Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

Sunday Schedule:

9:30 a.m. – Sunday School
10:30 a.m. – Morning Worship Service
5:45 p.m. – Outdoor Vespers Service

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Genesis

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‘Work’s Work’ and Other Myths

July 19, 2020 |

26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Genesis 1:26-28

Call the Sabbath a Delight!

July 12, 2020 |

“The Sabbath is not a fast, but a feast, a day for rejoicing in the works of a gracious God, and joy must be its temper throughout.  Joy suits no person so much as a saint, and it becomes no season as well as a Sabbath.” 

J.I. Packer

“O day of rest and gladness, O day of joy and light,
O balm of care and sadness, most beautiful, most bright,
On you the high and lowly, through ages joined in tune,
Sing ‘Holy, holy, holy’ to the great God triune.” 

Christopher Wordsworth

“Sunday feels odd without church in the morning. It’s the time in the week when we take our bearings, and, if we miss it, we’re just following our noses.” 

Garrison Keillor

“People who keep Sabbath live all seven days differently.” 

Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

O Day of Rest and Gladness!

July 5, 2020 |

“Sabbath is about God interfering with all the things you think you need to get done so that you can focus on what He has done for you.” 

Eugene Peterson

“When we rest we acknowledge that all our striving will, of itself, do nothing. Rest means letting the world pass us by for a time. Genuine rest requires acknowledging that God and our brothers and sisters can survive without us. It requires recognizing our own insufficiency and handing over responsibility.  It is truly surrendering to the ways of God. It is a moment of celebration, when we acknowledge that blessing comes only from the hand of God. That is why rest requires faith. It is also why salvation can be pictured as rest. When we rest we accept God’s grace: we do not seek to earn; we receive. We do not justify; we are justified.” 

Paul Marshall

“At least at night,
Let your heart have a rest . . .
At least at night,
stop your career,
calm those desires that nearly madden you,
see if you can manage to put your dreams to sleep.
Yield yourself,
body and soul,
yield yourself really, truly and completely into God’s hands!” 

Brazilian pastor’s poem

“Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD keeps watch over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives to his beloved sleep.”  

Psalm 127: 1-2

A Creature in Time

June 21, 2020 |

26 Then God said, “Let us make man[a] in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Genesis 1:26-28

1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

Genesis 2:1-3

1 Lord, you have been our dwelling place
in all generations.
2 Before the mountains were brought forth,
or ever you had formed the earth and the world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

3 You return man to dust
and say, “Return, O children of man!”
4 For a thousand years in your sight
are but as yesterday when it is past,
or as a watch in the night.

10 The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away.

12 So teach us to number our days
that we may get a heart of wisdom.
13 Return, O Lord! How long?
Have pity on your servants!
14 Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
15 Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
and for as many years as we have seen evil.
16 Let your work be shown to your servants,
and your glorious power to their children.
17 Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
and establish the work of our hands upon us;
yes, establish the work of our hands!

Psalm 90:1-4, 10, 12-17

The Heartbeat of Hope: The Embrace of the Father

May 19, 2019 |

“Salvation is membership in the family of God . . .The creation of a family with children is the reason for all of God’s activity.  This is how he intends to show his glory . . . Our sonship to God is the apex of creation and the goal of redemption . . . The story of Paradise lost becoming Paradise regained is the story of God’s grace bringing us from alienation from him to membership in his family . . . Our self-image, if it is to be biblical, will begin just here. God is my Father (the Christian’s self-image always begins with the knowledge of God and who he is!); I am one of his children (I know my real identity); his people are my brothers and sisters (I recognize the family to which I belong and have discovered my deepest ‘roots’).”

Sinclair Ferguson

“You sum up the whole of the New Testament teaching in a single phrase, if you speak of it as a revelation of the Fatherhood of the Holy Creator. In the same way, 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 the he does not understand Christianity very well at all.”

J.I. Packer

“If the love of the father will not make a child delight in him, what will?”

John Owen

The Mothers of Jesus: Eve

December 2, 2018 |

“Christmas, then, is not a dream, a moment of escapism.  Christmas is the reality, which shows up the rest of ‘reality.’ And for Christmas, here, read Christianity. Either Jesus is the Lord of the world, and all reality makes sense in his light, or he is dangerously irrelevant to the problems and possibilities of today’s world. There is no middle ground. Either Jesus was, and is, the Word of God, or he, and the stories Christians tell about him, are lies.”

N.T. Wright

“‘Advent’ means ‘coming’ of course, and the promise of Advent is that what is coming is an unimaginable invasion. The mythology of our age has to do with flying saucers and invasions from outer space, and that is unimaginable enough. But what is upon us now is even more so—a close encounter not of the third kind but of a different kind altogether. An invasion of holiness. That is what Advent is about. What is coming upon the world is the Light of the World. It is Christ. That is the comfort of it. The challenge of it is that it has not come yet. Only the hope for it has come, only the longing for it. In the meantime we are in the dark, and the dark, God knows, is also in us. We watch and wait for a holiness to heal us and hallow us, to liberate us from the dark. Advent is like the hush in a theater just before the curtain rises. It is like the hazy ring around the winter moon that means the coming of snow which will turn the night to silver. Soon. But for the time being, our time, darkness is where we are.”

Frederick Buechner

The Sign and Seal of God’s Promise

October 29, 2017 |

“A sacrament is an outward sign by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of His good will towards us in order to sustain the weakness of our faith, and we in turn attest our piety toward Him in the presence of the Lord and of His angels and before men . . . A sacrament is never without a preceding promise but it is joined to it as a sort of appendix, with the purpose of confirming and sealing the promise itself, and of making it more evident to us and in a sense ratifying it.  By this means God provides first for our ignorance and dullness, then for our weakness … as our faith is slight and feeble unless it be propped [up] on all sides and sustained by every means, it trembles, wavers, totters, and at last gives way.”

—John Calvin

“Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.”

—Galway Kinnell

Q: What is baptism?
A: Baptism is a sacrament, wherein the washing with water, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, doth signify and seal our ingrafting into Christ, and partaking of the benefits of the covenant of grace, and our engagement to be the Lord’s.

—Westminster Shorter Catechism 94

Lust: the Disordered Love

August 27, 2017 |

“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 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

Envy: The Joyless Sin

July 9, 2017 |

“Of all the deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.”

—Jason Epstein

“An envier resents; a coveter desires. Of course, an envier may begin his career as a coveter. He may begin by hankering for someone else’s goods, just as Cain may have originally wanted the blessing God gave to Abel. But failed covetousness is likely to curdle into envy: the envier is often a disgruntled coveter.  If the envier can come away with another’s goods, so much the better, but this is an incidental advantage. What the envier really wants is to spoil something – or someone.”

—Cornelius Plantinga

“An envier offers a backward intercessory prayer for his rival: ‘Drain his swimming pool, O God, but fill his basement.’”

—Cornelius Plantinga