Tim Challies Interview

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the apostle

Paul said, "'But we did not yield in subjection to them "'for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel "'would remain with you.'"

In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her king.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is

Mike Abendroth and I'm your host. You know the format here, you know the slogan, always biblical, always provocative, always in that order.

And every day of the week, Monday to Friday, we try to do something a little bit different, differently. Mondays, it's a sermon from Bethlehem Bible Church from 1

Corinthians 1, that's where we are now. Tuesdays, I like to talk about issues in the local church with Pastor Steve.

Wednesdays, we talk about books, good books, bad books, books that you should avoid, books that you should read.

Thursday, we deal with maybe some controversial issues, and then Fridays, it's potpourri.

Today, though, we have a special guest online. I don't even have to really give him an introduction. If you're an evangelical, you probably know the name when

I say it. If I put www before his name, you might recognize it sooner.

Tim Challies is on the line. Tim, welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. Sure, thanks for having me.

Do you know, some of the folks probably in Central Mass don't know your background. Tell us how long you've been blogging, what started you with your

Christian blog, challies .com. Tell us a little bit about the motivation for that. Yeah, I started blogging just about eight years ago now,

I believe, if my math is correct. And I started the site, challies .com, really as a way of sharing photos with my family.

My family had just moved down to the Atlanta area. I live up here in Canada, in Toronto. And they moved south, so I thought

I'd create a little site to put some photos up so they could see my kids. And a couple months after I did that,

I decided to write a little article. And I put it up there, and over the next few months, wrote a few more articles and put them up there.

Google did its magic and other search engines, and before too long, people were reading the articles and not that interested in the photos.

So I moved the photos somewhere else, and I just kept writing the articles, and that was sort of where the blog came from. I didn't know it was a blog until people started telling me it was that.

And then about, this was about six and a half years ago, I committed to blogging every day, and I've done that ever since.

Did you, in your wildest dreams, consider that the Lord would use a simple blog like this to influence so many people and open the doors for you and your ministry, really, across the world?

No, not at all. I just, again, I just started it. To put photos of the family up there and everything that's come has really been a surprise.

So I didn't set out to make a popular site, and really, I often get emails from people saying, you know, the basic gist of the email is, hey, how can

I be hugely influential? And I say, I really don't know. I can't duplicate anything

I've done through my site. I just set out writing, and somehow it grew into a site that people like to read.

I think it's insightful, when I listen to you, our same story with John MacArthur. When asked, did you ever set out to be popular, he said, and you're saying,

I never, you know, I just wanted to be faithful, I wanted to put some pictures out, I wanted to write some articles, I wanted to preach the gospel, and the

Lord takes care of the breadth of our ministry. We take care of the depth of it by His strength,

He takes care of the breadth of it. So, I almost don't like it when people say, how can I get so popular, do you know what

I mean? Yeah, absolutely. I think MacArthur committed at the very beginning of his ministry to spending 40 hours a week for 10 years studying the

Bible. And if you want to know how his ministry got to be where it is, I think that's your answer right there. He just absolutely knew his

Bible by the end of that time, and the Lord just blessed his diligence. And in terms of my site,

I obviously very much hesitate to compare myself to Dr. MacArthur in any way, but I think a lot of mine has just been the brute force of writing every day.

People get into habits, and they know that if they visit my site every day at the same time, there'll be something new to read there, so I do think that's part of it, is just the brute force way of writing every day over an extended period of time.

There's some apocryphal stories about how fast you can type. How fast can you type? I don't know that I've measured it, actually.

Pretty fast, as fast as I can think, anyway. I learned how to type back in high school, and I went to a

Christian high school that had no money, so we learned to type on old manual typewriters, the ones that, I mean, they didn't plug in anywhere.

And so I learned how to type on those, and after learning to type with those keys where you had to press a good half -inch just to even make contact, typing on a modern keyboard is very, very easy in comparison.

We're talking to Tim Challies. If you, the listener, would like to know what's happening in Christianity today, what is going on with evangelicalism, what are the new conferences, what are the issues, what are the things to watch out for, what are the positive things and encouraging things, if you only went to one website,

I really think you could go to just challies .com and you would be abreast of what is generally happening.

And so I want to encourage people to go to the site, and you'll find it a wonderful site. You design websites, right,

Tim? I do, yeah, not so much this year. I have, over the past few years this year, I'm dedicating a little bit more time to writing and to just doing some work, actually, with Ligonier Ministries.

I'm under contract with them to do some work with them, so that keeps me pretty busy. And you have just become an elder at your church.

I went to school with your pastor at the Master's Seminary. What is harder, being a blogger or an elder? Well, I've been blogging for six and a half years, and I've been an elder for a week, so so far

I would say the blogging, but I think that's gonna change before long. Paul has a lot to write in.

His pastoral epistles are about pastoral suffering and not too much to write about blogger suffering, so I'm thinking over time it'll prove that pastoring or eldering is the one that brings much more difficulty.

I think you're right. And more joy, I hope. Oh, well, both, for sure. Tell Paul Martin, your pastor, hello from my

Gabendroth when you get a chance. I'll do that. Reminds me of a story of an old pastor and his wife visiting a church, pastored by a brand -new young pastor who was very enthusiastic and energetic, and the wife said to her husband, the elder statesman, that was really a great sermon, wasn't it?

He's a great preacher. And the older pastor said to his wife, he will be after he suffers.

Yeah, yeah, I've heard stories like that, and I can't remember which preacher it was I was reading just a little while ago.

It might have been Lloyd -Jones, who was saying that you can tell a pastor who has what it takes to be a good pastor but hasn't yet suffered, and how once he suffers, it'll shape and form his ministry.

How old are you, Tim? I am 33. 33. Well, you've written a book called

The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment, Crossway Publisher, and I think it's about two years old now, and I was reading through it again over the weekend, and I was encouraged that a young man, young in the

Lord just by definition and young man generally, would want to write on such a topic,

The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment. I know you've got another book coming out pretty soon, but I wanna try to highlight this book because some of the questions

I ask you after that are going to help our listeners discern the times as it were.

Tell us the premise of the book and how it's been received. Yeah, the premise of the book was that Christians don't really know enough about spiritual discernment, that there's a lot of funny ideas out there about what discernment is, and a lot of those ideas are, well, they're sort of super spiritual ideas.

There's this idea that discernment is kind of a sixth sense, a kind of spiritual sense, and so I was just looking at what people were saying about discernment and began to study on my own what discernment is according to the

Bible, and I just started tracing those lines and found a publisher who was eager to publish such a book, and away

I went. I noticed - As for the reception, it's been received well, I believe. I think people have enjoyed it.

It hasn't been a whole lot written on the subject. Jay Adams and John MacArthur have written on it in the past, but both books were either out of print or difficult to find and maybe a little out of date, so I think the book, it just found that little niche to fit into.

Well, I liked early on in the book, in the chapter, The Challenge of Discernment, you said, it was tempting, as I wrote this book, to include a chapter arguing that Christians today are having a crisis in discernment.

It was tempting to look at Christian books, programs, and leaders to point to the multitudes of examples proving just how far

Christians have drifted from biblical standards. I think that was probably wise, but there's something in me, maybe it's my flesh, that wished you would have done that, to expose some of those programs.

Yeah, yeah, and it could have been that book, but I didn't want it to be that book. First of all, when you do that, you inherently date the book, so within two or three years, the book isn't that interesting anymore.

I think of a book like Charismatic Chaos by John MacArthur. It has great things to say, but if you read it now, you won't even recognize most of the names or most of the programs he talks about.

So you date the book and people no longer really enjoy it the same way after a couple of years.

And I wanted to focus more on the timeless principles than on specific applications of it. So it was an editorial decision, and really,

I think it was the right decision. There are lots of people out there who are unmasking some of the worst of the worst in the

Christian world. When people do that and their whole ministry is just unmasking, do you think that's unhealthy?

Do you think it's unbalanced when people have that as their main ministry? Yeah, I really do.

And I included a chapter in the book called The Danger of Discernment. And in that chapter, I wanted to show that people who focus on discernment sooner or later seem often like they don't really become, they become quite unkind.

They're not the kind of people you'd want to have over and hang out with very often. And I actually have suffered quite a bit at the hands of that discernment crowd, those people who claim that their whole ministry is discernment and they exist to unmask the deceivers.

And certainly there's a time to point out a specific person and say, give warnings about them, say, stay away from this person.

But it can be, if that is your ministry, if that is all that you do, that's the whole purpose of what you do, it just gets really out of hand after a while, especially when you stop focusing just on the absolute worst cases, but you start looking at people who have had a longing and useful ministry and start finding areas where you can disagree with them as well.

And I know even men like John MacArthur have fallen under the, they've been run over by these people as well, who will lump

John MacArthur in with Joel Osteen and show how both of them are false prophets. I can't remember the website, but there was some kind of wolf on the front of it, and exactly what you've said is to be true.

There's a picture of Benny Hinn and then a picture of John MacArthur, and these people run roughshod. I think, sadly,

Tim, that these people have not determined to know nothing among you except Christ and Him crucified.

Of course we are to refute those who contradict. You as an elder now, Titus 1, must do that.

We have to teach sound doctrine as well, and I think that's why your website is so appealing, is

I know when I go there, there will be things to feed my soul, things to encourage me, but there's also things that I can look at, especially as a pastor, to say, you know,

I think this is coming down the pike and I'm gonna have to make sure I warn my people about this because it's not healthy.

So I commend you for the dual purpose of the website, at least as I see it. And to be honest, a few years ago,

I was drifting towards that discernment crowd, those watch bloggers, as they're called, those people who their whole ministry, so to speak, is pointing out error, and I was just becoming part of that crowd and appreciated in that crowd, and as I started researching discernment,

I realized I had to get out of there and fast, and those people who, you know, were excited to have my blog on their side for a time really became very angry and very nasty, and I immediately became one of their foes as well.

So it was very interesting to see how quickly they were able to turn on me and really eager to turn on me, and really what joy it seemed to bring them to be able to turn on me.

Did you ever think you would be the foe of someone? Or you would have foes, rather? Well, I don't know that I'd stop to think about it, but I suppose, in retrospect,

I shouldn't be too surprised. Let's talk a little bit about the sexual detox e -book, a guide for the married guy is the one that I have in front of me, and there's a guide for the single guy as well.

I really have appreciated what you've written there. Why did you decide to just do it on an e -book? What's the book about, and why do you think so many men are enslaved to this kind of sexual sin?

Yeah, I wrote that book, oh, maybe about six or eight months ago now, and I ended up bringing out two versions.

As you said, one for the single guy, one for the married guy. They don't really differ very much except in the application questions.

I just wanted to have questions pointed to married men and pointed to single men, so that's why I distinguished. I wrote the book because I'd been talking with young guys and finding that they're going into their marriages expecting their wives to act like porn queens.

They've been raised on pornography. A lot of these guys, they may be Christian guys, say they're 24, 25 years old.

That means for the last eight or 10 years, they've been looking at pornography in most cases, many cases, and have really come to have their perception of sexuality formed by pornography, and so they go into marriage disappointed that their wife won't do the things they've been seeing and really just looking forward to using their wife in the way she's been used, other women have been used on the screen and for their entertainment for so long, and so that was really the starting point, and from there, then

I wanted to build out, I wanted to show them what was gonna happen. I wanted to challenge them with the thought that you are gonna bring into your marriage all of this junk you're seeing.

You're gonna want your wife, your innocent bride to be this porn queen, and then from that point to try and build a good biblical perspective on sexuality and, well, sex within marriage.

Well, if anybody'd like a copy of that book, it's free, sexualdetoxonchallies .com,

How to Overcome Sexual Sin, What Does the Bible Say About It? I think it's an important resource.

Yeah, it'll be out in print as well this September. I believe September 1st it should be available. It won't be a very expensive book, and I'm hoping it'll be a good one for people to give away and give away many copies of it if they're so moved.

I have a picture of the cover here that the listeners obviously can't see. Describe the cover because it really is shocking cover when you think about it.

Yeah, the cover has, well, it has a gas mask on it, doesn't it? And not a very pretty one at that.

Right, yeah, I just wanted to go for a grungy sort of detox feel, and so I found a nice picture of a grungy kind of gas mask, and I wanted to put that out there to show people just how they're poisoning themselves and poisoning their marriage with these radically unbiblical and disgusting views of sexuality.

Well, we're talking to author and blogger Tim Challies, and one of the things I want to do is to promote his website and his ministry.

Tell us about the book that's coming out next in 2011, The Next Story. What is it, and what should we expect from you?

That will be out in spring of 2011, and that's a book about technology, about living as Christians in a digital world.

I think there's a lot of challenges that are coming our way and have come our way through living digitally, and with all of us on Facebook and blogs and Twitter and email and all of these things, life has really, really changed.

And I don't know that Christians have really been able to or have been willing to think that through, think what it means, even things like going to church online, as a lot of people do now.

They say they can be as involved in a church that exists only on the internet as they can being involved in a church that exists in their community.

Issues like that, it may seem very easy for us to say, no, that's wrong, you have to go to a church in your community.

But I think there's some issues that we need to look at to really help explain why that's the case. So just throughout the book,

I'm dealing with certain issues related to technological living, and I hope that it will be very useful to people, helping them build a theology of technology, so to speak.

And who is going to publish it? That will be Zondervan publishing that. Zondervan, okay, great. Tim, when you look at evangelicalism, and you get a lot of exposure to it, what gives you encouragement as you see the evangelical landscape?

And then secondly, what concerns you? I think what

I see that's very encouraging is this resurgence of theology. People have talked about the

Reformed resurgence, and I'm far less excited about that word Reformed than I am just about the fact that a whole lot of people are starting to take theology very seriously.

And not theology as an end in itself, but a theology as a means to please God, as a means to understand

God, so we can please God by living in a way that honors Him. So I'm very excited to see people reemphasizing solid biblical preaching, verse -by -verse exposition.

I'm very excited to see that. In terms of what concerns me, would probably be how in a lot of circles the gospel is made central, but it's not the gospel as we understand it from the

Bible. So social gospel continues to be very prominent. I'm glad to see people being humanitarians, but I want to see them first get the gospel right and build their humanitarian work upon the gospel instead of redefining the gospel according to it.

When you were talking about social issues, I was thinking about the emergent church. As the emergent church evolves, what do you think the next step is for the emergent type of folks?

What will be the next level or stage as you leave emergent church?

People leave seeker -sensitive and they go to emergent. Where are they going to go to next, or what's going to be the outgrowth of that kind of theology?

I think the emerging church has gone beyond evolution now into slow destruction. I think it's really falling apart and people are no longer interested.

As inevitably must be the case when you don't build any kind of infrastructure. There was never an emergent seminary or an emergent college that were really churning people out within that stream.

So already I think it's starting to fall apart and the end is near. How about this?

Oh, go ahead, Tim. No, go ahead. No, I was going to ask you a couple other things. We've got about six more minutes left. Thoughts about Together for the

Gospel, the Gospel Coalition. I like both of those. Do you think they're contributing to the health of evangelicalism?

I guess really what I'm after is, do you think we're over -conferenced in this world of evangelicalism? Do we need these kind of conferences?

And by the way, I'm from the inside. I'm not against them, but I'm just wondering what you think about that. I think we probably are.

When I was at Together for the Gospel this year, I made a last -minute decision to buzz down and was glad to be there, but I just sat there and tried to run the math into how many dollars go into that, how many dollars are taken out of the evangelical world and essentially left in downtown

Louisville for one reason or another. And it really is astounding if you stop to think about it, it would be in the tens of millions of dollars,

I think, that is taken out of the church into the conference. So there is a certain impact in that way.

I don't think conferences are bad, but a few years ago I did the conference circuit.

I was doing a lot of blogging from conferences, getting to know the conferences, and I would sometimes go to maybe four or five conferences a year and see the same people at every one.

And that would concern me, if a pastor feels that he needs to go to five conferences a year. I think there's great benefit to going to a good conference as a pastor especially, but even as a lay person to go once or twice a year maybe and just sit under the preaching of the word.

Again, especially as a pastor, I think you're so used to preaching the word. I think it's good to be preached at in a very pointed way.

But I would hesitate. I think pastors and lay people need to examine their motives.

Why am I going? Am I going to be part of the experience? Am I going because I'm finding a kind of life there

I'm not finding in my church? I just want to be very careful with those sorts of heart motivators. Interestingly, Tim, where are the family camp conferences these days?

In the old generations, maybe in Canada, I don't know, but in America, there was a big family camp mentality.

And I almost think those are better when all the family can be together and spend a lot of time with one another.

Of course, Shepherd's Conference, Nine Marks Weekend or Gospel Coalition, Together for the Gospel, they encourage pastors a lot.

But I'm just wondering if we'll ever have a resurgence of the family conferences. I'm not sure. All right, how about we'll just do this,

Tim, since I have a short amount of time left, and we'll just do kind of short answers. The whole Warren -Piper deal, when

Piper asked Warren to come, what do you think? Give me your 30 -second analysis of that.

Well, I don't really understand so much why John Piper asked Rick Warren to that conference.

I don't think it was Piper's best decision ever. It's his conference.

He's allowed to do what he wants, I believe. Rick Warren is a believer, so I'm not concerned that he's invited a wolf in sheep's clothing, so to speak.

But I do think it was a strange decision based on Warren's long, negative impact on the

Church in many ways. How about the whole Francis Chan deal, him stepping down? Any comments on that?

I haven't looked into that one so much. I guess Francis Chan's theology about how

God speaks to him would be a little strange in terms of my understanding of it.

If I was able to talk to him, I'd probably want to mine that a little bit more. But I really like how

Chan is willing to do really difficult things and willing to do it for God's glory.

And I think his radical living is a very good example to people, especially a young generation. All right, good.

And this is kind of speed round. How about the arrogant canner situation at Liberty Theological Seminary?

Again, I haven't looked into that one too much, but I do hope that the University is very willing to dig deep and see what's actually at the heart of that one and to respond accordingly.

See, Tim, you're trying to get away from discernment ministry blogging, and I'm asking you these questions. Well, these are all issues in the

Church, and interesting ones. I don't think they're ones we're not allowed to talk about. I think it's more in how we talk about them and how we speak, especially the people involved.

Absolutely, and you know what I find? I find that it is good for people to use their spiritual discernment and analyze these things.

Same thing. Right, and I think I can say, I disagree with John Piper, and I hope people don't hear

I despise John Piper, or I think John Piper isn't a believer. I really think we have to be able to have that understanding that we're allowed to question these things, even in a public context, and say, look,

I don't understand this. I think it was a bad decision, and really differentiate between that and I think

John Piper is an evil person. You've hit the nail on the head, because in our culture, Tim, I think men have become effeminate and they no longer can just say,

I totally disagree, I respect you, I love you, we'll have to disagree, and now it's been turned into some ad hominem thing and people have their feelings hurt and feel ostracized.

Exactly so, and I don't think John Piper is the least bit bothered when I wrote an article and said, I disagree with him.

I think he was fine with that, and well, he should be. Absolutely. How about Christian celebrities in general?

Do you think there's a fascination, we've got about a minute left, with Christian celebrities? Let's do a cut and paste in the next paragraph, not talking about Piper, but just Christian celebrities in general.

I think there's definitely Christian celebrityism going on, and that's why these conferences, you have to have eight or 10 big names if you want to get people out to some of these conferences, anyway.

Maybe that's always been the way, though. You look back and you read a biography of George Whitefield, and people are out to see

Whitefield, not to hear his message a lot of the time. So perhaps that's always been the way of it. Lots of people lined up to see

Jesus, too, and they were there to see the celebrity, not to hear his message. Absolutely.

Well, Tim, 24 minutes has gone by so fast. We're talking to Tim Challies, challies .com. I encourage you to pick up The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment, and his e -book on sexual detox.

Tim, thank you so much for your ministry. I appreciate what you do, and thanks for being on No Compromise Radio. You're very welcome.

God bless you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

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