Rob Bell Quotes

Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two - love and controlling power over the other person - are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.

Agape doesn't love somebody because they're worthy.

Agape makes them worthy by the strength and power of its love.

Agape doesn't love somebody because they're beautiful.

Agape loves in such a way that it makes them beautiful.

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.

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

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 in his day. He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain him, especially the one called 'Christianity'.

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 we want,
because love wins.

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

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

because God has spoken, and everything else is commentary.

The priest's work, the priest's service, was understoon as an act of worship. Theis was God"s desire at Sinai - thst everybody would understand their roles as priests. Thst everybody would worship God by serving each other.

When we deny the spiritual dimension to our existence, we end up living like animals. And when we deny the physical, sexual dimension to our existence, we end up living like angels. And both ways are destructive, because God made us human.

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.

The priest's work, the priest's service, was understood as an act of worship. This was God's desire at Sinai - that everybody would understand their roles as priests. Thst everybody would worship God by serving each other.