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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Luke

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Tears of a King

April 5, 2020 |

“It is not, then, God the grand co-commiserator who gives us the freedom to cry out, but God the Rock. This is the God we can trust with our pain, our confusion, and grief even when he gives no answers, precisely because he is big enough to be the only answer we need.” 

Derek Rishmawy, “The God Who Hears Our Lament”

 “Did you know Creation is talking to you?
Wherever you go and whatever you do?
God will keep giving you clue after clue
So you won’t forget to remember what’s true …
Let the whole earth remind you of what God has said
From the moment you wake up ’till you go to bed
Oh and even on days you forget what is true
Don’t forget to remember, God won’t forget you”

Ellie Holcomb, “Don’t Forget to Remember” 

“Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.”

Westley, The Princess Bride

The Heartbeat of Hope: The Good News Really Is Good

May 5, 2019 |

“The church’s great news to a dying world is that there is a living God, whose love for his creation is inexhaustible . . . The church has no other and no better message. This is her great declaration.”

Lewis Allen

“The world is drowning in its efforts at life; it does not need lifeguards who swim to it carrying barbells.”

Robert Farrar Capon

“The religious see God as useful; gospel-believing Christians see God as beautiful.”

Tim Keller

“I am throwing all my good works overboard, and lashing myself to the plank of free grace; for I hope to swim to glory on it.”

Charles Spurgeon

Giving Ourselves to the Ministry of the Word

October 22, 2017 |

“Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.”

—Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, 18

“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

“How dare we speak, if God has not spoken? By ourselves we have nothing to say. To address a congregation without any assurance that we are bearers of a divine message would be the height of arrogance and folly. It is when we are convinced that God is light (and so wanting to be known), that God has acted (and thus made himself known), and that God has spoken (and thus explained his actions), that we must speak and cannot remain silent. As Amos expressed it, ‘The lion has roared; who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken; who can but prophesy?’ (3:8) . . . God has spoken. If we are not sure of this, it would be better to keep our mouth shut. Once we are persuaded that God has spoken, however, then we too must speak. A compulsion rests upon us. Nothing and nobody will be able to silence us”

—John Stott, Between Two Worlds, 96

Getting, Having, and Giving

August 13, 2017 |

“Considering the full sweep of the Christian tradition, one would have to conclude that the most profane word we can utter is that word: mine.”

—William Willimon

“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc, is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.”

―C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity

“The trouble with being rich is that since you can solve with your checkbook virtually all practical problems that bedevil ordinary people, you are left in your leisure with nothing but the great human problems to contend with: how to be happy, how to love and be loved, how to find meaning and purpose in your life. In desperation the rich are continually tempted to believe that they can solve these problems too with their checkbooks, which is presumably what led Jesus to remark one day that for a rich man to get to Heaven is about as easy for a Cadillac to get through a revolving door.”

—Frederick Buechner

Preemptive Forgiveness

April 14, 2017 |

33”And when they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. 34And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And they cast lots to divide his garments.

—Luke 23:33-34

21”For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. 22Hecommitted no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. 23When 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. 24He  himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.”

—1 Peter 2:21-24

Worth the Wait

December 20, 2015 |

“Waiting on God isn’t about the suspension of meaning and purpose. It’s part of the meaning and purpose that God has brought into my life.  Waiting on God isn’t to be viewed as an obstruction in the way of the plan.  Waiting is an essential part of the plan.  For the child of God, waiting isn’t simply about what the child will receive at the end of his wait.  No, waiting is much more purposeful, efficient, and practical.  Waiting is fundamentally about what we will become as we wait.” —Paul David Tripp

“Waiting is active. Most of us think of waiting as something very passive, a hopeless state determined by events totally out of our hands. But there is none of this passivity in scripture. Those who are waiting are waiting very actively. They know that what they are waiting for is growing from the ground on which they are standing. That’s the secret. The secret of waiting is the faith that the seed has been planted, that something has begun. Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it.” —Henri Nouwen

“It’s hard to wait, so hard to wait.” —Flo Paris

The Pleasure of God

December 13, 2015 |

Christ came to prove that God came to tell the truth, that God keeps his promises. Christmas means God can be trusted.  —John Piper

Nothing is more wonderful for a sinner to receive than mercy.  —Philip Ryken

We can recognize Jesus the same way the shepherds recognized him: by his humility. When we see him wrapped in the swaddling cloths of his humanity – and even more, when we see him dying in the naked agony of the cross – we know he is the Christ God has sent to save us.  —Philip Ryken

Praise Changes Things

December 6, 2015 |

Sabbath is the stranger you’ve always known. It’s the place of homecoming you’ve rarely or never visited, but which you’ve been missing forever. You recognize it the moment you set eyes on it. It’s the gift that surprises you, not by its novelty, but by its familiarity. It’s the song you never sang but, hearing it now, know inside out, its words and melody, its harmonies, its rhythm, the way the tune quickens just before the chorus bursts. Its been asleep in you all this time, waiting for the right kiss to wake it.

Life is meant to be much different — fuller, richer, deeper, slower — from what it is.
— The Rest of God, Mark Buchanan

But in fact the real difficulty, because the supreme mystery with which the gospel confronts us, does not lie here at all. It lies, not in the Good Friday message of atonement, nor in the Easter message of resurrection, but in the Christmas message of incarnation. The really staggering Christian claim is that Jesus of Nazareth was God made man — the second person of the Godhead became the ‘second man’ (I Corinthians 15:47), determining human destiny, the second representative head of the race, and that He took humanity without loss of deity, so that Jesus of Nazareth was as truly and fully divine as He was human. Here are two mysteries for the price of one — the plurality of persons within the unity of God, and the union of Godhead and manhood in the person of Jesus. It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. ‘The Word was made flesh’ (John 1:14);God became man; the divine Son became a Jew, the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. And there was no illusion or deception in this; the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the incarnation.
— Knowing God, J.I. Packer

What’s in a Song?

November 29, 2015 |

Hymns are not only powerful, they sneak into our soul. As William Cowper sings, “Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings; it is the Lord who rises with healing in His wings.” William Cowper was well aware of the power of hymns, as he wrote in a letter to a friend, “It is a noble thing to be a poet. It makes all the world so lively. I might have preached more sermons than even Tillotson did and better, and the world would have been still fast asleep. But a volume of verse is a fiddle that puts the universe in motion.” Hymns have this ability to sneak in undetected and surprise us! And we desperately need the truth of the mercy of God to break through, to reform us, to restore our sanity, to open our eyes to help us see Jesus as beautiful and believable—in short, to shape us as a people of God.
In her book A Royal Waste of Time, Marva Dawn tells of Vaclav Havel, a playwright who was also the president of the Czech Republic. He was asked how the revolution to overthrow communism in the Czech Republic was bloodless and yet had experienced real staying power. He simply replied, “We had our parallel society. And in that parallel society, we wrote our plays and sang our songs and read our poems, until we knew the truth so well that we could go out into the streets of Prague and say, ‘We don’t believe your lies anymore!’ And communism had to fall.”
Isn’t that a beautiful picture of what worship should be about? We gather to sing our songs so we will know the truth so well that we can go out into the world and say, “We don’t believe your lies anymore! We won’t be squeezed into your mold!” And so we can speak to our fearful heart and say, “Heart, I don’t believe your lies anymore!” (or as Charles Wesley put it, “Arise, my soul, arise! Shake off your guilty fear!”), because Jesus can trump even what my heart says! And Jesus does trump our hearts as He becomes beautiful and believable to you. That is why we gather in worship.”
—Kevin Twit

“Chant down Babylon with music!” —Bob Marley