It was several months ago that Bible Study Magazine (a publication from Logos) asked if they could interview me for a future cover story. The March/April issue of the magazine has just been released and, well, there I am.

I asked if there was any way that we could offer the magazine to the readers of this site, and Bible Study Magazine was glad to accommodate. If you are interested in subscribing, you can use the coupon code BSMCHALLIES and get the magazine for $14.95 per year instead of the usual $19.95. Click here to take advantage of the deal (or here to get a preview of the magazine).

In the meantime, here is an excerpt from the story they wrote about me (and yes, it’s just as strange as you might imagine to read a story about yourself):

Growing up, Challies felt that Bible reading was an obligation. “I felt that if I was going to be a Christian kid, this is what I had to do.” Throughout the years, his perspective has changed. He now emphasizes that there is no scriptural command that believers must read and study the Bible each day—a realization that freed him to delight in his own study. “I think most Christians are eager to spend time with the Lord by reading the Bible—just like every son or daughter wants to spend time with their father. At least, in their best moments, they are eager. But life is busy and tiring, and Bible reading tends to get squeezed out.”

He thinks those who struggle should avoid feeling overwhelmed with guilt: “We are saved by grace through faith, not through reading the Bible and praying.” At the same time, he would also encourage them to deepen their relationship with the Lord. “I am eager for Christians to look at personal devotions as being less about Bible study and more about relationship. I believe we can find freedom in seeing personal devotions as a conversation: hearing from the Lord in the Bible and then speaking to Him in prayer.”

Relating Personally

Challies begins his day with a 45-minute walk before sunrise while listening to the Bible. Each day, he covers 10 chapters. He then spends time in praying—sometimes even in his car. “Sometimes I love waking up in the morning and listening to the Bible; then there are other times when I feel no great desire. It is in these times— when the delight seems absent—that I need to spend time in the Bible anyway; so often God uses obedience to rekindle the flame of delight.”

Challies stresses that Bible reading isn’t a cerebral experience: “This is not about studying the way you would study a Shakespearean play or a textbook. This is relating to God. As I read the Bible, I am trying to ask questions based on my personal relationship with Him. If there is a story in there, I am asking, ‘Why would God reveal Himself in this story? Why does He want me to know this story? What am I being called to do?’”

Massive Sanctification - I appreciated this article from Ed Welch. Sometimes massive sanctification can work itself out in just a small change of words or a small shift in attitude. He works this out in those times a husband is rejected by his wife, but it applies much more widely than that.

Histories and Fallacies - Carl Trueman’s book Histories and Fallacies is on sale at just $3.99 (Kindle format).

Learning Worship from Idolaters - This article is based on an interesting premise: that we can learn something about worship by studying idolaters. In this case, the author looks at the idolatry of the sports fanatic.

Valentine’s Day - This infographic displays Valentine’s Day by the numbers.

Dying Regrets - “A nurse has recorded the most common regrets of the dying, and among the top ones is ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’. What would your biggest regret be if this was your last day of life?”

Herding the Elephants - If you haven’t kept up with The Elephant Room controversy but wanted to get oriented, this is the place to begin.

Fantastic Flying Books - Here is the Academy Award nominated short film The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.

I find not one corruption of my vile heart is dead, though some seem now and then asleep. —John Newton

Do you remember when you used to have a memory? Do you remember when you could actually remember stuff and when you actually needed to remember stuff? You know, stuff like phone numbers or recipes or Bible verses. Those days seem to be nearing an end. An interesting new study from psychology professors at Columbia University, the University Of Wisconsin-Madison, and Harvard University comes to this rather startling conclusion: “We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools.” It’s not just that we are no longer remembering things, but we are entrusting to our tools the things we used to entrust to ourselves. In this way we are becoming symbiotic with our tools, with our machines, forming an interdependent kind of relationship.

It is the ease with which we access information through the Internet that has gotten us here. The days of solving our questions by going to the library, searching the index system and looking for the book in the midst of all the shelves are long since gone. The days of walking over the bookcase and pulling out the relevant volume of the encyclopedia are gone as well. Instead, we now head straight to our computers or cell phones or iPads—whatever it is that we use to connect to the Internet.

The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

Just like people used to think “book” when they wanted information, we now think “computer” and “Google.” With information so easily accessible and so bountiful, we have less reason than ever to invest the time and effort necessary to move that information into our minds—to fully internalize it. Instead we trust that the Internet will retain it and we value only the ability to know where to find it. The more convinced we are that the information will always be available to us online, the less likely we are to memorize it. Instead we just remember where we can access it when we need it again.

Last week I shared three articles titled A Picture-Perfect Marriage. That short series looked to Ephesians 5 and the great mystery that is marriage. I showed from that text that marriage is, and always has been, a portrait of Christ and his church. But at the end of it all I was left with a question: What is the role of the sexual relationship in this great mystery? I had to take a shot at answering that question at a recent conference and want to share today how I understand it.

We have established that marriage is a portrait of Christ and the church and that both husband and wife have a part to play in this portrait. The wife completes her part when she joyfully submits to the leadership of her husband and the husband completes his part when he joyfully and lovingly gives himself up for his wife. But how does the sexual relationship fit into God’s good design for marriage? I will admit from the outset that the answer isn’t quite as clear in Scripture as I might have expected, but I will give it a try and eagerly await your feedback.

God’s Good Design

It ought to go without saying that the Bible knows no good in sex outside of the marriage relationship. In love God says that within marriage sex is to be enjoyed and to be enjoyed freely and regularly; in love God says that outside marriage, sex of any kind is strictly forbidden. Why? Because God designed sex for a specific purpose and that purpose can only be expressed within marriage. Any other expression of sexuality, whether that is adultery or fornication or any kind of self-centered sex—all of these things ignore God’s design for sex and reinterprets it according to our sinful designs.

To understand why God says that sex is to exist only within marriage, we need to look at the covenantal nature of the marriage relationship. Marriage is a covenant that a husband and wife enter into, a covenant in which they come together before God and before other people and are made one. It is not the rings or the white dress or even the sexual union that makes marriage, but the covenant (which is why, in older times, betrothal was considered as unbreakable as marriage). While husband and wife obviously remain two individuals, two independent life forms, there is now a sense in which God regards them as one entity. Each is now responsible to the other and joined to the other to such an extent that in some mysterious way God now views them as being one. In Ephesians 5 Paul goes all the way back to Genesis 2 and reminds the reader that “a man shall leave his mother and father and be joined to his wife and the two shall be one flesh.”