Paul Ellis's Blog, page 27

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

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...

The Chocolate Gospel is on Kickstarter!

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...

Should we close the church for the coronavirus?

“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...

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...

Ten birthday candles: E2R’s most inflammatory articles

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’...

The whole meaning of holiness

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...

Jesus, The First Champion of Women

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...

Why did Jesus send letters to angels?

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...

Merry Christmas from the Shaky Isles

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,...

How did Jesus empower women?

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....