Welcome to the online home of Tim Challies, blogger, author, and book reviewer.
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A couple of times now I have shared prayers from a new book I am really enjoying. Prone to Wander is a wonderful new collection of prayers inspired by The Valley of Vision. I probably can’t share too many more of them lest I fun afoul of copyright laws, but I did want to share this amazing and convicting one. Let this be your prayer of confession to God: King of heaven, We confess before you the pride, fear, and …
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” Since the dawn of time humans have looked to the sky and marveled at its immensity, its vastness, the sheer unfathomable number of stars dotting the dark night. The heavens declare God’s glory in all of these ways, but also in this: the heavens provoke wonder. The heavens provoke wonder and that wonder calls us to worship. The sky declares God’s glory through the fact that …
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 …
Jeremiah Burrough’s The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment is one of the most important and personally-impactful Puritan works I’ve ever read. Let me give you just a taste of what Burroughs has to say about contentment. Here he shares eight things that will be opposed by a true, biblical contentment. It is opposed to murmuring and repining at the hand of God, as the discontented Israelites often did. If we cannot bear this either in our children or servants, much less …
One of the more interesting sections of dialog in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress has Christian and Hopeful discussing the danger of backsliding, of falling away from what had the appearance of spiritual life and growth. That dialog, drawn from the tenth stage of Christian’s journey, is important and instructive. Bunyan presupposes that such people have been awakened to their need for salvation by some combination of the fear of God and the danger of hell, but eventually fall back or …
Things Introverts Dread in Church – I can identify with all of these, though I’ve learned to enjoy at least a couple of them. This is a list of The Top 5 Things Introverts Dread about Church (written so extroverts may understand). Canada Stops Making Cents – We’re so progressive up here in Canada. We’ve finally done what everyone’s been talking about and have gotten rid of the penny. Terminology for the Web – This article looks at the way the web …
Do you remember when you used to have a memory? Do you remember when you could actually remember stuff and when you actually needed to remember stuff? You know, stuff like phone numbers or recipes or Bible verses. Those days seem to be nearing an end. An interesting new study from psychology professors at Columbia University, the University Of Wisconsin-Madison, and Harvard University comes to this rather startling conclusion: “We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools.” It’s not just that we are …
Granted Ministries has recently republished The Person of Christ, written by Dr. Phillip Schaff. This is a book that describes and celebrates the character, the humanity and the divinity of Jesus Christ. In one section Schaff discusses the way all virtues and graces are exemplified in Jesus Christ. Here is what he says: We can not properly attribute to him any one temperament. He was neither sanguine, like Peter; nor choleric, like Paul; nor melancholy, like John; nor phlegmatic, as …
I came across a trio of Edwards quotes this week and each was powerful in its own right. So give these a read, not as quotes that follow one another in any sort of order, but simply as 3 quotes that represent what Edwards taught so well. You all have by you a large treasure of divine knowledge, in that you have the Bible in your hands; therefore be not contented in possessing but little of this treasure. God hath …
The more I grow in my knowledge of the Lord (by his grace) the more I see the utter centrality of the church, the local church, in his plan for his people. The more I learn of him, the more I see what a jewel the church is–what a blessing, what an honor it is to be part of something so amazing, so other-worldly. This is something that has been brought home to me in recent years primarily by the …