Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

Sunday Schedule:

8:30 a.m. – Worship
10:00 a.m. – Sunday School
10:15 a.m. – Hope Café
11:00 a.m. – Worship

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Following Jesus Into Broken Places

August 22, 2021 |

“Anything you are passionate about, you talk about!  A man who never says a word about the lady that he loves ought to be questioned.  A lady who is too embarrassed to bring up or ever mention the name of the one she says she loves ought to be questioned, because that which you are passionate about you talk about.  There is no greater message and there is no greater person than the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ!  God has invited us to be passionate about the gospel because we are passionate about Him.  We are in desperate need today for passionate Christians who don’t need to apologize.”

Dr. Tony Evans

“God uses men (and women) who are weak and feeble enough to lean on him.”

Hudson Taylor

“If a commission by an earthly king is considered an honor, how can a commission by a Heavenly King be considered a sacrifice?”

David Livingston

“Oh sing to the LORD a new song; sing to the LORD, all the earth!  Sing to the LORD, bless his name; tell of his salvation from day to day.  Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples!”

Psalm 96:1-3

“God REVEALS His glory to all nations in order to RECEIVE glory from all peoples through worship.”

Operation World View

“You did not choose me, but I chose you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide…”

 Jesus (John 15:16)

Good News About Judgment

February 14, 2021 |

“The picture of Jesus as the coming Judge is the central feature of another absolutely vital and non-negotiable Christian belief: that there will indeed be a judgment in which the creator God will set the world right once and for all. The word judgment carries negative overtones for a good many people in our liberal and postliberal world. We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s coming judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands. In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.” 

NT Wright, Surprised By Hope, 137.

“If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make a final end to violence- that God would not be worthy of worship… If I don’t believe that there is a God who will eventually put all things right, I will take up the sword and will be sucked into the endless vortex of retaliation. Only if I am sure that there’s a God who will right all wrongs and settle all accounts perfectly do I have the power to refrain.” 

Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace

“Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.  He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.” 

1 Peter 2: 21-23

The Presence of His Absence

February 7, 2021 |

“Lo! the incarnate God, ascended,
Pleads the merit of His blood;
Venture on Him, venture wholly;
Let no other trust intrude:
None but Jesus, none but Jesus,
Can do helpless sinners good.”

Joseph Hart

“The greatest impediment to the mission of the church is not the evils outside of the church (in our culture and our city), but the cynicism and apathy inside the church.” 

Rev. Sandy Willson

“Christ’s intercession reflects how profoundly personal our rescue is. If we knew about Christ’s death and resurrection but not his intercession, we would be tempted to view our salvation in overly formulaic terms. It would feel more mechanical than is true to who Christ truly is. His interceding for us reflects his heart . . . The intercession of Christ is his heart connecting our heart to the Father’s heart . . . What’s the point of saying Christ saves ‘to the uttermost’? We who know our hearts understand. We are to-the-uttermost sinners. We need a to-the-uttermost Savior.” 

Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly

How to Live in the Middle of the Story

November 25, 2019 |

“We all long for Eden and are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature is soaked with the sense of exile.”

J.R.R. Tolkien

 “The enthusiasms of my conversion have worn off. For whole stretches since the dream, since the baptism, my belief has faltered, my sense of God’s closeness has grown strained, my efforts at living in accord with what I take to be the call of the gospel have come undone…. Once upon a time, I thought I had arrived. Now I have arrived at a middle.”

Lauren Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis

 “In Jesus Christ we witness the long-awaited vindication and effective demonstration of God’s kingship in the world.  The coming of Christ is the climax of the whole history of redemption as recorded in the Scriptures. The rightful king has established a beachhead in his territory and calls on his subjects to press his claims ever farther in creation.”

Al Wolters, Creation Regained

 “Is there nothing to sing about today? Then borrow a song from tomorrow; sing of what is yet to be.”

Charles Spurgeon

Living as the Blood-Bought Church

November 17, 2019 |

“Ministry is not first about telling people what to do, but about telling them who they are, so that obedience will flow out of celebration.”

Paul David Tripp

“It shouldn’t be an easy walk from the pew to the weight bench, but it is made easy by a Christianity that looks more like a spiritual fitness program than a Gospel balm . . . The church is not like CrossFit; it is more like the hospital, or even the morgue. It is not a place where bad people go to be made good, but a place where bad people are loved in their badness.”

Conor Gwin, “My Church is Not CrossFit”

“The church is not in the world to teach sinners how to straighten up and fly right. That’s the world’s business; and on the whole it does a fairly competent—even gleefully aggressive—job of it. The church is supposed to be in the forgiveness business. Its job in filling pulpits is to find derelict nobodies who are willing to admit that they’re sinners and mean it. It’s supposed to take sheep who can be nothing but lost … and stand them up to proclaim that lostness, deadness, uselessness, and nothingness are God’s cup of tea. The church’s job is not to go around implying that those desperate states are conditions we must get over as quickly as possible once we’ve been found; its true work is to invite us all to go moonstruck over the news that the one operative consideration in our life is the Passion of the Finder to find.”

Robert Farrar Capon

Knowing the Known God

November 10, 2019 |

“I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”

Anne Lamott

“Longing for God arises in every human soul because it is part of the soul’s standard equipment. We have been endowed by our Creator with a sensus divinitatis (‘a sense of divinity’), wrote John Calvin, and everywhere in the world, even when it expresses itself as idolatry, the sense of divinity is the seed of religion. God has made us for himself. Our sense of God runs in us like a stream, even though we divert it toward other objects. We human beings want God even when we think that what we really want is a green valley, or a good time from our past, or a loved one. Of course we do want these things and persons, but we also want what lies behind them. Our ‘inconsolable secret,’ says C.S. Lewis, is that we are full of yearnings, sometimes shy and sometimes passionate, that point us beyond the things of earth to the ultimate reality of God.”

Cornelius Plantinga

“You don’t experience God; you get to know him . . . You enjoy him. He is, after all, a person.”

Paul Miller

Even Worshipers of God Need Jesus

November 3, 2019 |

“Before grace renews the heart, there is grace preparing us for grace.”

Charles Spurgeon

“The gospel declares that no matter how dutiful or prayerful we are, we can’t save ourselves. What Jesus did was sufficient.”

Brennan Manning

“I didn’t start out understanding that hospitality was this robust practice. I thought of it more as entertaining, coffee and donuts or casseroles or whatever, but hospitality is significant when you look at the Scriptures. It’s significant, and it wasn’t coffee and donuts. It was struggling with Jews and Gentiles and how people were going to get along together and be in the church together and be one body.”

Christine Pohl

Free Grace Alone From the First to the Last

October 27, 2019 |

“Grace is free, but it ain’t cheap.”

Pierce Pettis

“No one has helped to provide salvation; God has done it all himself. The banquet of mercy is served up by one host.”

Charles Spurgeon

“The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof grace–bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home free before they started… Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale.”

Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon and Three

Superstition and the Living God

October 20, 2019 |

“No room remains empty for long.  If God is driven out, the gods come trooping in.”

Lesslie Newbigin

“Idols are non-gods and as such are much more congenial to us than God, for we not only have the pleasure of making them, using our wonderful imaginations and skills in creative ways, but also of controlling them.  They are gods with all the God taken out so that we can continue to be our own gods.”

Eugene Peterson

“Those who make idols become like them; so do all who trust in them. O Israel, trust in the LORD!”

Psalm 115: 8-9a

“Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love . . . Salvation belongs to the LORD!”

Jonah 2: 8-9

The Village Church and the Global Gospel

October 13, 2019 |

“World evangelization requires the whole church to take the whole Gospel to the whole world.”

The Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization

 “Mission means inviting all the peoples of the earth to hear the music of God’s future and dance to it today.”

Christopher J.H. Wright

“C.T. Studd, born to privilege, gifted athletically, and trained at Eton and Cambridge, turned his back on wealth and served Christ for decades against unimaginable odds, first in China and then in Africa. He penned these words:

Some want to live within the sound
of church or chapel bell;
I want to build a rescue shop
within a yard of hell.”

D.A. Carson