Rob Bell on The Pursuit of Holiness…

November 27, 2005 | 3:41 AM

Don’t you hate it when someone you’ve never met sums you up in a few paragraphs and he’s never even met you? Yeah.

And then he said, in what has become a pivotal moment in my journey, “Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it.”

The relentless pursuit of who God made me to be.

I started identifying how much of my life was about making sure the right people were pleased with me. And as this became more and more clear, I realized how less and less pleased I was with myself. 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.

-Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis, p. 114-115.

Posted in Books, Christianity