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Private Notes
In the Hebrew Scriptures there is no word for "spiritual." And Jesus never used the phrase "spiritual life." Because for Jesus and his tradition, all of life is spiritual.
So what does that mean?
Where did the first caveman or cavewoman get the idea that somebody, somewhere existed who needed to be worshipped, appeased, and followed? And how did the idea evolve that if you didn't say, do, or offer the right things, this being would be upset, agitated, or even angry with you? Where did religion come from?
Follow Rob in this two-hour exploration of the endlessly complex relationship between suffering and creativity.
This film was shot on location during the Drops Like Stars 45-city international tour.
Why do we do the things we do? Why do we go to church or give money away? Because we're supposed to or because we think God needs it? Do we honestly put on our best clothes for an hour once a week, stand and sit at all the right times, and sing all the appropriate songs for God's sake, or because it'll make us look better to the world around us? We're tired of all the empty rituals and routines. And so is God. God hates it when we call ourselves Christians but ignore all the things he really cares about. He hates it when we go through hollow religious routines out of some feeling of duty or obligation. God doesn't want the meaningless rituals. God wants our hearts.
Why is silence so hard to deal with? Why is it so much easier for us to live our lives with a lot of things going on all the time that to just be in silence? We're constantly surrounded with "voices" that are influencing us on how to think, feel, and behave. Movies, music, TV, Internet, cell phones, and a never-ending barrage of advertising. There's always something going on. Always noise in our lives. But maybe there's a connection between the amount of noise in our lives and our inability to hear God. If God sometimes feels distant to us, maybe it's not because he's not talking to us, but simply because we aren't really listening.
We always think we know what's missing from our lives in order to really make us happy, don't we? If only I had that car, or that job, or if only I could lose those 15 pounds, then I'd be happy. Really? How often do we want something only to find out that it wasn't that great after all? Sometimes we ask God for things and if he doesn't deliver right away, we start questioning whether God really understands or even cares. Do we really trust God? Do we trust that God is good and sees a bigger picture than we ever could? It's easy to want what's right in front of us, but maybe God knows what's better for us, and sometimes we just can't see it.
Maybe a friend turned his or her back on you. Maybe someone you loved betrayed you. We all have wounds and we end up carrying these things that people have done to us for weeks, months, and sometimes even years. It isn't always easy to forgive these people and after a while these hurts can get really heavy. So the only way to feel better seems to be somehow getting back at the people that hurt us, to get revenge. But does revenge ever truly satisfy? Maybe forgiving isn't something you do for someone else to let them off the hook. Maybe forgiveness is about you. God didn't create you to carry these wounds around. God created you to be free.
Believing in God is important, but what about God believing in us? Believing that we can actually be the kind of people we were meant to be. People of love, compassion, peace, forgiveness, and hope. People who try to do the right thing all of the time. Who act on the endless opportunities around us every day for good, beauty, and truth. It's easy for us to sometimes get down on ourselves. To feel "not good enough" or feel like we don't have what it takes. But maybe if we had more insight into the culture that Jesus grew up in and some of the radical things he did, we'd understand the faith that God has in all of us.
At the heart of the historical Jesus story is the provocative, compelling, subversive, beautiful insistence that nothing can ever be the same again, not after resurrection.
Affectionately known as "nooma | 025", explore the "Spirituality of Wonder" with Rob in this short video.
For thousands of years, people have viewed the symbol of the cross as an icon of hope. But does it ever strike you as strange that the cross is actually an ancient execution device? Originally a clip from the special "The Rob Bell Show", in this short film, progressive pastor Rob Bell shows us a different way to look at this enduring symbol and how it can help us make peace with our past.
What does "evangelical" really mean?
"When I did the first Everything is Spiritual tour and film in 2006, I remember thinking 'I wonder if I’ll ever do a part 2…'
I knew that if there was going to be follow up, the ideas would have to be really compelling and it would take a long time to put it together and of course I’d need a new white board.
Ten years later here it is my friends, Everything is Spiritual, 2016."
In the early aughts, when he was barely in his thirties, Rob Bell was a star. Bell, a pastor, was the founder of the evangelical Mars Hill Bible Church, in West Michigan. The church had started scrappily, in 1999, with just a few hundred congregants (it was a transplant from an established congregation in Grand Rapids where Bell had worked before), but, largely thanks to Bell, it quickly ballooned in size. Within a few years, Mars Hill was meeting in a building that used to house a mall, and Sunday attendance was around ten thousand. Bell had built an impressive reputation as a preacher; he had a conversational style and a knack for making his messages straightforward and appealing, especially to young people.
But, as his preaching thrived, Bell’s personal faith was reaching a point of crisis. He began to feel that he could no longer share the standard evangelical messages that he had been preaching—about salvation and damnation and the infallible scripture—in good conscience. So he modified his approach, avoiding some topics and opening others to skepticism, and changing how the church was run. This evolution caused fractures in the congregation, some of them quite large; when Bell opened up church-leadership roles to women, for instance, attendance dropped by two thousand. In the course of a decade, the once celebrated wunderkind became a polarizing figure, and the turmoil came to a head in 2011, when Bell published a book called “Love Wins.” The book called into question the idea of a punitive, horrific, eternal Hell where God sends nonbelievers. The book was hugely controversial in evangelical Christian circles, and within a year Bell left Mars Hill.
In this video from the Amazon Originals series “The New Yorker Presents,” based on a story by Kelefa Sanneh that appeared in the magazine in 2012, Bell talks about the path that led him to the center, and then out to the fringes, and beyond, of American evangelicalism. At his new home, in Califor
Rob Bell addresses one of the most controversial issues of faith—the afterlife—arguing, would a loving God send people to eternal torment forever...? With searing insight, Bell puts hell on trial, and his message is decidedly hopeful—eternal life doesn't start when we die; it starts right now. And ultimately, Love Wins.
We all get consumed with ourselves; sometimes we're not even aware of it. We learn from a young age that life is about winning and impressing. We pick up that our worth and value come from how good, how smart, and how skilled we are. So, we twist things in our favor, making us look like we have it all together. Every day we have the choice to prop up these false ideas about ourselves or to let go of them. Jesus invites these parts of us to die, the parts of us that tell us our worth comes from the things we say and do. Maybe it's only when we let these things die, that we truly begin to live.
In this new edition, Rob Bell focuses his attention on explaining in ways both understandable and approachable to teens how it is that "love wins"—and why that's such an important lesson to learn.
New York Times bestselling author Rob Bell, whom The New Yorker describes as "one of the most influential Christian leaders in the country," does for the concept of God what he did for heaven and hell in his book Love Wins: He shows how traditional ideas have grown stale and dysfunctional and how to return vitality and vibrancy to lives of faith today.
Rob shows how traditional ideas have grown stale and dysfunctional and how to return vitality and vibrancy to lives of faith today.
Zimzum is a Hebrew term where God, in order to have a relationship with the world, contracts, creating space for the creation to exist. In marriage, zimzum is the dynamic energy field between two partners, in which each person contracts to allow the other to flourish. Mastering this field, this give and take of energy, is the secret to what makes marriage flourish.
Rob and Kristin Bell are brutally honest about their own struggles, their ups and downs, as together they pass along what matters most for couples. In this wise book, they explore the secret of what makes a happy union—probing the mystery at the heart of the extraordinary emotional connection that binds two people. With his down-to-earth charm, a dose of whimsy, and memorable stories, Rob, writing with his wife Kristen, changes how we consider marriage, providing insight that can help all of us create satisfying and sacred unions of our own.
Kristen and Rob answer, "What is Zimzum?"
Is there anything better than a conversation about The Zimzum of Love with
Pete Holmes? Here's one of the many great questions he asked…
The blinking line is asking you: What will you bring into existence?
In How to Be Here, bestselling author Rob Bell lays out the concrete steps we can use to define and follow our dreams, interweaving engaging stories, lessons from biblical figures like Adam and Eve, insights gleaned from Rob's personal experience, and practical advice.
In How to Be Here, bestselling author Rob Bell lays out the concrete steps we can use to define and follow our dreams, interweaving engaging stories, lessons from biblical figures, insights gleaned from Rob's personal experience, and practical advice.
In How to Be Here, bestselling author Rob Bell helps readers discover what gets them out of bed in the morning and shares ways that we align our lives with our passions.
In How to Be Here, bestselling author Rob Bell reminds readers that failure is part of the process of creating a life worth living. He encourages us to embrace failure and learn from it.
