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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Matthew

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Renewing Discipleship: Hearing and Doing the Word

May 22, 2022 |

“The greatest single secret of spiritual development lies in personal, humble, believing, obedient response to the Word of God. It is as God speaks to us through his Word that his warnings can bring us to conviction of sin, his promises to assurance of forgiveness, and his commands to amendment of life. We live and grow by his Word.” 

John Stott

“Our bodies, our pleasures, our fears, our fatigue, our friendships, our fights – these are in fact the stuff of our formation and transformation into the frail but infinitely dignified creatures we were meant to be and shall become. Our moments of exaltation and our stifled yawns – somehow they go together, part of the whole life that we were meant to offer to God day by day, as well as Sunday by Sunday, the life that God has taken into his own life. It is the life that Christ himself assumed, and thus rescued and redeemed.” 

Andy Crouch, in Liturgy of the Ordinary, by Tish Harrison Warren 

“Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?” 

Jesus, Luke 6:46

When the Anger of Jesus is Also the Welcome of God

March 28, 2021 |

“Come to your Temple here with liberation
And overturn these tables of exchange,
Restore in me my lost imagination,
Begin in me for good the pure change.”

Malcolm Guite

“Ponder the one truth that no one can reveal to you except God: he loves you just as much while you are sinning as he does while you are praying—probably more. That truth will never free you to sin; it will only free you to worship.”

Larry Crabb

“Almost everything that corrupts us is something we use to fill some kind of ache, some kind of emptiness…. And the joy of the Christian life is that those aches, those needs, that emptiness that we’re going to encounter because we’re human, is ultimately met in Christ, and that everything that we try to fill it with that is not Christ will never really fill it.”

Rich Mullins

The Disappointing, Disenchanting, and Dearly-loved Bride of Christ

March 7, 2021 |

“To be in Christ, is, by definition, to be part of something much bigger, more comprehensive, and more wonderful than you.”

Rankin Wilbourne

“Membership in a local church means joining your imperfect self to many other imperfect selves to form an imperfect community that, through Jesus, embarks on a journey toward a better future . . . together.”

Scott Sauls

“He can no longer have God for his father, who has not the church for his mother.”

Cyprian of Carthage

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 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

Waiting and Working for Heaven

June 14, 2020 |

“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

“Most respectable Christians do have the biblical habit of praying for the kingdom to come, but when their lives are good their prayers for the kingdom sometimes fade. People whisper their prayers for the kingdom, so that God can’t quite hear them. ‘Your kingdom come,’ they say, ‘but not right away.’ When our earthly kingdoms have had a good year, we don’t necessarily long for the kingdom of God to break in.  We like our own setup just fine.” 

Cornelius Plantinga

“If we believe in the kingdom of God we will pray and we will hope for those without much hope left. We will drive through the fog of doubt that descends on even the keenest believers . . . We will work and study in the same direction as we hope. According to Lewis Smedes, hoping for others is hard, but not the hardest.  Praying for others is hard, but not the hardest. The hardest task for people who believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ is in living the sort of life that makes people say, ‘Ah, so that’s how people are going to live when righteousness takes over our world.’” 

Cornelius Plantinga

Renew: Expressing Christ’s Kingdom

May 24, 2020 |

“A debtor to mercy alone,
Of covenant mercy I sing;
Nor fear, with Thy righteousness on,
My person and offering to bring.
The terrors of law and of God
With me can have nothing to do;
My Savior’s obedience and blood
Hide all my transgressions from view.” 

Augustus Toplady

“Honestly, I want to be like Christ. But honestly, I want to be like the Christ who turned the water into wine, not the Christ who thirsted on the cross. I want to be the clothed Christ, not the one whose garment was stripped and gambled away. I want to be the Christ who fed the five thousand, not the one who hungered for forty days in the wilderness. I want to be the free Christ, walking through the wheatfields with His disciples, not the imprisoned Christ who was deserted by them . . . This is the dark side of Christianity, the side we don’t see when we sign up. That if we want to be like Christ, we have to embrace both sides of His life. What else could it mean when the Bible talks about the “fellowship of His sufferings?”

Ken Gire, The Reflective Life

“He who is forgiven little, loves little.”

Luke 7:47

Renew: Christ’s Kingdom

May 17, 2020 |

“Grace is God loving, God stooping, God coming to the rescue, God giving himself generously in and through Jesus Christ.” 

John Stott

“No matter how much we give lip service to the notion of free grace and dying love, we do not like it. It is just too …  indiscriminate.  It lets rotten sons and crooked tax farmers and common tarts into the kingdom, and it thumbs its nose at really good people.  And it does that, gallingly, for no more reason than the Gospel’s shabby exaltation of dumb trust over worthy works.” 

Robert Capon

“Grace cannot prevail … until our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed.” 

Robert Capon

“Savior, if of Zion’s city,
I through grace a member am,
Let the world deride or pity,
I will glory in Thy name.
Fading is the worldling’s pleasure,
All his boasted pomp and show;
Solid joys and lasting treasure
None but Zion’s children know.” 

John Newton

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