Welcome to the online home of Tim Challies, blogger, author, and book reviewer.
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When I was a child, the maps in my Bible got me through many a sermon. I was rarely interested in listening to the preacher, so I would flip to the back pages of the Bible to study the maps there. I would gaze at the contours of the lands of the Middle East. I would observe how Abraham had obeyed God and left his country and his kindred and his father’s house to journey to the land that God …
A single object can be a source of comfort to one person and a source of fear to another. The same object can make one person breathe a great sigh of relief and another to recoil in terror. The one holding tight to the grip of a gun feels very differently about this firearm than the one who is staring toward its business end. The one who is being robbed feels very differently about the sound of approaching sirens than …
I was once told the story of a child who had been invited to spend a sunny summer day playing with his friends. He lived in a rural area and it took him a good bit of time to make the trek. But the child made his way toward his friends as they made their way toward him and eventually they came upon one another halfway. Soon they were climbing trees and jumping creeks and skipping rocks and generally having …
So many people live with a deep sense of failure. So many people go through their lives convinced they are a constant disappointment to the ones they so naturally long to please. Children consider their parents and feel a sense of shame, certain that in some way their parents regard them as a disappointment. Meanwhile, parents consider their children and feel that same sense of shame, sure that their children regard them with disapproval. Husbands consider their wives and wives …
There was no silence like the silence that descended over the trenches of Western Europe on the morning of November 11, 1918. At exactly 11 AM, an armistice came into effect that brought a halt to all fighting on land, sea, and air. Never had silence been better appreciated than when that silence marked the end of the four brutal years we now call the First World War. In its own way, the silence was a song that told of …
We live out our Christian lives in a place between Egypt and the Promised Land. We have been justified but not yet glorified—we have been delivered safely through the Red Sea but have not yet forded the Jordan and arrived on its far bank. We may not physically wander as did the Israelites of old and we may not actually follow pillars of fire and cloud, but we no less make a pilgrimage and we are no less dependent upon …
We can tell a lot about ourselves by what we long for, by what we desire, by what we dream about, by what consumes our thoughts when we lie in the quiet darkness of night. You can tell a lot because what consumes our thoughts is a good indication of what consumes our hearts which is, in turn, a good indication of what we value most. If we dream of riches it shows that we have set our hope on …
There is an undeniable intricacy to God’s world. There is an inescapable predictability to the universe God has made. The stars and planets follow their course day after day, year after year, millennium after millennium. We can predict with absolute certainty the next time we will have a full or partial eclipse. We can gaze thousands of years into the past or future and know when human beings did see (or next will see) Halley’s Comet. We can forecast down …
There is a kind of personality we are all familiar with, I’m sure—a kind of personality that is impetuous and impulsive, prone to act in ways that are spontaneous and ill-thought-out. It’s the personality of Simon Peter whom we know so well from the pages of Scripture—the one of the twelve disciples who stepped overboard to attempt to walk on water, the one who exclaimed, “not only my feet, but my hands and my head as well!,” the one who …
It’s undoubtedly one of the most-told and best-loved stories in the entire Old Testament. It has all the hallmarks of a great tale—heroes and villains and peril and deliverance. It tells of faithful young men who faced unjust persecution, faithful young men who were sentenced to die a horrific death—to be consumed by flames in a fiery furnace. Yet it also tells how they were unexpectedly and miraculously delivered; how, though they were thrown into the flames bound hand and …