Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

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Proverbs

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Choose Wisdom – Live Wisdom

September 1, 2019 |

“The Christian life after all is a life, it is a power, it is an activity. This is the thing we so constantly tend to forget. It is not just a philosophy, it is not just a point of view, it is not just a teaching that we take up and try to put into practice. It is all that, but it is something infinitely more. The very essence of the Christian life, according to the New Testament teaching everywhere, is that it is a mighty power that enters into us; it is a life, if you like, that is pulsating in us. It is an activity, and an activity on the part of God.”

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

“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.”

J.I. Packer, Knowing God, 110.

“Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, that part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before.  And taking your life as a whole with all your innumerable choices all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature, either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and other creatures and with itself or else into one that is in a state of war with God and with other creatures and itself.  To be the one kind of creature is heaven, that is joy and peace and knowledge and power.  To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.  Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Choose Wisdom

August 25, 2019 |

“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.

“People often think of Christianity as a kind of bargain in which God says “If you keep a lot of rules, I’ll reward you, and if you don’t, I’ll do the other thing.” I don’t think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, that part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole with all your innumerable choices all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature, either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and other creatures and with itself or else into one that is in a state of war with God and with other creatures and itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven, that is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The Wisdom We Need

August 18, 2019 |

“The practice of gaining wisdom and becoming wise is a path that is traveled, not a door that is opened. We usually want the door.”

Les Newsom

“The fear of God is that affectionate reverence, by which the child of God bends himself humbly and carefully to his Father’s law.”

Charles Bridges

“Wisdom is for the humbly eager – one might almost say, for the lover, the suitor . . . It is not for the man ‘wise in his own eyes’: he thinks that he has arrived – and indeed he has, for he will never get a step further. His trouble is not intellectual; he is no fool . . . It is that he does not seriously want to be a better person; whereas the wise person is teachable to the end, open to God’s commands and chastening.”

Derek Kidner

Putting Deadly Sin to Death

September 3, 2017 |

“Greed, gluttony, lust, envy, and pride are no more than sad efforts to fill the empty place where love belongs, and anger and sloth are just two things that may happen when you find that not even all seven of them at their deadliest ever can.”

—Frederick Buechner

 

“I am a riddle to myself; a heap of inconsistencies.”

—John Newton

 

“Come with thy heart hard, dead, cold, full of wickedness; come as a blood-red sinner; this is the way to come to Christ.”

—John Bunyan

 

“Though sin wars, it shall not reign; and though it breaks our peace, it cannot separate from his love. Nor is it inconsistent with his holiness and perfection, to manifest his favor to such poor defiled creatures, or to admit them to communion with himself; for they are not considered as in themselves, but as one with Jesus, to whom they have fled for refuge, and by whom they live by faith.”

—John Newton

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

A Blessing For Longing

July 23, 2017 |

“The danger is not that the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but that, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.”

—Simone Weil

“One might eat and eat of the superficial, cotton-candy righteousness vended by the professional religious hucksters and never have his hunger assuaged. Or he might drink and drink of their holy water and never have his thirst quenched. But the kingdom righteousness is meat indeed and drink indeed—rich, nourishing, satisfying.”

—Clarence Jordan

“I do not believe in God, but I miss Him.”

—Julian Barnes

Sloth: A Deadly Sin?

July 16, 2017 |

“Sloth is far more than indolence, physical laziness, or a state of couch-potato lethargy. It is a condition of explicitly spiritual dejection that has given up on the pursuit of God, the true, the good, and the beautiful.”

—Os Guinness

“In the world sloth calls itself tolerance; but in hell it is called despair. It is the accomplice of every other sin and their worst punishment. It is the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing and remains alive only because there is nothing it would die for.”

—Dorothy Sayers

“Sloth is most often evidenced in busyness … in frantic running around, trying to be everything to everyone, and then having no time to listen or pray, no time to become the person who is doing these things.”

—Eugene Peterson

Disorienting Grace: Out of Unrest and Arrogant Pride

July 2, 2017 |

“We often forget that the heinousness of sin lies not so much in the nature of the sin committed, as in the greatness of the Person sinned against.”

—Diane Langberg

“The sin I once feared to lose became a delight to dismiss. You turned them out and took their place, pleasanter than any pleasure.”

—Augustine

“Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all . . . If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.”

—C.S. Lewis