Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

Sunday Schedule:

9:00 a.m. – Worship
10:15 a.m. – Hope Café
10:45 a.m. – Worship

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Romans

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Soul and Body

March 14, 2021 |

“Even for God’s children death is a valley of shadows and darkness. But, as Richard Baxter put it, ‘Christ leads me through no darker rooms than he went through before.’ And in that darkness it’s not God but death that comes as a stranger. The one who stands beyond death will be the loving God for whom we have been longing all these years.” 

Neil Plantinga

“My present body – ‘brother ass,’ as Fancis of Assisi would have me call it – is like a student’s old jalopy; care for it as I will, it goes precariously and never very well, and often lets me and my Master down (very frustrating!). But my new body will feel and behave like a Rolls-Royce, and then my service will no longer be spoiled.” 

J.I. Packer

“In heaven I will be free to jump up, dance, kick, and do aerobics. If possible, somewhere, sometime before the party gets going, sometime before the guests are called to the banquet table at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, the first thing I plan to do on resurrected legs is to drop on grateful, glorified knees. I will quietly kneel at the feet of Jesus. The day is drawing near when I’ll be able to kneel again.” 

Joni Erickson Tada

The Greatest Gift

February 21, 2021 |

“A church can become crowded with legitimate causes, concerns, and needs. And it can be hard to find Jesus.”

Ray Ortlund

“The work of the Holy Spirit is the honoring of Jesus Christ . . .  the work of the Holy Spirit is simply to thrill us with Christ.”

Dale Bruner

“Spirit of God, descend upon my heart.
Wean it from earth; through all its pulses move;
Stoop to my weakness, mighty as Thou art;
and make me love Thee as I ought to love.

I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
No sudden rending of the veil of clay,
No angel vision, no opening skies;
but take the dimness of my soul away.”

George Croly

The Presence of His Absence

February 7, 2021 |

“Lo! the incarnate God, ascended,
Pleads the merit of His blood;
Venture on Him, venture wholly;
Let no other trust intrude:
None but Jesus, none but Jesus,
Can do helpless sinners good.”

Joseph Hart

“The greatest impediment to the mission of the church is not the evils outside of the church (in our culture and our city), but the cynicism and apathy inside the church.” 

Rev. Sandy Willson

“Christ’s intercession reflects how profoundly personal our rescue is. If we knew about Christ’s death and resurrection but not his intercession, we would be tempted to view our salvation in overly formulaic terms. It would feel more mechanical than is true to who Christ truly is. His interceding for us reflects his heart . . . The intercession of Christ is his heart connecting our heart to the Father’s heart . . . What’s the point of saying Christ saves ‘to the uttermost’? We who know our hearts understand. We are to-the-uttermost sinners. We need a to-the-uttermost Savior.” 

Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly

The Cross, the Resurrection, and the Death of Scorekeeping

January 31, 2021 |

“She who dies with the most checked boxes wins, right? Wrong…. [Accomplishment and ambition] are simply not the drivers of our happiness. By the time many people figure this out on their own, they have spent a lifetime checking things off lists, yet are unhappy and don’t know why.”

Arthur Brooks

“We delude ourselves into thinking that our own salvation can be achieved by keeping books on others …. as if putting ourselves at the head of a whole column marching in the wrong direction somehow made us less lost than the rest of the troops. It would be funny if it were not fatal; but fatal it is, because grace works only in those who accept their lostness. Jesus came to call sinners, not the pseudo-righteous; he came to raise the dead, not to buy drinks for the marginally alive.”

Robert Capon

“At times I feel Christ’s presence flooding my meager heart. At other times I cling on for dear life, not knowing the end of the story. But I must stake my life in this claim: that Jesus is the resurrection and the life.”

Rebecca McLaughlin

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

The Heartbeat of Hope: The Embrace of the Father

May 19, 2019 |

“Salvation is membership in the family of God . . .The creation of a family with children is the reason for all of God’s activity.  This is how he intends to show his glory . . . Our sonship to God is the apex of creation and the goal of redemption . . . The story of Paradise lost becoming Paradise regained is the story of God’s grace bringing us from alienation from him to membership in his family . . . Our self-image, if it is to be biblical, will begin just here. God is my Father (the Christian’s self-image always begins with the knowledge of God and who he is!); I am one of his children (I know my real identity); his people are my brothers and sisters (I recognize the family to which I belong and have discovered my deepest ‘roots’).”

Sinclair Ferguson

“You sum up the whole of the New Testament teaching in a single phrase, if you speak of it as a revelation of the Fatherhood of the Holy Creator. In the same way, you describe it as the knowledge of God as one’s holy Father. If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means the he does not understand Christianity very well at all.”

J.I. Packer

“If the love of the father will not make a child delight in him, what will?”

John Owen

Worship is a Verb

November 26, 2017 |

“Missions is not the ultimate goal of the Church. Worship is. Missions exists because  worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever.”
—John Piper

Let the Nations Be Glad

“The liturgy of my night—lock the doors, brush my teeth, get a glass of water, turn out the lights, pull back the covers, crawl into bed, curl up, close my eyes—is a repetitive, mundane, and good thing, through which I’ve learned to slow down, to let go of the day behind me, and go to sleep. Similarly, corporate worship trains us, over time, to cease striving to make our own way and mourn own righteousness and to receive God’s means of grace.”
—Tish Harrison Warren

Liturgy of the Ordinary

“The parallel between worship and other areas of human life should not surprise us, because, in one sense, worship is all of life.”

—John Frame
“A Fresh Look at the Regulative Principle”

Blessed and Sent by God’s Good Word

November 19, 2017 |

“We wonder, What does worship have do with my work? . . . The work we do together each week in gathered worship transforms and sends us into the work we do in our homes and offices . . . we are people who are blessed and sent; this identity transforms how we embody work and worship in the world, in our week, even in our small day.”

—Tish Harrison Warren

“In the daily rhythms for everyone everywhere, we live our lives in the marketplace of this world: in homes and neighborhoods, in schools and on farms, in hospitals and businesses, and our vocations are bound up with the ordinary work that ordinary people do. We are not great shots across the bow of history; rather, by simple grace, we are hints of hope.”

—Steve Garber

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

—C.S. Lewis

Growing True

October 1, 2017 |

“The certainty and completeness of God’s mercy [is] the magnet of confession . . . we run to his arms with our sin-sick hearts because we know there is grace sufficient, boundless, and free already there. We repent because we are forgiven, not to gain forgiveness . . . we are forgiven because he was forsaken, not because our contrition is adequate . . . we are cherished children of God despite our constant waywardness and the inevitable inadequacy of our confession.”

—Bryan Chapell

  “Absolution is neither a response to a suitably worthy confession, nor the acceptance of a reasonable apology. Absolvere in Latin means not only to loosen, to free, to acquit; it also means to dispose of, to complete, to finish. When God pardons, he does not say he understands our weakness or makes allowances for our errors; rather he disposes of, he finishes with, the whole of our dead life and raises us up with a new one.  He does not so much deal with our derelictions as he does drop them down the black hole of Jesus’ death. He forgets our sins in the darkness of the tomb. He remembers our iniquities no more in the oblivion of Jesus’ expiration. He finds us, in short, in the desert of death, not in the garden of improvement; and in the power of Jesus’ resurrection, he puts us on his shoulders rejoicing and brings us home . . . The work of redemption is done entirely by the redeemer, and not at all by the redeemed.”

—Robert Farrar Capon

“What I envy most about you Christians is your forgiveness.  I have nobody to forgive me.”

—Margaret Laski

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