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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.
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Rob Bell |
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I am for you. I've got your back. I am committed to your best. Help me understand things from your perspective. What can we do together to change things?
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Rob Bell |
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for a staggering number of people in our world the for of the Jesus message has been buried under a massive pile of againsts. Somewhere
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Rob Bell |
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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..
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Rob Bell |
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Wherever you find truth, wherever you discover something new, affirm it, embrace it, enjoy it.
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Rob Bell |
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When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.
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Rob Bell |
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Doctrine is a wonderful servant and a horrible master.
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Rob Bell |
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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.
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Rob Bell |
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seeing where
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Rob Bell |
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When you create space for another to thrive, it always unleashes new energies.
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Rob Bell |
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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.
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Rob Bell |
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Holism is when two plus two equals infinity.
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Rob Bell |
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It is as if the smallest amount of light is infinitely more powerful than massive amounts of dark.
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Rob Bell |
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when I'm talking about God, I'm talking about a reality known, felt, and experienced, but one that cannot be located in any specific physical space in any tangible way.
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Rob Bell |
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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 divi..
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Rob Bell |
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than
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Rob Bell |
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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 ar..
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Rob Bell |
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The great Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, "I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder."17"
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Rob Bell |
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But sometimes when I hear people quote the Bible, I just want to throw up.
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Rob Bell |
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But when I'm talking about God, I'm talking about the divine being who can't be located tangibly with the kind of evidence that the rationalism of reductionism demands in the same way that you cannot be located in your eyelashes or spine or shoulder.
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Rob Bell |
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Success is when you're seduced into thinking that your joy and satisfaction are not here but there--somewhere in the future, at some moment when you accomplish X or you win Y. Success can never get enough. It makes your head spin, because you get that thing you were desperately working for, for all those years, and when you get it, you realize that it isn't what you thought it was.
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success
happiness
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Rob Bell |
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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."
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worship
god
inspirational
serving-god
serving-others
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Rob Bell |
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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.
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Rob Bell |
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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.
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jesus
humanity
life
inspirational
serving-god
serving-others
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Rob Bell |
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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.
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Rob Bell |
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An image of God doesn't contain God, in the same way a word about God or a doctrine or a dogma about God isn't God; it only points to God.
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Rob Bell |
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If anybody didn't have a Messiah complex, it was Jesus.
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Rob Bell |
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Being a Christian then is more about celebrating mystery than conquering it.
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Rob Bell |
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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...
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Rob Bell |
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You cannot control how people are going to respond to you and your work in the world. Surrendering the outcomes does not mean that we don't care or we aren't emotionally involved or we are indifferent to the results. We want to connect with people and move them and inspire them - and we want more kids to learn to read. Surrendering the outcomes is making peace with our lack of control over how people respond to us and our work. Surrendering..
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Rob Bell |
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It is possible for religious people who see themselves as God's people to resist the forward-calling of God to such a degree that the larger culture around them is actually ahead of them in a particular area, such as the protection of human dignity or the integration of the mind and body or the treatment of women or inclusion of the forgotten and marginalized or compassion or intellectual honesty or care for the environment. Churches and re..
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Rob Bell |
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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.
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Rob Bell |
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This participation is important, because Jesus and the prophets lived with an awareness that God has been looking for partners since the beginning, people who will take seriously their divine responsibility to care for the earth and each other in loving, sustainable ways.
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Rob Bell |
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The elements are all there--fingers, keys, strings, ears--but there's something in the way, something inhibiting our ability to fully experience all the possibilities. The apostle Paul writes that now we see "as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face" (1 Cor. 13). Right now, we're trying to embrace our lover, but we're wearing a hazmat suit. We're trying to have a detailed conversation about complex emotions, but we're underwater. We'r..
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Rob Bell |
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as the king rose from his seat, Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king's belly. Even the handle sank in after the blade, and his bowels discharged. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it. (That's in the Bible. Word for word.)
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Rob Bell |
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Of all the conceptions of the divine, of all the language Jesus could put on the lips of the God character in the story he tells, that's what he has the Father say. "You are always with me, and everything I have is yours." ... Millions of people in our world were told that God so loved the world, that God sent his son to save the world, and that if they accept and believe in Jesus, then they'll be able to have a relationship with God... But..
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philosophy
monster-god
universality
theology
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Rob Bell |
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And to that, that impulse, craving, yearning, longing, desire-- God says yes. Yes, there is water for that thirst, food for that hunger, light for that darkness, relief for that burden. 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.
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Rob Bell |
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Now imagine what happened when people would offer a sacrifice but then it didn't rain or the sun didn't shine or their animals still got diseases or they were unable to have children--obviously, they concluded, they didn't offer enough. And so they offered more. And more and more. Because religion had built into it from the very beginning something called anxiety. You never knew where you stood with the gods. The gods are angry, the gods ar..
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Rob Bell |
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The gospel Jesus spreads in the book of Luke has as one of its main themes that Jesus brings a social revolution, in which the previous systems and hierarchies of clean and unclean, sinner and saved, and up and down don't mean what they used to. God is doing a new work through Jesus, calling all people to human solidarity. Everybody is a brother, a sister. Equals, children of the God who shows no favouritism. To reject this new social order..
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social-justice
lazarus
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Rob Bell |
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For Jesus the point is fruit. You'll know people by their fruit, by their life, by how they actually live in the world. Lots of people get excited about new ideas, and then they shove these new understandings in other people's faces and become the very thing they despise. (If you have bought more than five copies of Love Wins for the same person and they still haven't read it, I'm talking about you. Ha-ha.) If a new idea or understanding or..
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Rob Bell |
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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?
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Rob Bell |
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The violence isn't that surprising; what's surprising is that among all that violence are new ideas about serving and blessing and nonviolence. Here's what I mean: Do you find it primitive and barbaric to care for widows, orphans, and refugees? That's commanded in the book of Deuteronomy. Do you find it cruel and violent to leave a corner of your field unharvested so the poor can have something to eat? That's commanded in the book of Leviti..
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Rob Bell |
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This God disrupts the familiarity of the story by interrupting the sacrifice. Picture an early audience gasping. What? This God stopped the sacrifice? The gods don't do that! Second, the God in this story provides. Worship and sacrifice was about you giving to the gods. This story is about this God giving to Abraham. A God who does the giving? A God who does the providing?
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Rob Bell |
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The story is like the other stories about gods demanding acts of devotion and obedience. Gods who are never satisfied. The first audience for this story would have heard this before--it would have been familiar. But then it's not. The story takes a shocking turn that comes out of nowhere. This God disrupts the familiarity of the story by interrupting the sacrifice. Picture an early audience gasping. What? This God stopped the sacrifice? The..
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Rob Bell |