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GRACE BLOGS COLLECTION

Who will Jesus spit out?

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“I will spit you out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:16b). This spitting out passage, which comes from Christ’s letter to the Laodiceans, is sometimes used to terrorize the bride of Christ. “Fail to perform and the Lord will reject you. If you’re not on fire, you’ll be in the fire!” Such an evil line is a million miles from the gracious heart of the One who is faithful and true. Who will Jesus spew out? Not members of his own body. Some Bibles translate Jesus’ words as, “You make me want to vomit.” Have you ever vomited up a kidney or a toe? It’s a ridiculous notion, yet this is what some fear will happen. “Jesus vomits body parts.” Thankfully, this horrendous picture is refuted by scripture: The one who comes to me I will most certainly not cast out [I will never, no never, reject one of them who comes to me]. (John 6:37, AMP) Since Jesus will never reject those who come to him, who is in danger of being spit out? Those who are too proud to come. Who will be rejected by Christ’s mouth? It is those who deny their need for Jesus. “Those who deny [...]

Who invented the word hypergrace?

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Who was the first person to coin the word hypergrace? It wasn’t the Apostle Paul. Sure, he described God’s grace as hyper-super-abounding, but he was writing in Greek. Who was the first to say it in English?

Hypergrace. Who said it first?

It wasn’t me. Not even close. So who was it? Seriously, I would like to know.

As I mentioned in a recent article, I’m pushing to get hypergrace into the dictionary. Why? Because hypergrace is a unique word that describes “the extreme favor of God that extends over, beyond, and above what you can conceive or imagine.”

It’s a beautiful word and there’s no other word like it.

To get a word into a dictionary you have to think about the origins of the word. So lately I have been asking, where did hypergrace come from?

I’ve done some research and as far as I can tell, the word first appeared as a Twitter hashtag in mid-2009. Which makes hypergrace about the same age as Escape to Reality.

Coincidence?

Before hypergrace, people used to talk about radical grace. That is a common phrase, but it’s not extreme enough for some people. hence the emergence of super-grace, ultra-grace, and finally hypergrace.

Interestingly, the first people to use this word did so in a pejorative way. Hypergrace, they said, was bad grace. Greasy grace. It was something to mock and belittle.

But a small number of people, myself included, recognized that hypergrace is an absolutely spot on translation of what Paul speaks about in Romans 5 when he talks about the huper grace of God. The Greek word huper literally means hyper. And Paul was just one of several New Testament writers who used extreme language when describing God’s great grace.

Hypergrace milestones

As part of my dictionary research, I tracked down the first mentions of the word hypergrace in different media. This is what I have found so far:

  • first hypergrace blog post (Nov 12, 2009)
  • first hypergrace podcast (May 15, 2012)
  • first hypergrace magazine article (Feb 28, 2013)
  • first hypergrace video (Sep 17, 2013)
  • first hypergrace book (Jan 7, 2014)
  • first song (no idea)
  • first major motion picture starring Denzel Washington (still in pre-pre-production)

These are not certified Guinness Records, just placeholders. If you know of blog posts or podcasts that predate those in my list above, let me know and I will revise my list. And if you can prove that someone used the word hypergrace prior to 2009 in any form, let me know that too. It would be good to give credit where credit’s due.

Did you invent the word hypergrace? Got proof you said it before 2009? Let me know.

The hostile history of hypergrace

The word seems to have first appeared in 2009, but the hypergrace wagon did not really get rolling until 2013. That was the year CharismaNews decided to publish a series of articles attacking hypergrace. That was also the year I wrote my first article defending hypergrace.

The following year no less than five hypergrace books were published. The first was Michael Brown’s book Hypergrace: Exposing the Dangers of the Modern Grace Message; the second was D.R. Silva’s book Hypergrace: The Dangerous Doctrine of a Happy God, and the third was my book The Hyper-Grace Gospel.

In his book, Michael Brown named and shamed a number of hypergrace preachers, including me. In my response, I pointed out that most of the criticisms made by Brown et al. were based on a dozen or so oft-repeated myths.

Sidebar: People sometimes ask me why I don’t engage in more debates with hypergrace critics. When invited to “discuss” hypergrace on radio shows and podcasts, I usually say no. I have learned the hard way that when certain people say they are reaching out, they’re doing it to make themselves look good. They’re not actually interested in dialogue. When you point out that you never said all the awful things they say you said, they don’t apologize or change their tune. In this age of fake news, the facts don’t matter. The main thing is to keep feeding the monster of social media. Slandering grace preachers may be a great way to generate social media buzz, but it’s appalling behavior, embarrassing to Jesus, and I don’t want to feed the trolls.

I try to avoid hypergrace debates, but I LOVE talking about the hypergrace of King Jesus. If we can get the word into the dictionary I will celebrate!

Hypergrace: Let us continue to write about it, talk about it, and sing about it. Let us paint it, rap it, draw it, and celebrate it any way we can. Let us use whatever means we can to let people know about the extreme love and favor of our heavenly Father.

In the meantime, let’s dig a little and see if we can’t find the person who said it first. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

—

Paul’s newest book The Chocolate Gospel is available for just two more days on Kickstarter. Get your’s before they’re gone.

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How to share the good news if you’re an introvert

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I have a problem. I want to tell people the good news, but I have trouble talking to strangers. Heck, I have trouble talking to friends. (Just ask my friends how often I call them.) Like 50% of the human race, I am an introvert. I don’t have the gift of the gab. I will never hold your attention with my brilliant stories. My best party trick is leaving early without anyone noticing. So how does someone like me tell others the happy news that God loves us just as we are? Outdoor plays, street evangelism, tracts, concerts, special services. I’ve done them all, and I’ve done them badly. Because I’m not naturally gifted at these things, I’ve been spectacularly unsuccessful. But I can’t stay silent. People are starving for the love of our Father. I’ve got to share the good news. I want to bring joy and hope into the world. But how? How do introverts like me shine in dark places? Like the Apostle Paul, I like to experiment. Paul said he became all things to all people so that by all possible means he might save some. All possible means. That’s a pretty open-ended statement. That’s an [...]

The Chocolate Gospel is on Kickstarter!

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The Chocolate Gospel is here! For the next two weeks, you can order my latest book on Kickstarter. And then it’s gone forever.

You cannot get The Chocolate Gospel on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the Book Depository, or anywhere. It is ONLY available on Kickstarter and ONLY until the end of the month. If you wait until March 1 to order a book, you will miss out. You snooze, you lose.

This is a real book too. It’s a book you can share with friends. It’s the good news without any bad news. It’s the gospel without fish hooks; grace without pricetags.

Warning: Because I live in New Zealand, the prices shown on Kickstarter are NZD. But if you look closer you should see prices also listed in your local currency. The books are basically USD10 each, but the more you buy, the cheaper they get.

Don’t miss out! Grab your copy today, and while you’re at it, get some for your friends. Like chocolate, the good news is meant to be shared.

Check it out.

Paul

Should we close the church for the coronavirus?

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“Please don’t come to Mongolia.” I have been asked to visit many countries, but Mongolia’s the only place I’ve been asked to avoid. In 2003 I was heading to Ulaanbaatar for a church conference. I was packed, I had my visa, but at the last minute the organizers asked me to stay home. Why? Because I was from Hong Kong, ground zero for the deadly SARS outbreak. The SARS virus actually originated in China. But an infected doctor came across the border, passed the virus to tourists staying at the Metropole Hotel, and those travelers carried the virus to 26 nations. By the time the virus burned out, nearly 800 people had died. It was a scary time for Hong Kong. Everyone wore masks. A colleague working three floors beneath my office caught the bug. Companies and schools closed down. As a pastor, I had to ask an important question: Should we close the church for the duration of the outbreak? Many pastors are facing the same decision today in regards to the coronavirus. They are getting calls and texts from concerned Christians suggesting they close doors and cancel services. What should they do? At the time of the SARS [...]

E2R turns ten, and a free book for you!

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Ten years ago today I wrote an article called “Whose medicine are you taking? The dangers of taking scripture out of context.” I used this article to launch a brand new blog called Escape to Reality (E2R). Five hundred articles, 30,000 comments, and nearly 10 million page views later…

I’m kinda blown away by how this thing unfolded. Surely people are hungry for good news.

E2R is ten years old today. To celebrate our anniversary, I want to give you a free book!

• If you are an email subscriber, grab yourself a free copy of Letters from Jesus. (Link visible in email only.)

• If you are not a subscriber, sign up today and you’ll instantly get FOUR free ebooks

• If you are a pastor or church leader, join us in the Pastors’ Lounge and get a free copy of The Hypergrace Gospel

Enjoy your new book(s)!

The last ten years have been an adventure, but we’re only just getting started. We have not begun to scratch the surface of all that God has in store for us.

What’s coming next? God has given me a great big dream – a moonshot, if you will. If you want to know what’s in store, check out my audacious plan for the coming decade.

Let me take this opportunity to say a huge and heartfelt thank you to all of you who have shared the journey, particularly if you have taken the time to comment on or share my articles.

And special thanks to E2R’s awesome patrons and supporters. Your continued generosity makes giveaways like these possible.

Grace and peace,
Paul

Ten birthday candles: E2R’s most inflammatory articles

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Escape to Reality is turning ten next week! To mark the occasion I could list the ten most popular articles, but that would be boring. I’d rather list the ten most inflammatory articles, the ones that lit a fire and got people talking. Think of these as ten candles atop the cake of nostalgia. 10. The Christchurch Earthquake: Four questions Christians can answer After my hometown was flattened by an earthquake in 2011, some said God was judging the city for its sins. Apparently Jesus’ sacrifice was insufficient. God deals with our sins by dispensing death and destruction. Of course this was nonsense, and I wanted to offer an alternative narrative. Sadly, I don’t think I made much of an impact which is why I found myself apologizing five years later. 9. Why did Jerusalem fall? Back in 2014 I wrote a short article explaining that God did not destroy the city that Jesus loved. I was immediately contacted by a well-known preterist. He wanted to know if I was attacking his ministry. Er, no. I replied. Who are you again? And what’s a preterist? At the time I didn’t even know what the word preterist meant. But that reaction [...]

The whole meaning of holiness

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One of the reasons why we don’t walk in the freedom that the gospel brings, is that we have changed the meaning of words. We have made beautiful words ugly and turned truth into lies. We tell ourselves that we are doing what the Bible says, but since we have redefined words in the Bible, we are fooling ourselves. For instance, well tell ourselves that repentance means turning from sin. (It doesn’t.) Or that confession means reviewing my mistakes. (Wrong again.) So we review our mistakes and turn from sin until we’re blue in the face and then wonder why nothing’s changed. Holiness is another word that comes to us mangled by the machinery of religion. We’ve heard that holiness means avoiding sin or being set apart, but that’s not what holiness is. It’s not that those definitions are entirely wrong; they are just not quite right. Like defining light as the absence of darkness or wealth as the absence of poverty, we have missed the essence of the thing. Holiness means wholeness. To say “God is holy” is to refer to the wholeness, fullness, beauty, and abundant life that overflows within the Godhead. God lacks nothing. He is unbroken, [...]

Jesus, The First Champion of Women

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In the church we have a good appreciation of what Jesus did for us, but we don’t really understand all he did for women. If we did, you can be sure we would treat them better than we do. In my last article in this series, I introduced the idea that Jesus empowered women. In this article I want to highlight two radical things Jesus did for women: he spoke to them and he defended them. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but it should be. Men, if your mother, wife, and daughters get the respect they deserve, you can thank Jesus. Ladies, if you are treated with decency, give all credit to the Lord. Because he was the first. Jesus spoke to women When the disciples found Jesus chatting with the woman at the well, they were astonished (John 4:27). This was because in Biblical times, as in some societies today, women were not supposed to talk to men who weren’t their husbands. It was a bad look, suggestive of an inappropriate relationship. The Jewish Sages discouraged women from talking to men (“you’ll look like an adulterer”) and they discouraged men from talking to women [...]

Why did Jesus send letters to angels?

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People sometimes dismiss the letters to the Seven Churches because they were addressed to angels. “To the angel of the church in Ephesus; to the angel of the church in Smyrna,” etc. It sounds weird, a bit mystical. Don’t angels live in heaven? Why would Jesus send mail to angels? He didn’t. At least not to those sorts of angels. Here’s what really happened: The Apostle John had a vision. Jesus told John to record the vision in a book and then send that book along with some letters to “the seven churches that are in Asia” (Rev. 1:4). This is not the Asia we know, but the Roman Province that was situated on the western end of the Anatolian peninsula in modern Turkey. The letters were for the churches in Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea (Rev. 1:11). Why these seven churches? What did they have in common? John probably knew them all. Having lived in Ephesus and traveled around the region, he would have been well acquainted with the challenges facing each one. Look at the map of the seven cities and you will see that the order of the letters begins with Ephesus, the city [...]

Merry Christmas from the Shaky Isles

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As you may have heard, one of New Zealand’s many volcanoes erupted last week killing more than a dozen tourists plus a couple of local tour guides. It was a tragedy and a reminder that our time on earth is short. So make the most of it this Christmas. Treasure your families. Make memories. Live fully. Love deeply. Tell your kids about Jesus, who remains the Reason for the Season. This year has been a challenging and shaky one for us. But we come to the end of it full of gratitude and hope, knowing God is our solid rock in uncertain times. And because of his unchanging faithfulness, we are confident that the coming year will be awesome. What’s in store for 2020? Here are three things to look forward to: 1. March 28, 2020. If you’re in New Zealand, keep this date free for the official book launch of The Chocolate Gospel. And as we never had an official launch for Letters from Jesus, we’ll include that one too. 2. The Women’s Book. (Sorry, I don’t have a better title yet.) I am super-excited about this one. Draft chapters for my next book are already going up on [...]

How did Jesus empower women?

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When Jesus walked the earth, gender inequality was so entrenched in Jewish society that an adulteress could be stoned without trial and men could divorce their wives for just about any reason at all.

In a nation of God-fearing and moral men, women were considered little more than property. They were servants whose place was in the kitchen or the field. Some of the religious leaders taught that women were ignorant, yet there was no point teaching them anything because they were also inferior. They had weak minds to go with their feeble bodies. Since they were also untrustworthy chatterboxes, their testimony had little value in a court of law.

Then along came Jesus.

Jesus encountered all sorts of women, both good and bad, yet he never criticized them or spoke down to them. He never said they were unreliable or inferior to men. In stark contrast with the religious leaders of the day, he spoke to women, he touched them, and he revealed the love of God to them. In doing this Jesus provided us with a prophetic picture of the kingdom come.

For the past few months, I have been writing a book about women in the church. It’ll come out mid-2020. In this book I tackle all sorts of questions such as, what is God’s plan for women? Should women stay silent in church? And were women created to serve?

My favorite chapter in the book is entitled, How did Jesus empower women? The full chapter is available on Patreon. Here’s a taste…

In first-century Israel, women could not enter the best parts of the temple and they had to sit apart in the synagogue, hidden behind a curtain or balcony. This religious segregation conveyed an unholy message: men have the inside track when it comes to God. If women wanted to draw near to God, they needed a male priest to show the way. If they displeased the priest on account of their sin or inferior womanliness, they would never encounter the grace of God.

Then Jesus came preaching a message of unrestricted access and inviting all to draw near to God. “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). The Jewish religion had strict worthiness tests regarding who could approach God, but the only qualification Jesus listed was weariness. “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me” (MSG).

Again and again Jesus reminded his listeners that he was not looking to recruit a select group of high performers. “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). The Law of Moses specified that only certain men from a certain tribe with certain characteristics could minister before the Lord, but Jesus offered no restrictions. He would receive anyone who came to him, whether male or female, young or old. “Whoever comes to me I will never drive away” (John 6:37).

Jesus not only preached a message of universal acceptance, he preached it in places where those who had been rejected by religion were most likely to hear it.

On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink.” (John 7:37)

Jesus said this in the temple, but whereabouts in the temple did Jesus teach? The answer to this question is fascinating because it demonstrate the indiscriminate nature of Christ’s message.

The temple of Jerusalem was divided into courts. The inner court was called the Court of Israel, the outer court was the Court of Gentiles, and separating these two courts was the Court of the Women. As these names suggest, anyone could walk in the outer court, but only Jewish men could enter the inner court. In which courts did Jesus teach? In all of them.

When Jesus sat outside the treasury making remarks about widows and their mites (see Mark 12:41), he was sitting in the Women’s Court, because that’s where the treasury was located. When he debated with the Pharisees and religious leaders, he was in the Court of Israel, because that’s where religious men hung out. When Jesus overturned the tables, he was in the Court of the Gentiles, because that’s where the money changers and sacrificial animals were kept.

The religious leaders would never have taught in the Courts of the Gentiles and Women, but Jesus did because he wanted everyone to know how much God loves us.

It is written in the Prophets: “They will all be taught by God.” (John 6:45a)

Jesus liked to quote the prophets who foresaw an end to gender discrimination. Jeremiah, for instance, foresaw an end to the old ways where men taught only their neighbors and brothers, and a new way where all would know the Lord, “from the least of them (i.e., women and children) to the greatest of them” (Jer. 31:34).

Before Jesus, the message for women was, “You are not worthy, stay back.” But Jesus proclaimed a better message: “Your heavenly Father loves you, draw near.”

It was the dawn of a new day for the downtrodden daughters of Eve.

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