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Third, it is our responsibility to be extremely careful about making negative, decisive,
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Rob Bell |
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What you find in the Bible are stories accurately reflecting the dominant consciousness of the day, and yet right in among and sometimes even within those very same violent stories, you find radically new ideas about freedom, equality, justice, compassion, and love. New ideas sit side by side with old ideas. Vicious violence is right there next to new understandings of peace and justice. (Kind of like now.)
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Rob Bell |
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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
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Rob Bell |
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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. History
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Rob Bell |
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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?
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Rob Bell |
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What's the Best Question to Ask When You're Reading the Bible? Why did people find this important to write down?...Why did people write this down? What was going on in their world that this was important to them? Why did they feel the need to put words to this? Start with that question. Start with those questions. And see what happens.
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Rob Bell |
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Why didn't they just skip the whole sacrificial system all together? That would have been amazing. Just scrap the whole thing. Announce that the final sacrifice has been offered and there's no more need to do such things. Declare that the temple is going to be torn down. Proclaim that it is finished. Oh wait, we're getting ahead of ourselves, aren't we? (Please tell me you enjoyed that last paragraph.)
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Rob Bell |
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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.
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Rob Bell |
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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.
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Rob Bell |
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What does Jesus mean when he uses that word "heaven"? ___________________ First, there was tremendous respect in the culture that Jesus lived in for the name of God--so much so that many wouldn't even say it. That is true to this day. I occasionally receive e-mails and letters from people who spell the name "G-d." In Jesus's day, one of the ways that people got around actually saying the name of God was to substitute the word "heaven" for t..
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Rob Bell |
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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.
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Rob Bell |
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On earth, lots of wills are done. Yours, mine, and many others. And so, at present, heaven and earth are not one. What Jesus taught, what the prophets taught, what all of Jewish tradition pointed to and what Jesus lived in anticipation of, was the day when earth and heaven would be one. The day when God's will would be done on earth as it is now done in heaven. The day when earth and heaven will be the same place. This is the story of the B..
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Rob Bell |
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To name is to order, to participate, to partner with God in taking the world somewhere.
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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. They centered their hopes in the God who simply does not give up on creation and the people who inhabit it. The God who is the source of all life, who works from within cr..
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Rob Bell |
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What happens is our lives become so heavily oriented around the expectations of others that we become more and more like them and less and less like ourselves. We become split. I was split. I had this person I knew I was made to be, yet it was mixed in with all of these other ... people. As the lights were turned on, I saw I had all of this guilt and shame because I wasn't measuring up to the image of the perfect person I had in my head.
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Rob Bell |
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The question, then, the art, the task, the search, the challenge, the invitation is for you and me to become more and more the kind of people who are aware of the divine presence, attuned to the ruach,
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Rob Bell |
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The intellect has a way of building a fence around the heart, cutting us off from what we know to be true in a way that is hard to prove according to the categories in which proof matters.
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Rob Bell |
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Can you see why Jesus often began his teachings by saying "Repent!"? You know what repent means? It means to change your thinking, to see things in a new way, to have your mind renewed--all"
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Rob Bell |
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First, I'm a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God.
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Rob Bell |
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when people object to the idea of God, to the idea that there is more beyond our tangible, provable-with-hard-evidence observations and experiences of the world, they aren't taking the entire world into account.
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Rob Bell |