Welcome to the online home of Tim Challies, blogger, author, and book reviewer.
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Last week I solicited questions from the readers of this site, looking for good ideas for future blog posts. I received almost 100 responses, many of which asked really good questions. In the coming weeks and months I will attempt to answer many of them. I begin today with this one: “How do you discern when to take something up with a person and when is it something to just let go (is it ever right to just “let it …
It was a couple of years ago now that I read George Marsden’s great biography of Jonathan Edwards. As I read it I was often stopped short by Edwards’ wisdom. Constantly surrounded by conflict, and often facing people who sought to undermine his ministry, Edwards had every opportunity to reflect on the task of a minister. One of these conflicts involved the question of whether sermons should primarily enlighten the mind or whether they should primarily stir the affections. Charles …
Every believer carries a measure of the guilt for Jesus’ death. Was it not for our willful disobedience to God’s perfect Law, we would have no need of a Savior. We acknowledge in song that it was our hands that drove the spikes into His and sometimes speak about driving the nails into Jesus’ hands every time we sin. We speak figuratively, of course, knowing that although we were not present at the time of His death, we bear the …
Last week I spent an evening reading Rick Warren’s soon-to-be-published book The Purpose of Christmas. It is a mostly-original work that, while it draws heavily from The Purpose Driven Life is at least not entirely derived from it. An evangelistic gift book, it is meant to be given as a Christmas gift. I have written a review of it that I will post a little closer to the release date. For now, though, I wanted to deal with one of …
Over the weekend I read Michael Horton’s new book Christless Christianity. I greatly enjoyed reading it (despite chapters that were slightly longer than my attention span) and found that it gave me a lot to think about. A few days earlier I had read a new book by Rick Warren, The Purpose of Christmas. What a contrast there was between the two of them. Throughout his book, Horton emphasizes the importance and transcendence of the gospel message–the pure, undefiled simplicity …
The best defense is a good offense. You’ve probably heard that phrase before. As far as I can tell, it was coined by the Prussian military historian, theorist and tactician Carl von Clausewitz (a name I’m quite sure I haven’t written since military history classes way back in my college days). Since then it has been applied to all kinds of situations far beyond the military. It has also been turned around so occasionally you will hear people say, “the …
I woke up early this morning, a long time before my alarm was set to start buzzing. I woke up with a phrase bouncing through my mind–a phrase I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Some time ago I was thinking about children who have the privilege of growing up in Christian homes but was drawn to the many I know who have fallen away from the faith. Despite the great honor given them in being raised in a …
There is a profound truth that every Christian must face: the Bible is an inexhaustible treasure. Talk to a pastor who has spent a lifetime reading, studying and explaining the Bible and he will tell you, I’m sure, that the more he comes to understand, the more he realizes he does not understand. I have heard John Piper compare this to climbing a mountain. As he scales a sheer cliff and comes to the top of a great mountain, he …
So Ray Boltz, a once-prominent figure in the world of Christian Contemporary Music, is gay. He came out to his family–he is the father of four grown children–in December of 2004 but only recently has the news trickled beyond that inner circle. Just a few days ago his story was featured in an article in the Washington Blade, “the Gay and Lesbian News Source of Record” in D.C. and it provides a rough time line of the recent years of …
I wanted to post a brief follow-up to Monday’s article in which I asked Who Shapes Your World? I think the issue of celebrity and heroism was a fascinating component of the James Bradley’s book Flags of our Fathers. In the book he described the infamous battle of Iwo Jima, but he did so within the context of his search for the role his father played in that battle. His father, John Bradley, a Navy corpsman who was assigned to …