Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

Sunday Schedule:

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

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Hebrews

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Seeing Him Who is Invisible

January 8, 2023 |

“The life of Moses presents a series of striking antitheses. He was the child of a slave, and the son of a queen. He was born in a hut, and lived in a palace. He inherited poverty, and enjoyed unlimited wealth. He was the leader of armies, and the keeper of flocks. He was the mightiest of warriors, and the meekest of men. He was educated in the court, and dwelt in the desert. He had the wisdom of Egypt, and the faith of a child. He was fitted for the city, and wandered in the wilderness. He was tempted with the pleasures of sin, and endured the hardships of virtue. He was backward in speech, and talked with God. He had the rod of a shepherd, and the power of the Infinite. He was a fugitive from Pharaoh, and an ambassador from Heaven. He was the giver of the Law, and the forerunner of Grace. He died alone on Mount Moab, and appeared with Christ in Judea. No man assisted at his funeral, yet God buried him. The fire has gone out of Mount Sinai, but the lightning is still in his Law. His lips are silent, but his voice yet speaks. The history of such a life is well worth attention, and the principles which underlie its antitheses, the closest study.”

I.M. Haldeman

 

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” 

Hebrews 11:1

Not Neglecting Such a Great Savior

May 1, 2022 |

“Over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living, which we know we are passing by. Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power.” 

Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion

“God speaks to us: not only to move us to do what he wants, but to enable us to know him so that we may love him.  Therefore God sends his word to us in the character of both information and invitation.  It comes to woo us as well as to instruct us; it not merely puts us in the picture of what God has done and is doing but also calls us into personal communion with the loving Lord himself.” 

JI Packer, Knowing God, 110.

“Of this gospel, I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace . . . to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ.” 

Ephesians 3:7-8

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

The Eyes and Face, the Heart and Hands of God

January 24, 2021 |

“I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene . . . Jesus is too colossal for the pen of the phrase-mongers, however artful . . . No man can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word.” 

Albert Einstein

“At the cross, the most powerful man who ever lived submitted to the most brutal death ever died, to save the powerless. Christianity does not glorify violence. It humiliates it.” 

Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity

Larry King, when asked if he could interview anyone from all of history, said, “Jesus Christ . . . I would like to ask him if he was indeed virgin-born. The answer to that question would define history for me.”

 

“You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” 

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy

July 26, 2020 |

“I believe that God made me for a purpose—[to be a missionary to] China. But he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

Chariots of Fire

“Play is meaningful in itself. It justifies and rewards itself…. It pushes us to explore the world and to form bonds with new people. Play offers respite from the tyranny of work and  routine.”

Dan Doriani

“The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is to cry Father! from a full heart.”

George MacDonald

Renewing Good News

May 10, 2020 |

“It is high time that Christians should rediscover that the very heart of their faith is that Jesus Christ did not come to make a contribution to the religious storehouse of mankind, but that in him God reconciled the world unto himself.” 

Dr. W.A. Visser’t Hooft, first General Secretary to the World Council of Churches.

“Jesus is not ‘the Great’; he is the only. He has no peers, no rivals, and no successors.” 

John Stott

“I am grateful for Shinto, for Buddhism, and for Confucianism. I owe much to these faiths . . . Yet these three faiths utterly failed to minister to my heart’s deepest needs. I was a pilgrim journeying upon a long road that had no turning. I was weary. I was footsore. I wandered through a dark and dismal world where tragedies were thick . . . Buddhism teaches great compassion . . . but since the beginning of time, who has declared, ‘this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many unto the remission of sins’?” 

Toyohiko Kagawa

“The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore – on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him ‘meek and mild’ and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.” 

Dorothy Sayers

Waking Up to God’s Presence

August 4, 2019 |

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.”

Annie Dillard

“The meritocracy gives you brands to attach to—your prestigious school, your nice job title—which work well as status markers and seem to replace the urgent need to find out who you are.”

David Brooks

“[we] are overwhelmed by a sense of frustration and bewilderment and a general loss of direction in life…[we] ask about the purpose of living. Do we exist merely in order to eat, drink, sleep, work, and die? Or is there meaning to life?… Why [are we] here in this world? Skillfully using a well-known passage in Psalm 8, our author reminds his readers that man is not as he was meant to be.”

Raymond Brown

“We’re all gonna die.”

Sufjan Stevens

Growing True

October 1, 2017 |

“The certainty and completeness of God’s mercy [is] the magnet of confession . . . we run to his arms with our sin-sick hearts because we know there is grace sufficient, boundless, and free already there. We repent because we are forgiven, not to gain forgiveness . . . we are forgiven because he was forsaken, not because our contrition is adequate . . . we are cherished children of God despite our constant waywardness and the inevitable inadequacy of our confession.”

—Bryan Chapell

  “Absolution is neither a response to a suitably worthy confession, nor the acceptance of a reasonable apology. Absolvere in Latin means not only to loosen, to free, to acquit; it also means to dispose of, to complete, to finish. When God pardons, he does not say he understands our weakness or makes allowances for our errors; rather he disposes of, he finishes with, the whole of our dead life and raises us up with a new one.  He does not so much deal with our derelictions as he does drop them down the black hole of Jesus’ death. He forgets our sins in the darkness of the tomb. He remembers our iniquities no more in the oblivion of Jesus’ expiration. He finds us, in short, in the desert of death, not in the garden of improvement; and in the power of Jesus’ resurrection, he puts us on his shoulders rejoicing and brings us home . . . The work of redemption is done entirely by the redeemer, and not at all by the redeemed.”

—Robert Farrar Capon

“What I envy most about you Christians is your forgiveness.  I have nobody to forgive me.”

—Margaret Laski

A Hope That’s Worth More Than Success

August 30, 2015 |

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some intangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.  —David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water”

The Grip of Hope

August 9, 2015 |

In the ancient world, the anchor was the symbol of hope. Epictetus says: “a ship should never depend on one anchor, or a life on one hope.” Pythagoras said: “Wealth is a weak anchor; fame is still weaker. What then are the anchors which are strong? Wisdom, great-heartedness, courage – these are the anchors which no storm can shake.” The writer to the Hebrews insists that the Christian possesses the greatest hope in the world. —William Barclay, The Letter to the Hebrews