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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The Threat and Relief of Christmas

December 25, 2022 |

“Thou who art God beyond all praising,
All for love’s sake becamest man;
Stooping so low but sinners raising,
Heavenward by thine eternal plan.
Thou who art God beyond all praising,
All for love’s sake becamest man.”

Frank Houghton

“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 the really good people. And it does that, gallingly, for no more reason than the Gospel’s shabby exaltation of dumb trust over worthy works.  The work of redemption is done entirely by the Redeemer and not at all by the redeemed!” 

Robert Farrar Capon

“We need a Savior – even (or especially) we who think that we are good Christians.”

Frederick Dale Bruner

“One of the most unbelievable parts of the Christmas story is that a bunch of men showed up to a child’s birthday party and remembered presents!”

Will Nettleton

The Best of All—God is with Us!

December 24, 2022 |

21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:

23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel”

(which means, God with us).                                                                                                                                       

Matthew 1:21-23

The Deep and Wide Promise Fulfilled

December 18, 2022 |

“Come, thou long expected Jesus,
born to set thy people free;
from our fears and sins release us,
let us find our rest in thee.
Israel’s strength and consolation,
hope of all the earth thou art;
dear desire of every nation,
joy of every longing heart.” 

Charles Wesley

“Oh! I love God’s ‘shalls’ and ‘wills.’ There is nothing comparable to them. Let a man say ‘shall,’ what is it good for? ‘I will,’ says man, and he never performs; ‘I shall,’ says he, and he breaks his promise. But it is never so with God’s ‘shalls.’ If He says ‘shall,’ it shall be; when He says ‘will,’ it will be.” 

Charles Spurgeon

“Here is a simple Gospel mantra always to keep in mind: “One, I am a complete idiot. Two, my future is incredibly bright. Three, anyone can get in on this.” 

Ray Ortlund Jr.

Great David’s Greater Son

December 11, 2022 |

“The early Christians did not say ‘look what the world is coming to!’ but ‘look what has come into the world!’”

Carl Henry

“So I’ve been waiting for the King
To come galloping out of the clouds while the angel armies sing
He’s gonna gather His people in the shadow of His wings
And I’m gonna raise my voice with the song of the redeemed
‘Cause all this darkness is a small and passing thing”

Andrew Peterson, “The Dark Before the Dawn”

“In short, we need to be forgiven. That’s the only way for our discontent to be healed. It will take more than a miracle worker or a divine genie—it will take a Savior. Jesus knows that to be our Savior he is going to have to die. And we will discover that in the process of dealing with what we thought were our deepest wishes, Jesus has revealed an even deeper, truer one beneath—and it is for Jesus himself. He will not just have granted that true deepest wish, he will have fulfilled it. Jesus is not going to play the rotten practical joke of giving you your deepest wish—until he has shown you that it was for him all along.”

Tim Keller, Jesus the King

A Collision Course: the Expected Messiah and the Received Messiah

December 4, 2022 |

“Who is this, so weak and helpless,
Child of lowly Hebrew maid,
Rudely in a stable sheltered,
Coldly in a manger laid?
‘Tis the Lord of all creation,
Who this wondrous path has trod;
He is Lord from everlasting,
And to everlasting God” 

William Washam How

“John [the Baptist] saw the mission of the Coming One as primarily one of separation: those who repented he would save and the unrepentant he would judge. John, in fact,expected this twofold messianic work to take place in a single eschatological event. He had predicted that the coming Messiah would both ‘gather his wheat into the granary’ and burn the chaff with unquenchable fire (Matt. 3:12). When John was in prison, he began to reflect on the fact that, while he did see Jesus gathering wheat, he did not see him burning chaff.” 

Anthony Hoekema, The Bible and the Future

“Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” 

Acts 2:36

Who Is This? The Lord Saves

November 27, 2022 |

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. 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

“Did Jesus live? And did he really say
The burning words that banish mortal fear?
And are they true? Just this is central, here
The Church must stand or fall. It’s Christ we weigh.”

Sheldon Vanauken, “The Gap” from A Severe Mercy

“What child is this who laid to rest
On Mary’s lap is sleeping
Whom angels greet with anthems sweet
While shepherds watch are keeping?”

William Chatterton Dix

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