Welcome to the online home of Tim Challies, blogger, author, and book reviewer.
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As a co-founder of Cruciform Press, I like to provide occasional updates on news and tell you about our most recent titles. We recently released Christ in the Chaos: How the Gospel Changes Motherhood, by Kimm Crandall. If you ask what makes a woman a good mother, you will get a lot of different answers. From how you feed or diaper your children or how they are schooled, everybody seems to have an opinion. All of these things are important, of …
Contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.” Jude really cuts to the chase in his epistle, and for good reason: the church in his day was embattled by false believers and false teachers who had crept in unnoticed, perverting the grace of God into sensuality and denying the Lord (Jude 4). That’s a pretty serious charge, but also a very familiar one. Pastors, authors, bloggers, you name it—there are so many who seem to start well, …
Last week, as this site ticked by its tenth anniversary, I reflected a little bit on unintended consequences. This has been a theme in my thinking lately: the unexpected providence of a sovereign God. Today I was looking through my little book Sexual Detox and at the end found a short essay I wrote with Kevin Meath; I wrote it but then completely forgot about it. There we explained another unintended consequence–how a series of blog posts somehow turned into …
Modesty is a legitimate virtue whether you are a Christian or not, but for modesty to be distinctly Christian, it must be rooted in the gospel of grace. Whenever I was asked about this topic and whenever I read about it, I found plenty of law but very little gospel. When it comes to modesty we define the term too narrowly (our first mistake) and then surround ourselves with rules like “only this low,” “at least this long,” “never in …
You don’t have to be a philosopher to find yourself occasionally asking the kinds of existentialist questions that can make your head spin — Who am I? Why am I here? What’s the purpose of my existence? You pretty much just need to be human. As Christians, the Bible gives us a leg up on the process of figuring out who we are, but even then it’s not like you can simply flip to the Table of Contents and get …
7 Motives in Our Work – Matt Perman asks what our primary motives ought to be as we consider work. He comes up with a list of seven good motives. Child Labor – “Child labor has never been a particularly pretty part of society, but during the industrial revolution, the practice became even uglier than its earlier incarnations. Children were often put in dangerous industrial jobs and paid menial wages.” This site has the stories behind several vintage photos. Iditarod …
I have an occasional series on this site that I’ve titled It’s a Fact, Eh?. The series looks to various facts related to the great country that I live in. Today I want to extend that series to Labor Day (or Labour Day, if you’re up here in Canada), because if you’ve got the day off, you’ve got Canada to thank. Working conditions near the end of the 19th century, whether in Canada or the United States, were very different …
Cruciform Press is looking for a bit of tech help. On September 1 we plan to release a book by John Ensor, a pastor who has published a couple of fine books with Crossway and who has been active in the trenches of the pro-life movement for many years. As his pro-life ministry expands into China and Africa, he’s releasing an important little book called Innocent Blood: Challenging the Powers of Death with the Gospel of Life. The book addresses …
The death of a loved one is something we usually prefer not to think about…until we have to. If a Christian close to you were to die, would you know how to grieve biblically? That is, would you have a clear understanding of all that the Bible teaches on the subject of Christians in the afterlife, so that your grief could bring glory to God, as well as hope and comfort to your soul? I doubt that many of us …
This may be the season for breezy beach reading (I’ve done a little bit of that myself), but that hasn’t stopped people from saying very nice things about a hard-hitting new book by Brian Hedges–a book that deals with sanctification. The July book from Cruciform Press (a company I’ve co-founded), Licensed to Kill: A Field Manual for Mortifying Sin, has been endorsed by Tullian Tchividjian, Joe Thorn, Bob Lepine at FamilyLife Today, and Wes Ward at Revive our Hearts. In …