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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Psalms

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Praying Through Our Fears

February 28, 2021 |

“Our name has nothing to do with the historical meaning. There is a great quote that says, ‘Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.’ … Every single person walking down the street is fighting a great battle, whether or not you can see it.”

Joy Williams, The Civil Wars

“The life of David is full of incidents like this. Everyone’s life is. Not a palace coup for most of us…, but conflict and failure and fear, love and betrayal, loss and salvation. Every day is a story, a morning beginning and evening ending that are boundaries for people who go about their tasks with more or less purpose, go to war, love others, earn a living, scheme and sin and believe.”

Eugene Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms As Tools For Prayer

“Together we turn to the Psalms and pray through them, word by word, personalizing them for what is on our heart. In the dry, empty place, the Word comes alive. It shapes our lament. Praying this way challenges me at the deepest part of my being. It strips my soul of all supports, because my whole heart and mind bend toward God.”

Paul Miller, A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

All that I Need, I Have

January 17, 2021 |

“On the one hand [the Christian faith] is the most pessimistic religion in the world, for it recognizes the tragic and awful dimensions of man’s sin. But on the other hand it is the most optimistic religion in the world, for it recognizes the heightening dimensions of God’s grace and how God’s grace can come in and pick up…. Christianity, therefore, becomes the greatest pessimistic optimistic religion in the world…. God’s grace stands over man’s sin.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I could more easily contain Niagara Falls in a teacup than I can comprehend the wild, uncontainable love of God.”

Brennan Manning

“God’s blessings don’t pursue temporarily—but relentlessly…. When I’m in a wilderness, His mercy and goodness run after me. When I’m hurting, His grace hunts for me. When I’m plagued by problems, His goodness pursues me. No matter where I go, He has his two blessing men right there in hot pursuit: goodness and mercy, and no shadow of death can overshadow the goodness and mercy that shadows the child of God.”

Ann Voskamp

The Who Behind the What and the How

January 10, 2021 |

“Readers looking for seven easy steps to cultural influence will have to look elsewhere – because I do not happen to believe that anything lasting is easy.  What we most have to learn about being creators of culture is the very thing we human beings find hardest to learn: everything about our calling, from start to finish, is a gift.  What is most needed in our time are Christians who are deeply serious about cultivating and creating but who wear that seriousness lightly – who are not desperately trying to change the world but who also wake up every morning eager to create.”

Andy Crouch

“Creation was a way for God to spend himself . . . Creation is an act of imaginative love.”  

Cornelius Plantinga

“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child.” 

G.K. Chesterton

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” 

C.S. Lewis

Redeeming the Time

June 28, 2020 |

12 So teach us to number our days
    that we may get a heart of wisdom.
13 Return, O Lord! How long?
    Have pity on your servants!
14 Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
    that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
15 Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
    and for as many years as we have seen evil.

Psalm 90:12-15

A Creature in Time

June 21, 2020 |

26 Then God said, “Let us make man[a] in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Genesis 1:26-28

1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

Genesis 2:1-3

1 Lord, you have been our dwelling place
in all generations.
2 Before the mountains were brought forth,
or ever you had formed the earth and the world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

3 You return man to dust
and say, “Return, O children of man!”
4 For a thousand years in your sight
are but as yesterday when it is past,
or as a watch in the night.

10 The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away.

12 So teach us to number our days
that we may get a heart of wisdom.
13 Return, O Lord! How long?
Have pity on your servants!
14 Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
15 Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
and for as many years as we have seen evil.
16 Let your work be shown to your servants,
and your glorious power to their children.
17 Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
and establish the work of our hands upon us;
yes, establish the work of our hands!

Psalm 90:1-4, 10, 12-17

Renewing Real Life – Part 2

May 3, 2020 |

“God’s patience is not placidity, any more than his fierce anger is loss of control, his laughter cruelty or his pity sentimentality. When his moment comes for judgment, in any given case, it will be by definition beyond appeasing or postponing.” 

Derek Kidner

“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

“Think how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might towards strangers? Far from it . . . Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference . . . God’s wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer . . . which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with his whole being.” 

Rebecca Manley Pippert

“He left His Father’s throne above, so free, so infinite His grace!
Emptied Himself of all but love; and bled for Adam’s helpless race.
‘Tis mercy all, immense and free, for O, my God, it found out me!
Amazing Love, how can it be that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?” 

Charles Wesley

Renewing Real Life

April 26, 2020 |

“Christians live by faith in Jesus Christ, and when their faith leans forward toward the coming of the Kingdom, they call it hope. The person who pursues [vocation] in hope, and who then shapes his or her life accordingly for service in the kingdom – such a person has a calling that will outlast every recession.” 

Cornelius Plantinga

“There is nowhere we can go where God isn’t already there. There is nowhere we can leave where God does not stay. Every bit of our skin, bone, thought, imagination, and feeling, every minute pleasure of our prosperity, every glass shard of our adversity is held, governed, and seen through to us by God. Life under the sun is a God-inhabited life. The bent world rests and rebels within the arms of God. The whole earth is full of his glory.” 

Zack Eswine

“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.” 

N.T. Wright

The Language of the Heart: Praying Our Guilt

August 11, 2019 |

“Guilt is our inner police force, but if we give it too much emotional power, we risk turning into a police state.”

Ruth Whippman, “Guilt Trip,” The New York Times

“Repentance is as necessary to salvation by faith as the ankle is to walking. The one does not act apart from the other. … Faith is trusting in Christ; repentance is turning from sin. They are two sides of the same coin of belonging to Jesus.”

Sinclair Ferguson, The Grace of Repentance

“God has really forgiven you. He’s not like the person who forgives, but somehow you know you’d better not do it again because they won’t forgive you a second time. He doesn’t grant you a temporary truce and wait to get you later. God has really accepted you and made you his child.”

Jack Miller, Saving Grace

The Language of the Heart: Praying Our Life Together

July 28, 2019 |

“Getting saved is easy; becoming a community is difficult – damnably difficult.”

Eugene Peterson

 “I didn’t come to the conviction easily, but finally there was no getting around it; there can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart from an immersion and embrace of community. I am not myself by myself. Community, not the highly vaunted individualism of our culture, is the setting in which Christ is at play.”

Eugene Peterson

 “If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even when there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

 “Love the one you’re with.”

Stephen Stills

The Language of the Heart: Praying our Depression

July 21, 2019 |

“Our ‘inconsolable secret,’ says C.S. Lewis, is that we are full of yearnings, sometimes shy and sometimes passionate, that point us beyond the things of earth to the ultimate reality of God.”

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God’s World

“The first step forward in knowing God better is the awareness that you do not yet know him fully.  It is ‘thirsting’ for God. It is discovering that he has water which can satisfy our deepest longings.  It is saying to him: ‘Lord, give me this water’ (John 4:15).”

Sinclair Ferguson, Grow in Grace

O, heart bereaved and lonely,
Whose brightest dreams have fled
Whose hopes like summer roses,
Are withered crushed and dead
Though link by link be broken,
And tears unseen may fall
Look up amid thy sorrow,
To Him who knows it all.

O, cling to thy Redeemer,
Thy Savior, Brother, Friend
Believe and trust His promise,
To keep you till the end
O watch and wait with patience,
And question all you will
His arms of love and mercy,
Are round about thee still.

Fanny Crosby