Rob Bell
Rob Bell
Robert Holmes "Rob" Bell Jr.is an American author, motivational speaker and former pastor. Bell was the founder of Mars Hill Bible Church located in Grandville, Michigan, which he pastored until 2012. Under his leadership Mars Hill was one of the fastest-growing churches in America. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Love Wins and the writer and narrator of a series of spiritual short films called NOOMA. In 2011 Time Magazine named Bell on its list...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionReligious Author
Date of Birth23 August 1970
CountryUnited States of America
The fundamental story arc of the Bible is God is passionate about rescuing this world, restoring it, renewing it.
Like a mirror, God appears to be more and more a reflection of whoever it is that happens to be talking about God at the moment.
Everybody is following somebody. Everybody has faith in something and somebody. We are all believers.
Freedom is not having everything we crave, it's being able to go without the things we crave and being OK with it.
God has spoken, and everything else is commentary.
We need to return to the simplicity that God is love.
We live in a world where we have friends, neighbors, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, people we journey with for years who are gay. And we need to love, affirm and all of us together work on the real problems that we have in the world.
The ancient Hebrews had a word for this awareness of the importance of things. They called it kavod. Kavod originally was a business term, referring to the heaviness of something, which was crucial in weights and measures and the maintaining of fairness in transactions. Over time the word began to take on a more figurative meaning, referring to the importance and significance of something.
The thought of the word church and the word marketing in the same sentence makes me sick.
Any time someone makes you feel guilty about how you are living, that is part of the old system (pre-Christ).
Do we get what we want? Yes, we get what we want. God is that loving. If we want isolation, despair, and the right to be our own god, God graciously grants us that option. If we insist on using our God-given pwer to make the world in our image, God allows us that freedom; we have the kind of license to do that.that's how love works. It cant 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.
It often takes suffering and lost in order to remind us of how precious life is.
One truth is that suffering raises profound questions with the universe. The other truth is that grace, gift and generosity also raise profound questions.
There's way too much wonder and mystery all around us to not stay open to more that's going on here. You can wake up, and sense and feel and taste and hear a whole world right here within this one, right here in this breath you're about to take.