Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

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9:00 a.m. – Worship
10:15 a.m. – Hope Café
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Exodus

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Coveting vs Longing

August 21, 2016 |

 “Comparison is the thief of joy.” — Theodore Roosevelt

“Whatever worldly thing we may covet – zealously striving to obtain and then retain – never seems to bring an end to our   desires. Covetousness, envy, jealousy, and greed always escalate into a vicious spiral, as we seek greater and greater gratification but find less and less contentment. . . . Striving to acquire the things of the world not only does not bring lasting happiness and peace, but it drives us to seek more. When “all we’ve ever wanted” is grounded in the temporal trappings of this world, it is never enough!” ― Brent Top

 “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” ― C.S. Lewis

And he said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” — Jesus, Luke 12:15

The Truth Will Set You Free

August 14, 2016 |

“We embrace lies—reams of them—about our bodies, our money, our sexuality, our food, our vocations, and our relationships. The temptation to construe reality along the contours of our lies—to literally build a false creation—is everywhere, and never more so than now. In fact, one could argue that the chief destructive force of contemporary Western culture is the unparalleled power and fertility of its lies. We are locked away in a hall of mirrors.

Redemption, however, is about learning to hate the lies, about learning to see again. And part of the calling of God’s people is to name the parody as it presents itself to us and make war upon it. We look for the particular lies that lead us (and our communities) into the poison fog of non-reality and then go after them (in word and deed) with a battle axe. We find the anti-Eden and burn it down. Hating is part of our task in the world.”—Greg Thompson

“An honest answer is like a kiss on the lips.” —Proverbs 24: 26

The Big Gulp

August 7, 2016 |

“You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.”― John Bunyan

… not just what is necessary for bare subsistence, but also what is necessary for living a life “becoming” or appropriate to human beings. The point is not to live on crusts of bread with bare walls and threadbare clothes. The point is that a fully human life is lived in a way free from being enslaved to our stuff.― Rebecca DeYoung

“It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.”― Mother Teresa

“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.”― Winston S. Churchill

“Until we can receive with an open heart, we’re never really giving with an open heart. When we attach judgment to receiving help, we knowingly or unknowingly attach judgment to giving help.”― Brené Brown

Be Generous

July 31, 2016 |

If we look at mankind in all its conditions, it is nothing but a vast wide stable full of great thieves.—Martin Luther

Every time I give, I declare money does not control me. Perpetual generosity is a perpetual de-deification of money.—Kent Hughes

Any temporal possession can be turned into everlasting wealth. Whatever is given to Christ is immediately touched with immortality.—A. W. Tozer

Give away your life; you’ll find life given back, but not merely given back—given back with bonus and blessing. Giving, not getting, is the way. Generosity begets generosity.”—Jesus, Luke 6:38, The Message

Sexual Healing

July 24, 2016 |

“I am a riddle to myself; a heap of inconsistencies.” —John Newton

“Though sin wars, it shall not reign; and though it breaks our peace, it cannot separate us from his love. Nor is it inconsistent with his holiness and perfection, to manifest his favor to such poor defiled creatures, or to admit them to communion with himself; for they are not considered as in themselves, but as one with Jesus, to whom they have fled for refuge, and by whom they live by faith.” —John Newton

“The path of the righteous is like the light of the dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. The way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know over what they stumble.” —Proverbs 4: 18-19

“The fire of lust’s pleasures must be fought with the fire of God’s  pleasures.  If we try to  fight the fire of lust with prohibitions and threats alone – even the terrible warnings of Jesus – we will fail.  We must fight it with a massive promise of superior happiness.  We must swallow up the little flicker of  lust’s pleasure in the conflagration of holy satisfaction . . . Our aim is not only to avoid something erotic but also to gain something excellent.” —John Piper

 

The Language of the Heart

July 17, 2016 |

“Love is the seed in you of every virtue and of all acts deserving  punishment.”—Dante

“The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of tasting without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.”—CS Lewis, Mere Christianity.

“We use an unfortunate idiom when we say of a man prowling the streets, that “he wants a woman.” Strictly speaking, a woman is what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be a necessary apparatus… [Real love] makes a man really want, not [even] a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious fashion, the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.”—CS Lewis, The Four Loves.

“It’s more than just words that got spoken; There was the language of the heart.”—David Wilcox

Choose Life

July 10, 2016 |

“A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.”  —Isaiah 42: 3

“God himself did not despise humanity, but became man for men’s sake.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“You can survive on your own.  You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own.  But you cannot become human on your own.  Surely that is why, in Jesus’ sad joke, the rich man has as hard a time getting into Paradise as that camel through the needle’s eye.  Because with his credit card in his pocket, the rich man is so effective at getting for himself everything that he needs that he does not see that what he needs more than anything else in the world can be had only as a gift.  He does not see that the one thing a clenched fist cannot do is accept, even from God himself, a helping hand.”—Frederick Buechner

“But all the while, there was one thing we most needed even from the start, and certainly will need from here on out into the New Jerusalem: the ability to take our freedom seriously and act on it, to live not in fear of mistakes but in the knowledge that no mistake can hold a candle to the love that draws us home. My repentance, accordingly, is not so much for my failings but for the two-bit attitude toward them by which I made them more sovereign than grace. Grace – the imperative to hear the music, not just listen for errors – makes all infirmities occasions of glory.” —Robert Farrar Capon

Where Does Your Anger Take You?

June 26, 2016 |

Anger is only one letter short of danger. —Eleanor Roosevelt

I would rather be mad than sad. —Anonymous

God invites us to see the dark parts of our heart and face that our unrighteous anger, whether directed at others or ourselves, is always a condemnation of Him. And what is His response? We still might expect Him to scold and condemn or worse, attack or abandon us. But in fact, the marvel of the gospel is that He turns His wrath not against us, but against His own son, Jesus Christ. Our unrighteous anger is not condoned nor overlooked; it is a rebellion that our elder Brother paid for rather than allowing us to face the just wrath of God. —Dan Allender

Righteous anger warns, invites for the greater work of redemption. —Dan Allender

The Rule and Reign of Honor

June 19, 2016 |

“Optimism hopes for the best without any guarantee of its arriving and is often no more than whistling in the dark. Christian hope, by contrast, is faith looking ahead to the fulfillment of the promises of God, as when the Anglican burial service inters the corpse ‘in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God’s own commitment, that the best is yet to come.”― J.I. Packer

“You sum up the whole of New Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one’s holy Father. If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity  very well at all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. ‘Father’ is the Christian name for God. Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of  adoption.”― J.I. Packer, Knowing God

Parented by God

June 12, 2016 |

“… [In] writing some thoughts about a father … I feel as though I’m    writing a book about a troll under a bridge or a dragon. For me, a father was nothing more than a character in a fairy tale. … The sad thing is, as a kid, I wondered why I couldn’t have a dragon, but I never wondered why I didn’t have a father.” —Donald Miller, Father Fiction

“Today I wonder why it is God refers to Himself as ‘Father’ at all. This, to me, in light of the earthly representation of the role, seems a marketing mistake. Why would God want to call Himself Father when so many fathers abandon their children?” —Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

“Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.” —Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child