIFT.”

— Rob Bell

193. “People received, affirmed and experienced grace in many different forms.”

— Rob Bell

194. “The interactions I have are with people who are very kind and very grateful and they say very overwhelming things to me. Somebody who doesn’t like what I do or doesn’t understand it, then it wasn’t for them.”

— Rob Bell

195. “Whatever those things are that make you feel fully alive and like the universe is ultimately a good place and you are not alone, I need a faith that doesn’t deny these moments but embraces them.”

— Rob Bell

196. “Great artists know that it isn’t just about what you add; sometimes the most important work is knowing what to take away. Removing clutter, excess, all the superfluous elements – and finding out in the process what’s been in there the whole time.”

— Rob Bell

197. “My interest is in what’s true, where is the life, where is the heart and what inspires.”

— Rob Bell

198. “Decide now that you will not spend your precious energy speculating about someone else’s life and how it compares with yours.”

— Rob Bell

199. “So when we talk about God we’re using language, language that employs a vast array of words and phrases and forms to describe a reality that is fundamentally beyond words and phrases and forms.”

— Rob Bell

200. “My parents were both very intellectually honest, straightforward, and for them, faith meant that you were fully engaged.”

— Rob Bell