Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

Sunday Schedule

Sunday School 9:30 a.m.
Hope Café 10:15 a.m.
Worship 10:30 a.m.

You are here: Home / Archives for David Speakman

David Speakman

Filter Sermons By:

Waiting for Power

January 20, 2019 |

“Wait, pray, and believe, and all shall be well. He will not suffer them who fear Him and depend upon Him to want anything that is truly good for them.”

John Newton


“Waiting on God isn’t about the suspension of meaning and purpose. It’s part of the meaning and purpose that God has brought into your life. Waiting on God isn’t to be viewed as an obstruction in the way of the plan. Waiting is an essential part of the plan. For the child of God, waiting isn’t simply about what the child will receive at the end of his wait. No, waiting is much more purposeful, efficient, and practical. Waiting is fundamentally about what we will become as we wait . . . God is using the wait to do in and through you exactly what he has promised. Through the wait he is changing you. By means of the wait, he is causing you to see and experience new things about him and his kingdom. And all of this sharpens you, enabling you to be a more useful tool in his redemptive hands . . . Waiting on God is restorative. It is one of the tools God uses to remake us into what we were designed to be in the beginning . . . Picture in your mind the nimble and skilled fingers of a potter who is putting pressure on the clay right where it’s needed so that it will take on the beauty that is its potential. And with this picture in mind, give thanks for the very moment that once would have driven you crazy. Waiting is a “productive delay”.”

Paul Tripp

God’s Kingdom, God’s Way

January 13, 2019 |

“Waiting and fidelity are closely connected, and many of us struggle with both. Lured by the promise of freedom and infinite choice, we are fearful of foreclosing our options and limiting our opportunities. Why make commitments to something in the future, when better opportunities might surface in the meantime? Why live in a way that anticipates a future when the present includes so many other possibilities? What promise could possibly be so life-giving that we would shape our lives around it?”

-Christine Pohl, Making Room

“When the scriptural people of God seek redemption, they want personal salvation, and they express their desire in what sounds like a cry of the heart.  But to them redemption goes far beyond personal salvation. When biblical people want God to redeem, what they want is freedom and righteousness throughout the land.  They want God to unseat Pharaoh or Caesar. They want God to drive the Midianites back across the border. They’re Exodus people, after all. They’re Passover people. They have a history of being squeezed by Egypt, Babylon, or Rome.  In their eyes, God’s redemption means justice is coming, liberation is coming, the King of all the earth is coming!”

-Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God’s World

“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

God’s Church for His Mission

January 6, 2019 |

“It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world.  Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission – God’s mission . . . We ask, ‘Where does God fit into the story of my life?’ when the real question is, ‘Where does my little life fit into the great story of God’s mission?’”

Christopher Wright

“In his earthly career, Jesus changed the world but he didn’t perfect it. He healed many sick people, but not everybody. He cast out some demons, but not all. So far as we know, he turned water into wine only at Cana. He invited just one disciple to walk on water, with mixed results. So in his first advent, Jesus did much but he also left much to do.”

Cornelius Plantinga

“We must not lag behind the king in some kind of unwarranted pessimism as though his first coming and present reign do not make a difference. We must not run ahead of the king in some kind of unwarranted triumphalism as though we’re going to make utopia here before he comes again. We keep in step with the king.”

David Jones

The Mothers of Jesus: The Wife of Uriah

December 23, 2018 |

“If I am told over and over to repent, to change, to orient my life to God, nothing will ever happen. I will cling to the Gucci luggage—not that I could afford it—and the earthly status symbols more desperately than ever. I don’t need to hear exhortations to repent. I need power from outside myself to make me different . . . A power from outside is coming, a power that is able to make a new creation out of people like us,  stones like us, people who have no capacity of ourselves to save ourselves.”

Fleming Rutledge

“Why is power a gift? Because power is for flourishing. When power is used well, people and the whole cosmos come more alive to what they were meant to be. And flourishing is the test of power . . . Power at its best is resurrection to full life, to full humanity.”

Andy Crouch

“There are theological reasons for observing a serious Advent without being swallowed up prematurely by the Christmas rush. Advent offers an unparalleled opportunity to take a fearless inventory of the darkness in our world and in our hearts, into which the True Light will come.”

Fleming Rutledge

The Mothers of Jesus: Eve

December 2, 2018 |

“Christmas, then, is not a dream, a moment of escapism.  Christmas is the reality, which shows up the rest of ‘reality.’ And for Christmas, here, read Christianity. Either Jesus is the Lord of the world, and all reality makes sense in his light, or he is dangerously irrelevant to the problems and possibilities of today’s world. There is no middle ground. Either Jesus was, and is, the Word of God, or he, and the stories Christians tell about him, are lies.”

N.T. Wright

“‘Advent’ means ‘coming’ of course, and the promise of Advent is that what is coming is an unimaginable invasion. The mythology of our age has to do with flying saucers and invasions from outer space, and that is unimaginable enough. But what is upon us now is even more so—a close encounter not of the third kind but of a different kind altogether. An invasion of holiness. That is what Advent is about. What is coming upon the world is the Light of the World. It is Christ. That is the comfort of it. The challenge of it is that it has not come yet. Only the hope for it has come, only the longing for it. In the meantime we are in the dark, and the dark, God knows, is also in us. We watch and wait for a holiness to heal us and hallow us, to liberate us from the dark. Advent is like the hush in a theater just before the curtain rises. It is like the hazy ring around the winter moon that means the coming of snow which will turn the night to silver. Soon. But for the time being, our time, darkness is where we are.”

Frederick Buechner

Slow Drift and the Anchor of Grace

November 25, 2018 |

“Institutions are the way the teeming abundance of human creativity and culture are handed on to future generations. So posterity, not just prosperity, is the promise of God to Abraham: countless descendants and blessings poured out on entire nations not yet born. Posterity, not just prosperity is God’s promise to David, a succession of sons in his line on the throne. And posterity was what the average Israelite prayed for as well – “may you see your children’s children!” – a wish that before death one would see the evidence that shalom and abundance would continue in one’s own line after death. There is nothing quick about shalom. True shalom endures.”

Andy Crouch, Playing God

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

G.K. Chesterton

“If our religion be of our own getting or making, it will perish; and the sooner it goes, the better; but if our religion is a matter of God’s giving, we know that He shall never take back what He gives, and that, if He has commenced to work in us by His grace, He will never leave it unfinished.”

C.H. Spurgeon

“And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Christ Jesus.”

Philippians 1:6

Fruit in Keeping With Repentance

November 18, 2018 |

“Remember the story in the Imitation, how the Christ on the crucifix suddenly spoke to the monk who was so anxious about his salvation and said, ‘If you knew that all was well, what would you, today, do, or stop doing?’ When you have found the answer, do it or stop doing it. You see, one must always get back to the practical and definite. What the devil loves is that vague cloud of unspecified guilt feeling or unspecified virtue by which he lures us into despair or presumption. ‘Details, please?’ is the answer.”

C.S. Lewis

“Repentance unto life is a saving grace whereby a sinner, out of a true sense of his sin and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, doth, with grief and hatred of his sin, turn from it unto God with full purpose of and endeavor after new obedience.”

Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 87.

“To become that which you are not, you must go a way in which you are not.”

St. John of the Cross

“Bear fruits in keeping with repentance!”

Luke 3: 8

Repentance Unto Life

November 11, 2018 |

“The awareness of sin used to be our shadow. Christians hated sin, feared it, fled from it, grieved over it. Some of our grandparents agonized over their sins. A man who lost his temper might wonder whether he could go to Holy Communion. A woman who for years envied her more attractive and intelligent sister might worry that this sin threatened her very salvation. But the shadow has dimmed. Nowadays, the accusation you have sinned is often said with a grin, and with a tone that signals an inside joke.  At one time, this accusation still had the power to jolt people. Catholics lined up to confess their sins; Protestant preachers rose up to confess our sins. And they did it regularly . . . The word sin now finds its home mostly on dessert menus. “Peanut Butter Binge” and “Chocolate Challenge” are sinful; lying is not. The new measure for sin is caloric.”

Cornelius Plantinga

“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

“My sin, not in part, but the whole, is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more. Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!”

Horatio Spafford

The God of the Word

November 4, 2018 |

“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

“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.

Fears Relieved

October 28, 2018 |

“‘Fear God!’ is a call that puts us in our place and puts all other fears, hopes, and aspirations in their place.”

Derek Kidner


“Strengthen weak hands,
and make firm the feeble knees.
Say to those who have an anxious heart,
‘Be strong; fear not!
Behold, your God
will come with vengeance,
with the recompense of God.
He will come and save you.’”

Isaiah 35: 3-4


“As we might guess, far from gradually becoming extinct in adulthood, our fears increase throughout our lives. What was once a small family of worries quietly conducts an aggressive breeding program to become a teeming community of palpable fears and private anxieties. The code by which fear and anxiety live is primal: multiply. As we possess more things, care about more people, accumulate more bad experiences, and watch the evening news, it is as if we absorb fear. If they are not obvious in your own life, perhaps it’s because you have been living in a war zone your entire life. At first you noticed every gunshot. After a while the mayhem blends in with the rustle of the trees, the TV, and the children playing in the other room. Fear gradually becomes the background noise of everyday life.”

Ed Welch, Running Scared