Imperishable Inheritance

Tim Chal­lies of the famous “God­blog” Challies.com has gra­ciously agreed to answer a few ques­tions of mine. Before the ques­tions, let me give you some brief bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion for him.

He is a reformed blog­ger cov­er­ing var­i­ous the­o­log­i­cal, social, and per­sonal issues. Cur­rently, almost 2,000 users sub­scribe to his syn­di­ca­tion feed which he updates daily. By day he is a web devel­oper at Web­sonix. He also runs Dis­cern­ing Reader which is a repos­i­tory of book reviews. He is also lives in Ontario, Canada and is mar­ried with three children.

How has blog­ging changed/improved your spir­i­tual life, and how do you con­tinue to keep God’s glory at the fore­front of your writing?

Blog­ging has rev­o­lu­tion­ized my spir­i­tual life. While it took me some time to under­stand it this way, I now regard blog­ging as one of my spir­i­tual dis­ci­plines. It is, for me, an indis­pen­si­ble part of my walk with God. Of course it is not blog­ging, per se, that has made the dif­fer­ence, but sim­ply the fact that it causes me to think delib­er­ately and deeply about some spir­i­tual topic for an hour or two each day. It also requires me to be con­stantly read­ing and review­ing books. A strange and unex­pected bonus has been the priv­i­lege of attend­ing and writ­ing about some great con­fer­ences. These con­fer­ences have allowed me to sit under some pow­er­ful teach­ing and to hear mes­sages deliv­ered by some of my heroes in the faith and by some of my men­tors, though men who have only men­tored me through the books they have written.

I would like to think that I con­tin­u­ally keep God’s glory at the fore­front of my writ­ing, but am aware that I often fail to do this. Still, by God’s grace, I do attempt to keep God in His right­ful place. I do this more delib­er­ately now than I did in the past. Not too long ago I real­ized that I was blog­ging for my own ben­e­fit. At one point I felt like the site was quickly becom­ing a place that was more about crit­i­cism than about edi­fi­ca­tion; about tear­ing down than build­ing up. I real­ized that I was falling into a fairly com­mon trap among blog­gers who soon come to real­ize that it is far eas­ier to gen­er­ate buzz and to gain read­ers by being con­tro­ver­sial than it is to do so by being godly. At around the same time I real­ized that blog­ging was becom­ing and could become a valu­able part of my spir­i­tual life, I real­ized that I was plac­ing myself at the fore­front of the blog. At that time I began to change the empha­sis a lit­tle bit and to focus more on top­ics that I felt were edi­fy­ing and to change the empha­sis to glo­ri­fy­ing God. I am still learn­ing and still strug­gling at times, but do feel that I am, through His grace, mak­ing progress in this.

What advice would you give to young reformed writers?

My first piece of advice is to stick to it. When I first began writ­ing for my web site it had been sev­eral years since I had attempted to do any for­mal writ­ing. I was sur­prised to see how my skills had faded and grown rusty. Only through a great deal of prac­tice was I able to attain a level of pro­fi­ciency that I was com­fort­able with. Even now as I attempt to write my first book I am find­ing it dif­fi­cult and am con­fi­dent that I will have to prac­tice hard and to ded­i­cate myself to writ­ing if I wish to pro­duce a book that rep­re­sents my best effort.

The sec­ond piece of advice is to exam­ine motives. Many peo­ple, and per­haps too many peo­ple, begin writ­ing because they feel they need to be heard. I would encour­age peo­ple to write because they know that they need to learn. I try to write as a stu­dent more than a teacher, as one who seeks to learn more than one who seeks to instruct.

Of all the issues you’ve writ­ten on that threaten evan­gel­i­cal­ism (Open The­ism, Emer­gent Church, NPP, etc.) which do think will have the great con­tin­ued impact?

It strikes me as I look at these issues that, while they are all dif­fer­ent in some ways, in oth­ers ways they are all sim­i­lar. All of them depend on an inter­pre­ta­tion of the per­son or work of Jesus Christ that is far less than what the Bible presents. I think the great­est threat to evan­gel­i­cal­ism is that we con­tinue to present a Jesus that is far too human; a Jesus who is made in our image. Many, and prob­a­bly most of the doc­trines that chal­lenge the church in the early twenty-first cen­tury will fade away, but I sus­pect the all-too-human Jesus, the Jesus who is only a man, the Jesus who takes risks and has finite knowl­edge, will chal­lenge the church until He returns.

Through all the book reviews you’ve done, what of those (besides the Bible) have impacted you the most and why?

That is a sur­pris­ingly dif­fi­cult ques­tion to answer. I have often grown a great deal through review­ing books that I did not enjoy. It is gen­er­ally far more dif­fi­cult to review a bad book than a good one. After all, when I review a book that I feel is not bib­li­cal, I want to be sure that I truly under­stand what the author is say­ing and that I am being fair to him. In this way I tend to think about the issues for a long time before review­ing the book.

Hav­ing said all of that, some of my favorite books, and ones that gave me a great deal of plea­sure when read­ing them are: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by Bruce Ware; Pray­ing Back­wards by Bryan Chapell; Putting Amaz­ing Back Into Grace by Michael Hor­ton. These three stand out as ones that I have rec­om­mended far and wide. I could prob­a­bly have named twenty or thirty others.

How do you see tech­nol­ogy improv­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of com­plet­ing the Great Commission?

I was think­ing the other day about mis­sion­ar­ies and how they have ben­e­fit­ted from tech­nol­ogy. Where mis­sion­ar­ies once had to be will­ing to for­sake almost all com­mu­ni­ca­tion with their fam­i­lies, tech­nol­ogy has allowed them to bridge these gaps. A mis­sion­ary can now, through the won­ders of the Inter­net, be in near-instant com­mu­ni­ca­tion with peo­ple on the other side of the globe. Surely this has proven a great com­fort to a great many missionaries.

Beyond that, I really can’t imag­ine how tech­nol­ogy is improv­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of com­plet­ing the Great Com­mis­sion. In the end, it is not tech­nol­ogy, but Chris­tians who are respon­si­ble for this task. I hope that we do not come to rely on technology’on slick mar­ket­ing efforts and mul­ti­me­dia presentations’to do the work. The Word must go out today and tomor­row as it has in the past: through the preach­ing of the Word.

As a father, what is the les­son you want to pass on to your chil­dren, and how do you plan on accom­plish­ing that?

I have often been chal­lenged by those times in Scrip­ture that the Apos­tle Paul urged the recip­i­ents of his let­ters to imi­tate him. For exam­ple, in 1 Corinthi­ans 4:16 he writes, “I urge you, then, be imi­ta­tors of me.” Paul is, by the Holy Spirit, so con­vinced that what he is doing is right and godly that he urges oth­ers to imi­tate him. I would love to live a life of god­li­ness so that I can urge my chil­dren to imi­tate me. And even bet­ter, I’d love them to see in me a god­li­ness that they want to imi­tate. I want them to know that I love God most of all and that no one and noth­ing will come between myself and Him. I want them to know that I love my wife sec­ond of all, and that nei­ther they nor any­one else could come between the two of us. And I want them to know that I love God and I love my wife so that I might model love for them. I want them to feel secure in the love I have for God, for my wife, and for them.

I hope to accom­plish this by being a stu­dent of the Word, a dis­ci­ple of Jesus Christ. I trust that, through His grace, I will be able to fin­ish strong.