Love Wins and The Love Wins Companion

Love Wins and The Love Wins Companion
Rob Bell

This two-book edition combines Rob Bell’s bestselling Love Wins with the Love Wins Companion, helping you get the most out of this pioneering book.In Love Wins, Rob Bell presents a richer, truer, and more spiritually satisfying way of understanding heaven, hell and Jesus’s message. The result is the discovery that the ‘good news’ is much, much better than we ever imagined.Alongside Love Wins, this edition offers The Love Wins Companion: a study guide for those who want to go deeper. The extra material includes:• Insights and commentary by theologians, Bible scholars, scientists, and pastors• Deep analysis of all relevant Bible passages on heaven, hell, and salvation• Detailed chapter summaries, discussion questions, and Bible studies for individuals, groups, and classes• Excerpts from works throughout Christian history illustrating the variety of teachers also debating the issues Bell wrestles with• New material by Bell on his mission for the book and how people can take the next stepThe two-book edition is perfect for readers looking to engage with this provocative, inspiring classic.

Love Wins

and

The Love Wins Companion

ROB BELL

Contents

Love Wins (#ud4a6fcb9-8faf-5827-b713-b97c52a90411)

The Love Wins Companion (#litres_trial_promo)

Contents

Preface - Millions of Us

Chapter 1 - What About the Flat Tire?

Chapter 2 - Here Is the New There

Chapter 3 - Hell

Chapter 4 - Does God Get What God Wants?

Chapter 5 - Dying to Live

Chapter 6 - There Are Rocks Everywhere

Chapter 7 - The Good News Is Better Than That

Chapter 8 - The End Is Here

Further Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Preface

Millions of Us

To begin with,

a bit about this book.

First, I believe that Jesus’s story is first and foremost about the love of God for every single one of us. It is a stunning, beautiful, expansive love, and it is for everybody, everywhere.

That’s the story.

“For God so loved the world . . .”

That’s why Jesus came.

That’s his message.

That’s where the life is found.

There are a growing number of us who have become acutely aware that Jesus’s story has been hijacked by a number of other stories, stories Jesus isn’t interested in telling, because they have nothing to do with what he came to do. The plot has been lost, and it’s time to reclaim it.

I’ve written this book for all those, everywhere, who have heard some version of the Jesus story that caused their pulse rate to rise, their stomach to churn, and their heart to utter those resolute words, “I would never be a part of that.”

You are not alone.

There are millions of us.

This love compels us to question some of the dominant stories that are being told as the Jesus story. A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better. It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.

And so this book.

Second, I’ve written this book because the kind of faith Jesus invites us into doesn’t skirt the big questions about topics like God and Jesus and salvation and judgment and heaven and hell, but takes us deep into the heart of them.

Many have these questions.

Christians,

people who aren’t Christians,

people who were Christians,

but can’t do it anymore because of questions about these very topics,

people who think Christians are delusional and profoundly misguided,

pastors, leaders, preachers—

these questions are everywhere.

Some communities don’t permit open, honest inquiry about the things that matter most. Lots of people have voiced a concern, expressed a doubt, or raised a question, only to be told by their family, church, friends, or tribe: “We don’t discuss those things here.”

I believe the discussion itself is divine. Abraham does his best to bargain with God, most of the book of Job consists of arguments by Job and his friends about the deepest questions of human suffering, God is practically on trial in the poems of Lamentations, and Jesus responds to almost every question he’s asked with . . . a question.