Welcome to the online home of Tim Challies, blogger, author, and book reviewer.
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I have spent the great majority of my life on the western side of the Greater Toronto Area. In grade school my family moved to Ancaster and I soon went to school in Hamilton and got a job in Burlington; when Aileen and I married we moved to Brantford, then on to Dundas. My first job took us to Oakville where we remain to this day. I studied history in grade school, high school, and university, yet until recently had …
It’s always fascinating to me which characters history doesn’t remember and which ones history cannot forget. Sometimes key players fall out of our consciousness altogether while lesser ones are raised to legendary status. Sometimes real-life characters are lost to the mists of time while fictional ones are treasured forever. This is exactly the case with Josiah Henson. Though he has largely been forgotten, the character who was based on his life lives on. Henson was a significant part of the …
Of all the people you’ve ever seen preach in a Speedo, David Boudia must be the most eloquent. A world-class diver who, after Rio, now has 4 Olympic medals to his name, he often stands with reporters after competitions and does all he can to deflect attention away from himself and toward Jesus. He usually does this by telling how his identity is not wrapped up in being an Olympian or a medalist but in being in Christ Jesus. Just …
The Eric Liddell story is well known. We all know the broad outline: He was one of Great Britain’s great hopes at the 1924 Olympics, he refused to race because of his Christian convictions, he switched races and won an event he had barely trained for, he left it all behind to travel to China to serve as a missionary, he died there in a Japanese prison camp. It’s an amazing story, really. I was recently reading For the Glory, …
Shortly after I heard that Jerry Bridges had died, I sat down to write about the ways he had impacted me through his life and ministry. In a too-weak tribute, I outlined five big lessons I had learned from him. Recently I read his memoir God Took Me by the Hand: A Story of God’s Unusual Providence and came to a section where he outlines seven big lessons he learned over the course of his sixty-plus years of being a …
There are some historical figures who stand out because of their amazing accomplishments and there are some who stand out because of the depth of their character. There are a select few who stand out for both accomplishment and character, and prominent among them is the Flying Scotsman, Eric Liddell. Liddell accomplished great feats of athleticism, then left behind fame and fortune to pursue a much higher calling in the dangerous mission field of China. He did it all with …
I trust you know the rule when it comes to books by Iain Murray: If he writes it, you ought to read it. Murray has a long legacy of authoring books that look to the past to help us better understand the present. Through this work he has had an unexpected and far-reaching impact, and any serious account of today’s New Calvinism needs to tell of his influence. When Mark Dever wrote a series titled “Where’d All These Calvinists Come …
Now here is a provocative title for a book: Black and White Bible, Black and Blue Wife. The subtitle brings a measure of explanation: “My Story of Finding Hope after Domestic Abuse.” Ruth Tucker’s new book is really two books in one—it is her harrowing account of being married to an abusive man and, at the same time, her critique of complementarian theology and an associated call for full egalitarianism. In my assessment it succeeds well as the first book …
Like countless millions of people of my generation (and the one before and the one after), I grew up reading Peanuts. I loved reading stories and gags based on Charlie Brown and his gang. Charles Schulz had a gift for creating lovable characters and for communicating real ideas through the simplest medium—three or four small squares on newsprint. One thing that always fascinated me about Schulz was his references to the Christian faith. Hundreds of his strips and many of …
I have often expressed my love of biography. It’s not only that I enjoy peering into people’s lives, but also that there is so much to learn about life and faith by reading about other people. Biography, and Christian biography in particular, shows Christianity lived, realized in God’s people. New from Leland Ryken is J.I. Packer: An Evangelical Life. The publisher’s description does a good job of describing what you’ll encounter in the book’s pages: “Over the last sixty years, …