The book was amazing. I didn't really feel like it was something spectacular at the time when I was reading it, but when I go back and read the quotes I took away from it... wow. Rob Bell is an amazing communicator and someone I deeply admire.
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"You can’t talk about sexuality without talking about how we were made. And it will inevitably lead you to who made us. At some point you have to talk about God."
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"What we often do is reverse the creative process God initiated. We start with different cultural backgrounds and skin colors and nationalities, and it’s only when we look past these things that we are able to get to what we have in common—that we are fellow image-bearers with the shared task of caring for God’s creation. We get it all backward. We see all of the differences, and only later, maybe, do we begin to see the similarities. The new humanity is about seeing people as God sees them."
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"How you treat the creation reflects how you feel about the creator."
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"A church exists to be a display of the new humanity. A community of people who honor and respect the poor and rich and educated and uneducated and Jew and Gentile and black and white and old and young and powerful and helpless and fully human, created in the image of God."
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"With every decision, conversation, gesture, comment, action, and attitude, we’re inviting heaven or hell to earth."
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"Our sexuality has two dimensions. First, our sexuality is our awareness of how profoundly we’re severed and cut off and disconnected. Second, our sexuality is all of the ways we go about trying to reconnect."
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"I often meet people who aren’t park of a church and don’t want anything to do with God because 'all those religious hypocrites.' Often they have great pain that they blame on 'the church.' But it’s not possible for and institution, whether it’s a church or a school or a business or even the government, to hurt somebody. Institutions are made up of people. People hurt people."
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"You can’t be connected with God until you’re at peace with who you are. If you’re still upset that God gave you this body or this life or this family or these circumstances, you will never be able to connect with God in a healthy, thriving, sustainable sort of way. You’ll be at odds with your maker. And if you can’t come to terms with who you are and the life you’ve been given, you’ll never be able to accept others and how they were made and the lives they’ve been given. And until you’re at peace with God and those around you, you will continue to struggle with your role on the planet, your part to play in the ongoing creation of the universe. You will continue to struggle and resist and fail to connect."
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"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."
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"Paul insists that everything God created is good, and we come to see this through what he calls 'the word of God and prayer,' which is the hard work of study and reflection and meditation and discussion and debate. The temptation is always to avoid things that are difficult and complex. To go around them rather than through them."
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"One of the marks of someone who has experienced significant growth in their soul is their ability to live in the midst of tension."
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"You are not alone. Whatever you struggle with, whatever you have questions about, you are not alone. It doesn’t matter how dark it is or how much shame or weakness or regret it involves, you are not alone."
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"If I want something to the point that I can’t conceive of being content without it, then it owns me."
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"Life is not about toning down and repressing your God-given life force. It’s about channeling it and focusing it and turning it loose on something beautiful, something pure and true and good, and something that connects you with God, with others, with the world."
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"The story the Bible tells is of a living being who loves and who continues to love even when that love is not returned. A God who refuses to override our freedom, who respects our power to decide whether to reciprocate, a God who lets us make the next move."
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"Love is handing your heart to someone and taking the risk that they will hand it back because they don’t want it. That’s why it’s such a crushing ache on the inside. We gave away a part of ourselves and it wasn’t wanted."
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"Jesus always chooses the path of love, not power."
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"If you have ever given yourself to someone and had your heart broken, you know how God feels. If you have ever given yourself to someone and found yourself waiting for their response, exposed and vulnerable, left hanging in the balance, you know how God feels."
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"Our first need is not for people to fix our problems. People who charge in and have all the answers and try to make things right without first joining us in our pain generally annoy us, or worse yet, they push us away. They have nothing to give us. The God that Jesus points us to is not a god who stands at a distance, wringing his hands and saying, 'If only you’d listened to me.' This is the God who holds out his hands and asks, 'Would you like to see the holes where the nails went? Would that help?'"
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"In matters of love, it’s as if God has agreed to play by the same rules we do. God can do anything—that’s what makes God, God. But God can’t do everything. God can’t make us love him—that’s our choice. Love is risky for God too."
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"At the heart of the worldview of a Christian is the simple truth that people are worth dying for."
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"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."
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"What we do comes out of who we believe we are."
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"Your worth does not come from your body, your mind, your work, what you produce, what you put out, how much money you make. Your worth does not come from whether or not you have a man. Your worth does not come from whether or not men notice you. You have inestimable worth that comes from your creator. You will continue to be tempted in a thousand different ways not to believe this. The temptation will be to go searching for your worth and validity from places other than your creator. Especially from men."
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"When our trust has been betrayed and those who were supposed to stand by us don’t, this naturally has consequences for how we think about God. It becomes hard to trust that God is good when our significant relationships aren’t that good."
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"If you see me for who I really am, the me that no one else has ever seen, the me that I wouldn’t dare to show anybody else on the planet, the parts of me I’m not sure I want anybody to ever see, if I give you that kind of glimpse into the seat of my being, into my soul, will you still love me like you do now? It’s our question for each other, and it’s our question for God."
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"It is easy to take off your clothes and have sex. People do it all the time. But opening up your soul to someone, letting them into your spirit and thoughts and fears and future and hopes and dreams…that is being naked. This is why when people sleep together after they’ve just met, they’re raising the chances significantly that the relationship will not survive. Racing ahead of the progression always costs something. When there is no common mission, no shared task, no sense of bone of bone and flesh of flesh, no bonds that take years to develop, many end up moving from relationship to relationship, having sex but never really being naked. Too much too fast rarely endures."
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Seriously, if you have not read this book, you need to. Fantastic stuff.
Peace.
Awesome book indeed! I had heard friends talking about it for ages, and then one day someone lent me a copy and I finished it that night. Glad you also enjoyed it! Bless your bro, Nick
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