"The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment is a truly important work-one that should be required reading not only for church leaders, but for all sober-minded laypeople as well."

John MacArthur (From the Foreword)

"If you were more discerning you’d probably buy this book. If you do read this book, you will be! This book on discernment is simple, clear, well-written and well-illustrated...

Mark Dever

Welcome to the online home of Tim Challies, blogger, author and web designer. My first book, "The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment," is now available everywhere.

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Frivolity Archive

The Rookie Draft (04/05/07 - 22 Comments)
As you well know, the school calendar is rapidly drawing to a close and a new class of rookies is set to graduate from the nation's seminaries. As the annual rookie draft approaches, I've scoured the ranks of young men, have spoken to the scouts, have attended the combine and have interviewed many of the candidates. And now I share the fruit of all this labor and provide my thoughts on how this year's draft...

Ee-lectronic gold - A Song (04/04/07 - 16 Comments)
On Saturday I submitted the manuscript for my book. That evening we had some friends come over, and among these friends was Paul, our pastor, who took the opportunity to share a song he had written for the occasion. I do believe this marks the first, and probably the last, time anyone has written me a song. It's a humdinger, too, even if it is somewhat lacking in historical accuracy. I assume you can figure...

Friday Miscellania (09/15/06 - 17 Comments)
God, Max & Me - I've felt a little bit brain-dead this week. Grieved by the shallowness of my devotional life and my difficulty in making sufficient time for it, I recently decided to try a whole new approach. I now wake up an hour earlier than I used to but leave my Bible on the shelf. I get up a good long time before the sun comes up and head outdoors with just my...

Fantasy Church (08/31/06 - 44 Comments)
Fantasy church is a game in which players moderate imaginary denominations based on the real-life performance of churches and pastors, and compete against one another using those churches' statistics to score points. The most recent addition to the long list of fantasy activities (other fantasy games include fantasy baseball, fantasy football, fantasy hockey, and so on), it is surely also the most exciting and the most edifying. So why not form a league today and...

Friday Frivolity (07/21/06 - 3 Comments)
Series - I had considered posting the third part of my series on children who die in infancy, but I've decided to hold off until next week. The discussion on the previous two entries continues to go strong, so I thought I would let that carry on before posting the third part. So stay tuned for that next week. At the very least it is bound to be controversial. Extreme Makeover - A few days...

The Gauntlet Has Been Thrown (05/23/06 - 9 Comments)
Mark Heinrich has thrown down the gauntlet. It has hit the ground with a resounding pfffft and with all the force of feather colliding with the earth. My world has been shaken. The impact of this gauntlet was such that Marc not only posted a challenge on his blog, but felt obligated to email me when I did not respond within what he felt was a sufficient timeframe. My initial reaction was simply to send...

Allegations of Retirement - Challies Denies All (04/03/06 - 15 Comments)
This weekend, the blogosphere, or the small corner of it that exists in Oakville, Ontario, was rocked with the allegations that Tim Challies has retired from the blogosphere. It began with an article posted on Saturday by Pastor Shaun in which he announced Challies' retirement: "In a move nearly as upsetting as the announcement of Al Mohler's ghost writing team, and nearly as threatening to the future stability of the Christian blogosphere, Tim Challies, web...

Friday Frivolity (03/31/06 - 15 Comments)
Before we get frivolous, Jeff Fuller has asked that I pass along an April Fool's tract he is promoting called "Don't Be An April Fool." You can download it here. I am now firmly established in my new office, which I grow to enjoy more every day. At one point I had all the books on the shelves, but have since begun to try to put them in some semblance of order. Of course prior...

Personal Notes (And A Request) (03/24/06 - 7 Comments)
First off, I'd like to apologize for the lighter-than-usual blogging over the past few days. As you may know, we are preparing to move this weekend. We signed the final papers yesterday morning, hope to be handed the key to the house early this afternoon, and will be actually moving tomorrow. We'll be heading over this evening to clean, move in some of the more fragile and important boxes, replace the locks, and so on....

Friday Frivolity (03/17/06 - 11 Comments)
It's good to see Amy beginning to get back to posting her humble musings. She's been a bit of a slacker lately! And speaking of Amy, my really-quite pregnant wife made the mistake of reading Amy's birth story in which she describes the rather difficult time she had in giving birth to her latest bundle of joy. Thankfully I was able to console Aileen with the knowledge that her path to childbirth always leads her...

Friday Frivolity (Pastor Rushes, Christian Atheists, And More) (03/10/06 - 21 Comments)
My friend Matthew sent me an interesting article today. It is the story of a Christian athiest. Yes, you read that correct: a Christian atheist. Isn't postmodernism wonderful? The article begins like this: I don't believe in God. I don't believe Jesus Christ was the son of a God that I don't believe in, nor do I believe Jesus rose from the dead to ascend to a heaven that I don't believe exists. Given these...

Friday Frivolity (02/24/06 - 22 Comments)
I'm always reading statistics. And really I have no choice because our culture seems obsessed with them. I have a question for those of you out there who are more adept than I am with numbers (and, statistically-speaking, I'd guess that this includes over 99% of you). What does it mean when "survey results are considered accurate within 2.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20." What on earth does that mean? One of the...

Friday Frivolity (02/17/06 - 21 Comments)
First off, let's do another giveaway. For some reason I keep getting copies of Nancy Pearcey's Total Truth in the mail so let's go ahead and clear out a couple of those. It seems appropriate that in giving away Nancy's book we'd have a contest somehow based on the Pearceys. So how's this? The first person to tell me what instrument Nancy plays AND the instrument her husband Rick plays, will win a copy of...

Friday Frivolity (02/10/06 - 16 Comments)
I used to watch far too many episodes of The Simpsons. In fact, I'd be willing to entertain arguments that watching any episodes of The Simpsons is too many, but I digress. Several years ago, after my son began to develop some awareness of what was playing on the television screen I decided that it was probably not an appropriate show for young eyes. And so we turned of The Simpsons and haven't really watched...

Friday Frivolity (01/27/06 - 21 Comments)
As I mentioned a couple of days ago, this has been a bit of a crazy week. The primary reason is a really good one: Aileen and I just completed the purchase of our first house. We are now waiting only for a piece of paper to change hands from our lawyer to our real estate agent and it's a done deal. While we would have preferred a single home property, housing prices in this...

Friday Frivolity (12/23/05 - 0 Comments)
Just about everyone who reads web sites does so at work. It's a strange and shameful fact, isn't it? In fact, you are probably sitting at work right now as you read this. Shame on you. My experience with working the Friday afternoon before Christmas tells me that you're probably not doing much today anyways. This is the day where most people have already taken the day off and the office is half empty to...

Friday Frivolity (10/28/05 - 0 Comments)
First off I would like to warn everyone that the site may be a little unpredictable over the weekend. I am hoping to upgrade to a whole new design. This design is such a radical departure from the current one that it will take a massive amount of work to make the change. So bear with me through the inevitable missing graphics, broken links and so on. I trust it will all be back to normal by Sunday.

Have you seen this Pumpkin-based computer? I suppose this is what happens when college students are not given enough homework.

Friday Frivolity (10/14/05 - 0 Comments)
I had a humbling moment yesterday. I received in the mail an unexpected gift of a new book written by one of my very favorite authors. I opened the cover and saw that he had taken the time to sign it to me. I was quite thrilled. My wife was napping at the time (she's pregnant, you remember, and seems to need an hour-long nap in the afternoon) so I couldn't show it to her right away, but as soon as she woke up I took it in to her. She opened the cover, read the inscription and said, "Who's Tom?"

Friday Frivolity (10/07/05 - 0 Comments)
I have a question of ethics that I'm sure is unique to our technologically-advanced age. It concerns one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century and one that has been updated for the twenty-first. I am talking about, of course, Tupperware (which I use as a generic term for reusable storage containers). Now it used to be that if a neighbour were to bring you a gift (like authentic Cajun Gumbo Soup, for example)...

Friday Frivolity: Penguins, Archimedes, Phil Johnson, Adrian Warnock and More... (09/30/05 - 0 Comments)
Adrian Warnock, whom most people know only as a pixelated face superimposed over a picture of Big Ben (click here), seems to want to fight. And as history has proven time and time again, these British folk, like the little kid on the playground who runs to the safety of his big brother, will only fight when the Americans have their back. Thus Adrian has also seeks to poison the mind of Phil Johnson so that he will turn on me.

And so today, I present to you a list of the top 10 reasons you should read Adrian's blog and Phil Johnson's blog instead of mine.

Friday Frivolity (09/23/05 - 0 Comments)
I'm going to be rolling out a new feature of this blog on Monday. Or am am hoping to, anyways. It is a feature that is long overdue, and one I hope contributes to the blogosphere. So check back Monday for that - it's guaranteed to be a letdown.

Two weeks from today I will be making the trek to the bustling metropolis of Minneapolis to attend (and blog) the Desiring God National Conference.

Friday Frivolity (and a word about RSS) (09/16/05 - 0 Comments)
There is quite a large number of people who read this site through RSS readers. I have no idea how many of you there are as you only rarely make yourselves known. But I know you exist because whenever I post the details of a new giveaway I am immediately inundated by a large number of people signing up - far more than read the site in the span of a few minutes. I think I am rambling. I would like the RSS folk to know that I will be making some changes to the RSS feed later today. I am consolidating the feeds and will be pointing them all to a Feedburner RSS feed. This should make absolutely no difference to you and I do not think you will need to update your settings. However, if you find you are having trouble with the RSS feeds later today or over the next few days, please let me know.

Friday Frivolity (08/26/05 - 0 Comments)
Today I would like to regale you with a story about my daughter. It is a true story, of course, and seems just frivolous enough to post on a Friday.

One day a couple of weeks ago when we were on vacation it was nearly dinner time and my daughter really wanted a popsicle. My wife told her that it was too close to dinner time and that she would have to wait until after we had eaten. But then my daughter pulled the trump card. "But Anna has one!" (Anna being my niece).

Friday Frivolity (07/29/05 - 0 Comments)
It's four in the afternoon and I am only just getting to the Friday Frivolity. My most profuse apologies go to everyone, but Amy in particular.

This is completely non-frivolous but some have asked me about the heart issues I was having a couple of weeks ago. I finally got the call-back from the doctor who told me I have two conditions. The first was Bipolar Cheddarprolapse Valvelobotomy and the second Microvalve Discumbobulatory Oranganeck. Or something like that. I knew I should have paid more attention in biology classes.

Friday Frivolity (07/15/05 - 0 Comments)
It is a little late in the day to be publishing this, I admit, but I've been otherwise-occupied. I've been having some trouble with my ticker lately, so yesterday I went to the doctor to get fitted with a little gadget that would record every beat of my heart for a full 24 hours. This required, of course, sticking seven or eight little electrodes to my upper body. While they even went so far as to shave necessary bits of chest hair, this did not make the gadget any more comfortable to wear. It itched constantly and pretty well drove me to distraction. Rolling over in bed is just about impossible when you're attached to a box with all sorts of wires.

Friday Frivolity - Amazon's Top 25 of All Time (07/08/05 - 0 Comments)
In honor of their tenth anniversary, Amazon has released a list of their 25 all-time best-selling authors. Here, for your reading pleasure, is that list along with some obnoxious commentary.

  1. J.K. Rowling - She writes something about a wizard kid and is richer than the queen. Can't say I've ever read any of her books. Can't say I ever will.