Welcome to the online home of Tim Challies, blogger, author, and book reviewer.
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Let me first tell you how None Like Him begins, then make two brief observations. “If you had told me five years ago that I would one day write a book for Christian women that led off with a quote from Proverbs 31, I probably would have punched you in the face.” The first observation: You know this book is going to be interesting when it begins with face-punching. Second, while Wilkin says she has written a book for Christian …
In God’s revelation of himself to Moses on Mount Sinai, he says that he is “slow to anger” (Exodus 34:6). However, later in the Old Testament, in the prophecy about Christ in Psalm 2, we are told to “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled” (2:12). So which is it? Is God slow to anger or is he quick to wrath? It can’t be both, can it? It seems …
One of the great privileges of pastoral ministry is pronouncing a benediction before the congregation. The benediction is not a mystical performance in which a pastor invokes his own authority or his own position to bless the people, but a time in which he stands before the congregation and brings them a blessing from the Lord. This is why benedictions tend to be drawn directly from Scripture. The pastor simply conveys God’s words of blessing. But consider this. Where there …
I love this quote from A.W. Pink’s The Sovereignty of God. Employing some wonderful prose, particularly near the end of the quote, he does battle with those who claim to be Christians but who show very little evidence in their lives. He describes the sweeping nature of what Christ accomplishes in giving new life. The new birth is very, very much more than simply shedding a few tears due to a temporary remorse over sin. It is far more than …
It was A.W. Tozer who wrote (in The Knowledge of the Holy), “what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” That is a broad statement, a grand one, but one that merits some thought, for as Tozer says, “the history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of …
Today we continue with our readings in R.C. Sproul’s classic work The Holiness of God. This week we come to chapter 8, “War and Peace with a Holy God.” I know that quite a few of you continue to read along; I trust you’re enjoying this rather amazing book. Summary As with last week, I think I’m going to focus on quotes from the chapter rather than writing out a summary of it (since that is meaningful even to people …
This blog is full of false starts and dead ends–series I decided to write and gave up on or articles I meant to continue and just plain forgot about. A friend recently pointed out that just about a year ago I discussed Chasing Delight and in that post wrote about Proverbs 11:1: “It is one of my favorite Proverbs, for reasons I’ll explain at another time. It says simply, ‘A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a …
This is the second article in a short series dealing with the tendency Christians have to put God in a box (click here for the first article). Several people, commenting on this first article, remarked that this is a topic usually reserved for people attacked Reformed theology rather than defending it. Bear with me and I think you’ll have to agree that we, even as Bible-loving Christians, can put God in a box. We can find ourselves feeling insecure about …
As you may know, Aileen and I just bought our first house. While we found the house quite quickly (as these things go), we first toured several towns and walked through fifteen or twenty houses looking for just the right one. As we toured house after house it quickly became apparent which homeowners had invested some extra effort in making their homes attractive to prospective buyers. I’m sure you have experienced what we did. Some houses were immediately attractive to …
In this article we turn our attention to what Christians believe about the ways God has revealed Himself to humans. We have already looked at this briefly, so today we will review the two ways God has revealed Himself to us and provide some details about each. In a previous article we answered the question of how God has revealed Himself to us. We saw that he has used Natural Revelation and Special Revelation. We saw that Natural Revelation is …