Tim Challies

—Tim Challies, The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment (Crossway, 2007), 27.

—Tim Challies, The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment (Crossway, 2007), 35.

Times have changed. People are still the same, but my, how the times have changed. When I was a teenager in the early ’eighties, pornography was acquired only through determined effort. The availability was limited, and there was a stigma attached to it. Men had to expose themselves to the embarrassment of purchasing it in face-to-face transactions at the drugstore or other public establishment, or sneak away, looking over their shoulders in fear for their reputations, to “adult” bookstores. Boys had to take the risk of shoplifting it, or if lucky, find their older brother’s or father’s stash of dirty magazines. A decade later, little had changed for boys like Tim Challies. Tim is the author of a little book I read early this morning called Sexual Detox: A Guide for Guys Who Are Sick of Porn. Beyond that, he requires little introduction here.

Add another decade, and all that has changed. Anyone can, free of charge and in total privacy, consume all the porn he wants — with no effort beyond a few clicks of the mouse, and no risk of public embarrassment. This has created the perfect environment for a virtual pandemic of sexual perversion. This corruption, and its cure, is the burden of Sexual Detox. Here’s a sample:

   If you are like most young men, you have already started to give in to temptation. Perhaps you have only just begun to look at pornography, or perhaps you’ve been doing it for many years. Perhaps you struggle with masturbation. You don’t want to indulge yourself, but somehow it’s a whole lot tougher to quit than you would have thought. Perhaps you’re finding that, more than ever, sex is filling your mind and affecting your heart.

. . . You will never stop until you see the monstrous nature of the sin you are committing. You will never stop until the sin is more horrifying to you than the commission of the sin is enjoyable. You will need to hate that sin before you can find freedom from it. That means you need more grace. You need to cry out to be changed so you do see the monstrous nature of this sin, and then you need to act, in faith that God will meet you with grace as you seek to cut off pornography and begin the reset.

. . . The first message of this book, then, is that you must see what porn is doing to your heart. You must recognize that the corruption of pornography is real and, despite the convenient and self-indulgent lies we can tell ourselves, that corruption is only going to get worse. The sin underlying the consumption of pornography will not stop escalating until it cripples your marriage, or until you die, or until you get too old and weak to care about sex. The only difference for single guys? The sin won’t stop escalating until it destroys any hope you will ever get married.

—Tim Challies, Sexual Detox: A Guide for Guys Who Are Sick of Porn (Cruciform Press, 2010), 15, 17–18, 21.

Sexual Detox is not a book of moralistic “do better” or therapeutic “live happier.” It offers straight talk about sin and death, grace and redemption.

Sexual Detox makes a thoroughly biblical theological attack on the poison that is pornography. In doing so, it strikes at the root of the problem: the sinful human heart. It reiterates the truism spoken by Albert Mohler that we do not have an alien problem in need of an inner solution, but an inner problem in need of an alien solution. The problem is our sin; the solution is Christ.

Sexual Detox takes in the big picture, offering, in addition to specific help with porn and the sin it breeds, a general theology of sex. So, while it is addressed to men, I believe it will be tremendously helpful to women, as well. This book will take women a long way towards an understanding of biblical sexuality, and I think I can say — without hyperbole — that this might be the last book about sex that any man needs to read, ever, and all in 108 small-format pages, readable in one sitting.

Buy this book. Buy extra copies. Get it into the hands of as many young men as you can. Learn it and live it.

Tim Challies on the message of the medium of digital technology:

According to Mark Federman, the message of a new technology, the ideology carried within it, is “the change in inter-personal dynamics that the innovation brings with it.” So the “message” of a particular television show is not the show itself, with all its dramatic scenes and storytelling, but the change in attitude or the change in thinking that the audience experiences after watching it. The “message” of a show like American Idol may have been not the music but the nastiness of one of its judges—a nastiness that quickly shaped and defined society. The message within the medium of the Internet may not be the e-commerce sites and videos and blogs we use every day but he way humans are increasingly seeing themselves and their relationships with others in terms of data and networks. The true message of these digital technologies is buried deep inside them and will eventually be revealed in time. We will see their effect in the ways we think differently act differently, and understand ourselves differently.

—Tim Challies, The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion (Zondervan,2011), 38–39.

This has been my primary concern as I use the internet — not the content related hazards, but the packaging. All the really great, useful content that I enjoy and from which I benefit so much is packaged in a way that caters to our get-it-fast-and-easy culture. Jigabytes of information have enabled me to accomplish things I otherwise never would have. It has also, to some extent, made me a lazy thinker. I don’t think it’s worth the trade.

Sometime around 1980–81, two brand new personal computers rolled into my high school in Montana, inciting much excitement. Until that day, few, if any, of us had ever seen such a thing. We had previously known computers as enormous monsters that filled entire rooms, storing and processing data for the military, high-tech industries, and the like. I remember seeing one of those colossal machines on a field trip. I can’t remember where, or who or what it served, but I remember the multiple units standing side-by-side, clicking and whirring loudly, recording data on reel-to-reel tapes. The desktop units in our school followed suit on a smaller scale, employing cassette tapes. They were ridiculously expensive, and did next to nothing. They included one or two games, but they were so unimaginative and crude that no one would have predicted that gaming would one day be a major portion of computer use. Computers were not toys. They were tools, useful for spy agencies, star ships, and businesses. Little did we know what the future held.

As Tim Challies writes, this has been the way new technology has always developed. And just as current technology may have metamorphosed into something far from its original purpose, new technologies that we adopt may change our lives in unintended ways. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a fact of which we ought to be wary.

When we create a new technology or add one to our lives, we may have a sense of how it will play out its hand, but rarely do things go exactly as we had planned. More often than not, the consequences are quite different from what we had expected.

This owes, at least in part, to the reality that the invention of a technology almost always precedes its function. Technology is generally created independently from the way it will eventually be used. It is usually only after a new technology is invented that we use our creativity and ingenuity to find ways of integrating it into our lives. This exacerbates its unintended consequences. If a technology was created specifically for business application and we adapt it to a worship service, we will see that there are some businesslike ideologies wrapped up in that technology (such as when we take PowerPoint from the boardroom to the sanctuary). The wise consumer of technology will realize that the technology he uses today, the technology he has come to love and depend on, will have unintended consequences in his life and in the world around him. He will look not just to the technology itself but to the function for which it was created, the problem it was originally supposed to address.

—Tim Challies, The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion (Zondervan,2011), 62.

Challies identifies a “new Gnosticism,” a way of life in which virtual relationships with mediated communication are preferred over real face-to-face relationships:

In The Soul in Cyberspace, Douglas Groothuis writes of a woman who suffers from a serious social phobia that has left her extremely anxious in social situations and, as a consequence, increasingly isolated and alone. But through the Internet she was able to find others who suffered from a similar condition, and together they have been able to interact and form a kind of community. Here they have found the friendship and fellowship that their conditions have denied them in the real world. Here, in a world without her body and all of its limitations, she has found a place to be herself.

But has this woman truly found freedom from the limitations of her flesh? There is a sense in which she has—she has been able to find a way of overcoming her inability to communicate. And yet, there is another sense in which she has not really found freedom at all because she is still bound by her condition, a condition that keeps her from finding and experiencing community in the real world. She is still a captive to the four walls that keep her from the world of flesh and blood. Cyberspace has provided a sense of community but has also furthered her captivity by giving her the illusion of freedom. That she believes she is now free from this limitation only shows just how captive she remains to its power. She has accepted the promise of Gnosticism—that life without the physical is as good or better than life within it. But this denies what the Bible tells us: “In the biblical teaching, matter is something not to be escaped but redeemed” [Groothuis]. Freedom without the body, freedom without what makes us whole and complete human beings, is really no freedom at all.

—Tim Challies, The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion (Zondervan,2011), 101–102.

This way of thinking is not exclusive to those, like the woman in the example above, suffer from abnormal phobias. If you are reading this post, chances are that you are among the millions whose communications are increasingly impersonal, mediated through email and text-message. We would be wise to consider the extent to which that is true, and examine ourselves to see if we prefer it that way.

Can any of us deny being affected to some extent as described below?

Here is one of the great dangers we face as Christians: With the ever-present distractions in our lives, we are quickly becoming a people of shallow thoughts, and shallow thoughts will lead to shallow living. There is a simple and inevitable progression at work here:

Distraction —> Shallow Thinking —> Shallow Living

All of this distraction is reshaping us in two dangerous ways. First, we are tempted to forsake quality for quantity, believing the lie that virtue comes through speed, productivity, and efficiency. We think that more must be better, and so we drive ourselves to do more, accomplish more, be more. And second, as this happens, we lose our ability to engage in deeper ways of thinking—concentrated, focused thought that requires time and cannot be rushed. Instead of focusing our efforts in a few directions, we give scant attention to many things, skimming instead of studying. We live rushed lives and forget how to move slowly, carefully, and thoughtfully through life.

The challenge facing us is clear. We need to relearn how to think, and we need to discipline ourselves to think deeply, conquering the distractions in our lives so that we can live deeply. We must rediscover how to be truly thoughtful Christians, as we seek to live with virtue in the aftermath of the digital explosion.

—Tim Challies, The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion (Zondervan,2011), 117.

What if Solomon had been an average guy, living today?

But Solomon wasn’t an average 21st century guy. He didn’t tweet. He took time to think, and so must we.

King Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived, and his life gave little indication of speed. Rather, his life showed the virtue of deliberate meditation, deliberate slowness. He knew 3,000 proverbs, each of which took time to commit to memory and each of which only had value in the time taken to ponder it. Here is just one example of how Solomon grew in wisdom and understanding:

I passed by the field of a sluggard,
by the vineyard of a man lacking sense,
and behold, it was all overgrown with thorns;
the ground was covered with nettles,
and its stone wall was broken down.
Then I saw and considered it;
I looked and received instruction.
A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest,
and poverty will come upon you like a robber,
and want like an armed man.

Proverbs 24:30–34

Here Solomon walks by a field and pauses to observe that it has become overgrown with thorns and that the wall surrounding it has fallen into decay. He sees that only a lazy man, a sluggard, a fool, would allow his land to fall into such a state. Even in the midst of his busy life as king, Solomon responds by taking the time to meditate on this, to consider it. And having done so, he receives divine instruction: “A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.” It was only through his willingness to slow down, to take time, that he drew a lesson from this foolish man and his misused land. Virtue was found not in hastening by but in taking time to slow down, to pause, to think. He did not immediately dash off a Twitter update or snap a photo to post to Facebook. He stopped; he watched; he learned.

The challenge facing us is clear. We need to relearn how to think, and we need to discipline ourselves to think deeply, conquering the distractions in our lives so that we can live deeply. We must rediscover how to be truly thoughtful Christians, as we seek to live with virtue in the aftermath of the digital explosion.

—Tim Challies, The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion (Zondervan, 2011), 122–123.