Top 250 Rob Bell Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Celebrity seems totally at odds with authentic community and honest, real sorts of relationships.”

— Rob Bell

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

— Rob Bell

203. “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

204. “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

205. “I’m very comfortable in a room with thousands of people.”

— Rob Bell

206. “The vibrant, real historic Christian faith is very wide and leaves lots and lots of room for varying perspectives. It’s very diverse and wide, that’s part of it’s strength, life and vibrancy.”

— Rob Bell

207. “Sociologically, large groups of people don’t generally have massive changes in their belief instantaneously.”

— Rob Bell

208. “To me some of the greatest writing is when somebody puts something in words that you felt and experienced and you go, that’s it.”

— Rob Bell

209. “The first word about you is that you received this life...”

— Rob Bell

210. “I think that grace and love always rattle people.”

— Rob Bell

211. “I get ideas about things I want to make and then I throw myself into it with everything I have.”

— Rob Bell

212. “I think that at the core of faith is trust.”

— Rob Bell

213. “What will you do with your power and wealth and might and armies? What kind of world will you create with it? Will you use it to manipulate and overpower others to build your empire even bigger, or will you use it to help the widow, the orphan, and the refugee among you?”

— Rob Bell

214. “We cannot earn what we have always had. What we can do is trust that what God keeps insisting is true about us is actually true.”

— Rob Bell

215. “When people stepped forward and said, “You have heard it interpreted this way, but I tell you it really means this,” it was progressive for their day. They were making new claims about what it means to be true to the Bible. What is accepted today as tradition was at one point in time a break from tradition.”

— Rob Bell

216. “The question is: Why have these poems and prayers endured? Why, thousands of years later, do we still have them? And the answer you’ll return to again and again is: They speak to our human experience.”

— Rob Bell

217. “Arguing about how it literally happened can be an easy way to avoid facing the people in your life you need to forgive. For the people who first heard this story, the story would have had a provocative, unsettling effect. The Assyrians? The Assyrians were like a huge, gaping, open wound for the Israelites. Bless the Assyrians? The story is extremely subversive because it insists that your enemy may be more open to grace and love than you are.”

— Rob Bell

218. “When the gospel is understood primarily in terms of entrance rather than joyous participation, it can actually serve to cut people off from the explosive, liberating experience of the God who is an endless giving circle of joy and creativity.”

— Rob Bell

219. “But the first Christians didn’t see Jesus this way, as if God were somewhere else and then cooked up some way to solve the sin problem at the last minute by getting involved as Jesus. They believed that Jesus was somehow more, that Jesus had actually been present since before creation and had been a part of the story all along.”

— Rob Bell

220. “When we don’t throw ourselves completely into it and we hold back our best efforts because of what happened in the past, we are letting the past decide the future.”

— Rob Bell

221. “To name is to order, to participate, to partner with God in taking the world somewhere.”

— Rob Bell

222. “To fully appreciate the Bible, you have to let it be what it is.”

— Rob Bell

223. “Which leads to another question: When Matthew tells us that some of Jesus’s followers doubted, does this undermine the story, or is this the exact kind of honesty that reflects how people actually are? When each of the Gospel writers includes the part about the women being witnesses, why risk it? What a strange thing to include knowing it would discredit their story, unless women actually were the first witnesses.”

— Rob Bell

224. “For a lot of people in our world today, God has become about believing the right stuff so you don’t get in trouble.”

— Rob Bell

225. “This is why for thousands of years Christians have found the cross to be so central to life. It speaks to us of God’s suffering, God’s pain, God’s broken heart. It’s God making the first move and then waiting for our response.”

— Rob Bell

226. “God is in the best, and also the worst. God is in the presence, and also in the absence. God is in the power, and also in the powerlessness.”

— Rob Bell

227. “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.”

— Rob Bell

228. “At any moment in the day, you can only do one thing at a time. And the more intentional you are about knowing what your 1 is, the more present you will be.”

— Rob Bell

229. “We are both large and small, strong and weak, formidable and faint, reflecting the image of the divine, and formed from dust.”

— Rob Bell

230. “Pain has a way of making us more honest.”

— Rob Bell

231. “Sometimes the reason people have a problem accepting ‘the gospel’ is that they sense that the God lurking behind Jesus isn’t safe, loving, or good. It doesn’t make sense, it can’t be reconciled, and so they say no.”

— Rob Bell

232. “He writes to his friends in Ephesus: I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened. When people ask you what the Bible is about, do you answer: It’s about becoming more enlightened? Because that’s how Paul puts it.”

— Rob Bell

233. “The scorecard is rooted in resentment, and the space between you is highly responsive to resentment. The scorecard is lethal because its rooted in fear – fear that we’re on our own, that we’re not going to be taken care of, that we’re not going to get what we need... In order to get rid of scorecard, you have to choose to act in love instead of fear. To get rid of your scorecard, someone has to move toward the other first.”

— Rob Bell

234. “When a leader comes along who eliminates the tension and dodges the paradox and neatly and precisely explains who the enemies are and gives black-and-white answers to questions, leaving little room for the very real mystery of the divine, it should not surprise us when that person gains a large audience. Especially if that person is really, really confident.”

— Rob Bell

235. “In every life there is an energy field created because we are energy, giving out energy, creating energy .”

— Rob Bell

236. “There’s a line in the Bible about the God who is above all and through all and in all. Just one line, but so massive. Above all and through all and in all.”

— Rob Bell

237. “No one has ever done this before. No one has ever been you before. This exact interrelated web of people and events and places and memories and desire and love that is your life hasn’t ever existed in the history of the Universe. Welcome to a truly unique phenomenon. Welcome to your life. I want you to be here. Welcome to here.”

— Rob Bell

238. “In those moments when the two of you see things differently, you can hold on to your view, defending it and protecting it and arguing for its superiority, or you can allow your perspective to be broadened, enriched, expanded, and deepened.”

— Rob Bell

239. “But sometimes when I hear people quote the Bible, I just want to throw up.”

— Rob Bell

240. “What’s disturbing, then, is when people talk more about hell after this life than they do about hell here and now. As a Christian I want to do what I can to resist hell coming to earth: poverty, injustice, suffering – they’re all hells on earth and as Christians we oppose them with all of our energies.”

— Rob Bell

241. “There is an energy in the world, a spark, an electricity that everything is plugged into. The Greeks called it zoe, the mystics call it “Spirit,” and Obi-Wan called it “the Force.”

— Rob Bell

242. “Forgiveness is unilateral. God isn’t waiting for us to get it together, to clean up, shape up, get up – God has already done it.”

— Rob Bell

243. “Why would we ever be surprised when truth turns up in strange places?”

— Rob Bell

244. “How we respond to what happens to us – especially the painful, excruciating things that we never wanted and we have no control over – is a creative act.”

— Rob Bell

245. “What would it look like for you to approach tomorrow with a sense of honor and privilege, believing that you have work to do in the world, that it matters, that it’s needed, that you have a path and you’re working your craft?”

— Rob Bell

246. “It’s one thing to be in love; it’s another to act because of love. Love is a noun – a feeling you have – and it’s also a verb, something you do.”

— Rob Bell

247. “Gospel is the divine announcement that you are loved and accepted exactly as you are, that everything has been taken care of, that everything you’ve been striving to earn has been yours the entire time, that you belong, in exactly this condition that you are currently in, nothing additional required or needed.”

— Rob Bell

248. “You start with your 1 and then you suspend judgment on what you’re doing, because you don’t know what you have when you start. When you are constantly judging what you’re doing, you aren’t here. You aren’t present. You are standing outside of your life, looking in, observing. The time for judgement will come at some point, but in the moment, you have only the 1. And then the 2. And then the 3...”

— Rob Bell

249. “We’re all endlessly figuring it out because Spirit keeps doing something new. We can fight this, resist this, dig in our heels, wish things were the way they used to be, or we can embrace it. We can choose to see it with fear and frustration, or we can see it as thrilling and invigorating. Organizations can keep trying to relive their glory days, wishing things were like they were when they started.”

— Rob Bell

250. “If there is a divine being who made everything, including us, what would our experiences with this being look like? The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. We are dealing with somebody we made up. And if we made him up, then we are in control. And so in passage after passage, we find God reminding people that he is beyond and bigger and more.”

— Rob Bell