Welcome to the online home of Tim Challies, blogger, author, and book reviewer.
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Today I am kicking off a new series of articles that is going to ask the simplest of questions: “What’s the purpose of …?” Though the question is simple, the answers can be difficult and even controversial. We’ll begin with the home: What’s the purpose of marriage? What’s the purpose of sex? What’s the purpose of children? Then we’ll turn to the church: What’s the purpose of the church and its pastors? What’s the purpose of the Lord’s Day and …
Our culture is ruled by sex, obsessed with sex, saturated in sex. It sometimes seems that everywhere we go and everywhere we look we are confronted with messaging about sexuality. So much of this messaging is false, misleading, and downright disturbing. A little historical perspective can be helpful, though, for as we look to the distant past we see that the culture at the time of the early church was equally obsessed and saturated with sex. For this reason, the …
It used to be so straightforward. We got married, then we had children. It’s just what we did. But then something changed, so that today both marriage and having children have become optional, matters of preference. Countless millions are choosing to delay marriage or take a pass on it altogether. Many of those who choose to marry decide not to have children at all. In the face of these new realities we do well to ask: What’s the purpose of …
Whatever else we may know about Christians, we know this: Christians are supposed to go to church. Every Sunday, Christians gather together to worship God and spend time in fellowship. But do we actually know why we do this? Do we pause to consider the purpose of the local church? In this series of articles we are considering the purpose of many things we may take for granted, and so far we have looked at marriage, sex, and children. Today …
The Bible knows nothing of lone Christians, of believers who are willfully independent from a local church. Rather, Christians gather in communities to worship together and serve one another. And as God commands his people to gather in community, he also commands them to be led—led by men called and qualified as pastors or elders (terms the Bible uses interchangeably). As we progress through a series of questions about things we as Christians often take for granted, we now come …
There is little doubt that the Bible commands Christians to baptize. Yet exactly who should be baptized and under what circumstances is a matter of no little debate. As we progress through this series about things we as Christians often take for granted, we need to ask: What’s the purpose of baptism? It is important to note that to this point in the series, we have been covering topics for which there is substantial agreement among the majority of Protestants. …