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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David Speakman

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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

Renewing Discipleship: The Working Word

May 15, 2022 |

“Christians feed on Scripture.  Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body.  Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.” 

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, 18.

“When a minister reads out of the Bible, I am sure that at least nine times out of ten the people who happen to be listening at all hear not what is really being read but only what they expect to be read. And I think that what most people expect to hear read from the Bible is an edifying story, an uplifting thought, a moral lesson—something elevating, obvious, and boring. So that is exactly what very often they do hear. Only that is too bad because if you really listen—and maybe you have to forget that it is the Bible being read and a minister who is reading it—there is no telling what you might hear.”

Frederick  Buechner

“The most precious part of each day for me is the 30-40 minutes I spend each morning before breakfast with the Bible.  All the rest of the day I am bombarded with the stories the world is telling about itself.  As I take time to immerse myself in the story the Bible tells, my vision is cleared, and I see things in another way.  I see the day that lies ahead in its place in God’s story.” 

Lesslie Newbigin

Not Neglecting Such a Great Savior

May 1, 2022 |

“Over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living, which we know we are passing by. Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power.” 

Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion

“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.

“Of this gospel, I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace . . . to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ.” 

Ephesians 3:7-8

The Living from the Dead

April 17, 2022 |

“The most fantastic of all Christian claims is thot Jesus Christ rose from the dead. It strains our credulity to the limit. Human beings have tried with all possible ingenuity both to defy and to deny death. But only Christ has claimed to conquer it, that is, to defeat it in his own experience, and, to deprive it of its power over others.” 

John Stott

“I find that Holy Week is draining; no matter how many times I have lived through his crucifixion, my anxiety about his resurrection is undiminished – I am terrified that, this year, it won’t happen; that, that year, it didn’t. Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer.” 

John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall . . .

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.” 

John Updike

The Measure of a King

April 10, 2022 |

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your king is coming to you;
righteous and having salvation is he,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
and the war horse from Jerusalem;
and the battle bow shall be cut off,
and he shall speak peace to the nations;
his rule shall be from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth.” 

Zechariah 9:9-10

“Jesus bursts into tears . . . in them is distilled an eternity of grief. And although we know something of the brimming surface of those tears, we know nothing of the depths  from which they are drawn. Nothing of the pain that lies at the watery depths of his heart. Nothing of the sorrow. Or of the sadness . . . He is going to his death. A horrible, shameful, humiliating death. He knows the pain will be unbearable . . . He knows the blessings outside the gate will turn to curses within. He knows the hands of praise will become fists of punishment. He knows the reverently placed palms will become a mocking reed scepter. But knowing all of this, Jesus does not weep for himself. He weeps for Jerusalem.” 

Ken Gire

Lost and Found: the Possible Impossibility

April 3, 2022 |

“Human beings can bear an incredible amount of meaningful deprivation but only a very little meaningless affluence.” 

Erazim Kohak

“We are all born into this world looking for someone looking for us.” 

Dr. Curt Thompson

“You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own. Surely that is why, in Jesus’ sad joke, the rich man has as hard a time getting into Paradise as that camel through the needle’s eye. Because with his credit card in his pocket, the rich man is so effective at getting for himself everything that he needs that he does not see that what he needs more than anything else in the world can be had only as a gift. He does not see that the one thing a clenched fist cannot do is accept, even from God himself, a helping hand.” 

Frederick Buechner

The Wide Mercy of the Narrow Door

March 20, 2022 |

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”  

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.”

 C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“No evangelical, I think, need hesitate to admit that in his heart of hearts he would like universalism to be true. Who can take pleasure in the thought of people being eternally lost? If you want to see folk damned, there is something wrong with you! Universalism is thus a comfortable doctrine in a way that alternatives are not. But wishful thinking, based on a craving for comfort and a reluctance to believe that some of God’s truth might be tragic, is no sure index of reality.”

 J.I. Packer

Dare to Call Him Father

March 13, 2022 |

“Prayer is an expression of who we are . . . We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.” 

Thomas Merton

“If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life . . . Learned desperation is at the heart of a praying life.” 

Paul Miller

“Believers do not pray with the view of informing God about things unknown to him, or of exciting him to do his duty, or of urging him as though he were reluctant.  On the contrary, they pray in order that they may arouse themselves to seek him, that they may exercise their faith in meditating on his promises, that they may relieve themselves from their anxieties by pouring them into his bosom; in a word, that they may declare that from him alone they can hope and expect, both for themselves and for others, all good things.” 

John Calvin

“God, of your goodness give me yourself, for you are enough for me. And only in you do I have everything. Amen.” 

Lady Julian of Norwich

The Many Things and The One Thing

March 6, 2022 |

“I would not have the restless will
That hurries to and fro,
Seeking for some great thing to do,
Or secret thing to know;
I would be treated as a child,
And guided where I go.

So I ask Thee for the daily strength,
To none that ask denied,
And a mind to blend with outward life
While keeping at Thy side;
Content to fill a little space,
If Thou be glorified.” 

Anna Waring, from her hymn, “Father, I Know”

“For a [person’s] communion with God to be sacrificed for the work is to choke the fountain for the sake of the stream.”  

Henry Moule

“You wanna be held? You gotta hold still.” 

Taylor Leonhardt

Through the Cross to the Crown

February 27, 2022 |

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time—death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call.” 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“The cross comes before the crown, and tomorrow is a Monday morning.” 

C.S. Lewis

“A religion that costs you nothing is worth nothing. A cheap Christianity without a cross will prove in the end a useless Christianity without a crown.” 

JC Ryle

“Christ leads me through no darker rooms
Than He went through before;
He that unto God’s kingdom comes
Must enter by this door.”

Richard Baxter