Tim Challies Quotes & Sayings

God honored Solomon's request because he was pleased with what Solomon had asked. This teaches us that God values discernment and honors those who seek after it. — Tim Challies

Dustin Wax says it well: No matter how organized you are, how together your system is, how careful you are about processing your inbox, making a task list, and working your calendar, if you don't stop every now and again to look at the "big picture," you're going to get overwhelmed. You end up simply responding to what's thrown at you, instead of proactively creating the conditions of your life.16 Find a time for your weekly review, add it to your calendar, and commit to doing it every week. I really can't over-emphasize the importance of this discipline. — Tim Challies

When you cry out against a God who punishes people in a place like hell, you cry out against the God who has revealed Himself in the pages of Scripture. You cry out against His goodness, holiness, and justice; and all the while you minimize your own sinfulness or the sinfulness of others. — Tim Challies

We deliberately forget because forgetting is a blessing. On both an emotional level and a spiritual level, forgetting is a natural part of the human experience and a natural function of the human brain. It is a feature, not a bug, one that saves us from being owned by our memories. Can a world that never forgets be a world that truly forgives? — Tim Challies

The key to a productive and contented life is "planned neglect" - knowing what not to do and being content with saying no to truly good, sometimes fantastic, opportunities. This happens only when you realize how truly limited you are, that you must steward your little life, and that of all the best things to do on the planet, God wants you to do only a miniscule number. — Tim Challies

Quentin Schultze says that we have become like tourists who are so enamored by our mode of transportation that we cruise through nation after nation largely indifferent to the people and the cultures around us. We have our passports filled with the little stamps telling people just how many places we've been, but what is the purpose of being in places if we have not experienced them? And what is the purpose of knowing people if we do not care to know them on anything more than a surface level? The trend today is toward these fleeting, surface-level interactions — Tim Challies

You do not exist in this world to get things done. You exist to glorify God by doing good to others. — Tim Challies

To be productive, you need a system. You need to build it, use it, perfect it, and rely on it. Your system needs to gain your confidence so that you can trust it to remember what needs to be remembered, to alert you to what is urgent, to direct you to what is important, and to divert you away from what is distracting. — Tim Challies

You need to structure and organize your life so that you can do the maximum good for others and thus bring the maximum glory to God. — Tim Challies

Key Thought Because discernment is a good and noble pursuit, it is one that has been opposed on all fronts. It will continue to be opposed by our sinful natures, by satanic forces, and by cultural influences. As Christians we must stand firm against all of these forces, trusting in God to equip and to sustain us, for while discernment is a difficult calling, it is one with ultimate benefits. — Tim Challies

Christian productivity is unique. Most productivity gurus will encourage you to be as selfish as you need to be, to get rid of anything that doesn't interest or excite you. But as a Christian you know you can do things that do not perfectly fit your mission but still do them out of love for God and with a desire to glorify him. — Tim Challies

As we seek after discernment, a good and godly desire, our sinful natures will fight against us. We will soon discover a part of ourselves that does not want to make clear distinctions between what is good and evil, and a part of ourselves that does not want to be committed to what is good and right and true. And so the first enemy we must overcome in our discipline of discernment is ourselves. — Tim Challies

You glorify God when you do good works. The — Tim Challies

Do you ever wonder why it is that many of history's titanic intellects managed to come to radically different conclusions? The answer is simple: If you begin your system of thought by refusing to acknowledge what you know to be true - if you start with a lie - the more brilliant and consistent you are in following that premise, the further from truth you will go. — Tim Challies

By giving us control, our new technologies tend to enhance existing idols in our lives. Instead of becoming more like Christ through the forming and shaping influence of the church community, we form, and shape, and personalize our community to make it more like us. We take control of things that are not ours to control. Could it be that our desire for control is short-circuiting the process of change and transformation God wants us to experience through the mess of real world, flesh and blood, face-to-face relationships? — Tim Challies

Productivity - true productivity - will never be better or stronger than the foundation you build it upon. — Tim Challies

The simple fact is, you are not the point of your life. You are not the star of your show. If you live for yourself, your own comfort, your own glory, your own fame, you will miss out on your very purpose. God created you to bring glory to him. — Tim Challies

A home for everything, and like goes with like....If you consistently apply [this principle] all over your life, your life will be and remain organized. — Tim Challies

God calls you to productivity, but he calls you to the right kind of productivity. He calls you to be productive for his sake, not your own. — Tim Challies

We live in an age where too many who profess to be Christians rarely consider their spiritual maturity - an age when many consider spiritual immaturity a mark of authenticity, and when people associate doubt with humility and assurance with pride. Far too many people consider sound theology the mark of a person who is argumentative and proud. — Tim Challies

If you are a student and apply yourself to your studies, you are doing a good work that brings glory to God, because what you learn can and will be used someday to benefit other people. If — Tim Challies

You haven't begun to live a focused and productive life until you have said no to great opportunities that just do not fit your mission. There are many good things in this world that will go undone or that will have to be done by someone else. — Tim Challies

Motivation gets you started, but habit keeps you going. You need to use those times of high motivation to build habits and to embed those habits in a system. That way, when motivation wanes, the system will keep you going. — Tim Challies

And Richard Phillips writes, Theology bores today's Christians, which is another way of saying we are bored with God himself. — Tim Challies

A half-hearted commitment provides halfway results, while — Tim Challies

Technology presents us with a unique spiritual challenge. Because it is meant to serve us in fulfilling our created purpose, because it makes our lives easier, longer, and more comfortable, we are prone to assign to it something of a godlike status. We easily rely on technology to give our lives meaning, and we trust technology to provide an ultimate answer to the frustration of life in a fallen world. Because of this, technology is uniquely susceptible to becoming an idol, raising itself to the place of God in our lives. — Tim Challies

When you ought to be working on your computer, you are only ever one or two clicks away from checking out your friends on Facebook or welcoming a few minutes of mindless entertainment on YouTube. Text messages provide a welcome distraction from deep thinking, and binge watching the latest series on Netflix can set you back a week. You are surrounded by temptations to laziness and may succumb far more often than you think. — Tim Challies

Each of us has had plenty of experience with technology, but few of us have the theoretical or theological tools to make sense of the consequences of our use of technology. — Tim Challies

No amount of organization and time management will compensate for a lack of Christian character, not when it comes to this great calling of glory through good - bringing glory to God by doing good to others. — Tim Challies

The Bible places great emphasis on spiritual maturity because, like children, immature believers are prone to sample anything. They are attracted to what looks good to their untrained eyes. Only as they grow in maturity are they able to differentiate between what pleases God and what does not. Because of this there can be no growth without discernment. — Tim Challies

Christ gave up his life for you so that you could have a genuine zeal to do good works. Paul calls upon Christians to be good works zealots or good works extremists - to be absolutely committed in every way to doing good for others. — Tim Challies

God created you so he could receive glory from you and receive glory through you. — Tim Challies

The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life - the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one's "real life" is a phantom of one's own imagination. — Tim Challies

Productivity - will never be better or stronger than the foundation you build it upon. So — Tim Challies

Productivity is effectively stewarding your gifts, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm for the good of others and the glory of God. — Tim Challies

Productivity is not what will bring purpose to your life, but what will enable you to excel in living out your existing purpose. — Tim Challies

We have truth, righteousness, faith, salvation, and the Spirit to guard us. We have the Word of God to battle for us. Through it all we pray to the Spirit to protect and guide us against the schemes of the devil. In this way we can fight against and overcome the spiritual forces that are set against us and committed to our downfall. We can wage war against and defeat the spiritual forces that seek to lead us away from discernment by offering a clever and subtle counterfeit of the truth. — Tim Challies

Remember your created limits. So much of workaholism is a defiance of the physical limitations that God our creator has imposed upon us. — Tim Challies

When we have rejected the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture, we allow Christians to depend on things other than the Bible as their guide to matters of life and faith. In particular, people begin to depend upon mysticism, upon ways of supposedly knowing God apart from the Bible. They look inward for intrinsic wisdom rather than outward to the Bible for its extrinsic wisdom. They forsake biblical reason in favor of feelings, voices, visions, or other subjective means of supposedly knowing God. This is a deadly error, for spiritual discernment must be founded upon God's objective revelation of himself in Scripture. We can only judge between what is wrong and what is right when we know what God says to be true. We can know this only from Scripture. — Tim Challies

We may well find that if we are to fulfill God's mandate on earth, we will need to communicate less often so we can communicate more. We will need to forsake the ease and the pace of quantity for the reflective significance of quality. — Tim Challies

There is no task in life that cannot be done for God's glory. — Tim Challies