The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place. Rob Bell
his message around becoming the kind of people who are generous and loving and compassionate. The goal here isn’t simply to not sin. Our purpose is to increase the shalom in this world, which is why approaches to the Christian faith that deal solely with not sinning always fail. They aim at the wrong thing. It is not about what you don’t do. The point is becoming more and more the kind of people God had in mind when we were first created.
It is one thing to be forgiven; it is another thing to become more and more and more and more the person God made you to be.
Let me take this further: If we only have a legal-transaction understanding of salvation in which we are forgiven of our sins so we can go to heaven, then salvation essentially becomes a ticket to somewhere else. In this understanding, eternity is something that kicks in when we die. But Jesus did not teach this.
Jesus said that when we believe, we have crossed over from death to life.6 God always has been and always will be. And when I enter into a relationship with God through Christ, I am connected with God now and I will be connected with God forever. For Jesus, salvation is now.
I need a God for now.
I need healing now.
I need help now.
Yes, even greater things will happen someday.
But salvation is now.
This now leads to another danger of embracing only one dimension of salvation. When faith is defined solely in legal terms, the dominant idea often becomes “inviting Jesus into your heart,” a phrase that is not found anywhere in the Bible. That doesn’t mean it is not legitimate; it just means we have to be careful that we don’t adopt ideas that come with it that aren’t what God has in mind. The problems come when salvation becomes all about me. Me being saved. Me having my sins forgiven. Me being reconciled to God.
The Bible paints a much larger picture of salvation. It describes all of creation being restored. The author of Ephesians writes that all things will be brought together under Jesus.7
Salvation is the entire universe being brought back into harmony with its maker.
This has huge implications for how people present the message of Jesus. Yes, Jesus can come into our hearts. But we can join a movement that is as wide and deep and big as the universe itself. Rocks and trees and birds and swamps and ecosystems. God’s desire is to restore all of it.
The point is not me; it’s God.
It is one thing to be saved. To believe in Jesus. It is another thing to be healed. It is possible to be saved and miserable. It is possible to be saved and not be a healthy, whole, life-giving person. It is possible for the cross to have done something for a person but not in them.
My Soul
What happened to me is that I realized I believed in Jesus and thought of myself as “saved” and “redeemed” and “reborn,” yet massive areas of my life were unaffected. I learned that salvation is for all of me. I learned that Jesus wants to heal my soul—now.
And for Jesus to heal my soul, I had to stare my junk right in the face.
There is so much I could say about this healing of the soul, and it has only just begun for me, but a few things have become quite clear.
First, no amount of success can heal a person’s soul. In fact, success makes it worse. I speak with great authority on this subject. People were referring to me as the poster boy for the next generation of Christianity. I started a church and a lot of people were coming to hear me speak, and I had things I had never dealt with and they were still there, even after I “made it.”
If you have issues surrounding your identity, those issues will not go away if you “make it.” They will be there until they are hunted down and identified and dealt with. We often live under the illusion that when we reach that goal and complete our mission, those issues that churn on the inside will go away.
But it’s not true.
There is a great saying in the recovery movement: “Wherever you go, there you are.”
That’s why when we talk with people who are just itching to leave town because they “just need to get out of here,” we know they will be back. Often they find out that whatever it is, it went with them. The problem is not the town. The problem is somewhere inside of them.
Success doesn’t fix anything. We have the same problems and compulsions and addictions, only now we have more stress and more problems and more pressure.
I used to think—and I’m giving you a window into my insanity here—that when the church got bigger, then it would be easier.
Easier?
I don’t know if this connects with you, but have you bought into any of these lies? The lies that tell you success and achievement will fix it? They won’t. You will be the same person, only you’ll have more of everything, and that includes pain.
In addition, there is always a mystery behind the mystery.8 There is a reason we do what we do, and often it is the result of something that is the result of something that is—you guessed it—the result of something. What happens is we try to fix things, but we stop at the first or second layer. We’re stressed and so we make adjustments in time management. But a better question is, why do I take on so much? But an even better question is, why is it so hard for me to say no? Or even, why is that person’s approval so important to me?
But that’s not even the real issue.
What I have learned is that the deeper you go, the more painful it gets.
We have to be willing to drag up everything.
I started going to counseling and discovered that there are things that happened to me when I was thirteen that have shaped me.
Thirteen?
In one moment of enlightenment, my therapist and my wife were helping me drag up specific events from when I was in my early teens. I was remembering them like they were yesterday. I remember the encounter, what was said, what I did, how I reacted, and what it did to me.
Now I come from a family where I was loved and supported, and yet I have junk from way back then. What we discovered is that some of these experiences produced a drive in me to succeed and prove myself and show others . . . sound familiar?
Part of my crash came from my failure to identify these forces until recently. I had been pushing myself and going and going and going and achieving and not even really knowing why.
It is easier to keep going than to stop and begin diving into the root causes.
I think this is why so many pastors have affairs. They don’t know how to stop. They are driven and are achieving and are exhausted and don’t know how to say they’re tired. They are scared to look weak. So they start looking for a way out. They know that a “moral failure” will give them the break they’re looking for.
As pastor, I spend a lot of timing dealing with other people’s pain. And when I am dealing with theirs, then I don’t have to think about my own. I think that’s why so many of us push ourselves so hard. As long as I’m going and going and going, I don’t have to stop and face my own pain. Stopping is just so difficult.
I learned that most of my life I avoided the abyss because it is the end of the game. There’s no more pretending.
It is scary. It is scary to hit the wall because you don’t know what it’s going to feel like. And you might get hurt.
But what happened to me in that storage room between the 9 and 11 A.M. services, in those agonizing moments of despair, was the best thing that could have happened.
I couldn’t go on.
Usually, we