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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Davis Mooney

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Who Is This? The Humble and Exalted Messiah

April 2, 2023 |

“We face the same challenge the Israelites faced long ago. Jesus is king, but we must let him define his kingship. We must receive Jesus as he is, not as we would like him to be. We must let him come on a donkey, not a stallion. We must let him define his reign.”

Dan Doriani

“Well, I’ve got no answers
For hurt knees and cancers
But a Savior who suffers them with me”

John Mark McMillan; The Road, The Rocks, and The Weeds

“And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Philippians 2:8-11

Layers of Resistance and God’s Gracious Provision

February 19, 2023 |

“Consider the mighty ways in which God used a dead stick of wood. ‘God so used a stick of wood’ can be a banner cry for each of us. Though we are limited and weak in talent, physical energy and psychological strength, we are not less than a stick of wood. But as the rod of Moses had to become the rod of God, so that which is me must become the me of God. The Scripture emphasizes that much can come from little if the little is truly consecrated to God.”

Francis Schaeffer, “No Little People, No Little Places”

“Take these hands / Teach them what to carry
Take these hands / Don’t make a fist
Take this mouth / So quick to criticize
Take this mouth / Give it a kiss

Yahweh, Yahweh / Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh / Still I’m waiting for the dawn”

U2, “Yahweh”

“For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong…”

1 Corinthians 1:26-27

Who Is This? The Lord Saves

November 27, 2022 |

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” 

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Did Jesus live? And did he really say
The burning words that banish mortal fear?
And are they true? Just this is central, here
The Church must stand or fall. It’s Christ we weigh.”

Sheldon Vanauken, “The Gap” from A Severe Mercy

“What child is this who laid to rest
On Mary’s lap is sleeping
Whom angels greet with anthems sweet
While shepherds watch are keeping?”

William Chatterton Dix

Encouraging Words to Fragile People

October 30, 2022 |

“There are no little people in God’s sight, so there are no little places. To be wholly committed to God in the place where God wants him—this is the creature glorified … This is the way of the Christian: he should choose the lesser place until God extrudes him into a position of more responsibility and authority.”

Francis Schaeffer

“The world shouldn’t dictate what we anticipate from God. As the West becomes more committed to a secular belief system, it doesn’t mean we should expect less from God during our lifetime. He is sovereign, which is why we should believe anything is possible. His Spirit can move when and where He wishes.”

Andy Jones

“So if I stand let me stand on the promise that you will pull me through
And if I can’t, let me fall on the grace that first brought me to You
And if I sing let me sing for the joy that has born in me these songs
And if I weep let it be as a man who is longing for his home”

Rich Mullins, “If I Stand”

The Father’s Hands

April 15, 2022 |

44 It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, 45 while the sun’s light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. 46 Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last. 47 Now when the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God, saying, “Certainly this man was innocent!” 48 And all the crowds that had assembled for this spectacle, when they saw what had taken place, returned home beating their breasts. 49 And all his acquaintances and the women who had followed him from Galilee stood at a distance watching these things.

Luke 23:44-49

A Litany of Lost Things

March 27, 2022 |

“When the younger son returns, Christ reports for us the words of the son to his father, but does not give anything about a speech of the father to his son. For in reality, the father substitutes kisses for words and replaces assertion with expression and eyes speak for the tongue.”

Rev. Dr. Ibrahim Sa’id, Quoted in Poet & Peasant by Kenneth Bailey

“For my entire life I had been quite responsible, traditional, and homebound. But, I suddenly saw my jealousy, my anger, my touchiness, doggedness and sullenness, and, most of all, my subtle self-righteousness. I saw how much of a complainer I was and how much of my thinking and feeling was ridden with resentment. I was the elder son for sure, but just as lost as his younger brother, even though I had stayed ‘home’ all my life.”

Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son

“These parables are truly a reassurance to those lost sheep who have strayed. But they are also a warning – and this aspect of their message is generally missed. Men and women everywhere prefer to build communities that affirm their choices, that share their values, that keep out those who might bring unrighteousness to their neighborhoods.”

Gary Burge, Jesus, The Middle Eastern Storyteller

The Messiah Enters Tension and Expectation

January 9, 2022 |

“The reason of my waking mind tells me that great evil has befallen and we stand at the end of days. But my heart says nay; and all my limbs are light, and a hope and joy are come to me that no reason can deny.”

 JRR Tolkien, The Return of the King

“The mystery of the incarnation reveals to us the spiritual dimension of human solidarity. We cannot live in intimate communion with Jesus without being sent to our brothers and sisters who belong to that same humanity that Jesus has accepted as his own. Thus intimacy manifests itself as solidarity and solidarity as intimacy.” 

Henri Nouwen, Lifesigns

“The picture at Jesus’ baptism is of God stepping out of heaven to address people, of God entering into their everyday world. Clearly God takes the initiative to show humanity the way to him.” 

Darrell Bock

A Divine Announcement in Routine Longing

December 5, 2021 |

“The announcement of John’s birth begins a series of great events that ring through the corridors of time and eternity as God’s salvation comes to fruition.”

Darrell L. Bock

“Aged priest tending the fires of incense,
You mistrust the angel’s sudden visit,
Counting pledges of answered prayer nonsense
For an old man, an old woman, neither fit.
You temporize, reluctant to submit.
I, too, inquire, “What’s the evidence?”
Even as I stoke altar fires with sweet incense.”

Christine H. Boldt, “Dumbstruck”

“I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else, and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of our times. It’s hard to believe always but more so in the world we live in now.”

Flannery O’Connor

Mission and the Messiness of Life

August 29, 2021 |

“Open wide the window of our spirits, O Lord, and fill us full of light; Open wide the door of our hearts, that we may receive and entertain thee with all our powers of adoration and love. Amen.”

Christina G. Rossetti, from Prayers from the Heart by Richard J. Foster

“There was a bird who… perched atop the corner of the world and built three nests. One of gold, one of silver and one of clay…. In the nest of gold she cleansed her coat daily, in the nest of silver she brought back her food. In the nest of clay she laid her eggs. On the day the fires came the nests of gold and silver met in a lucid river rushing to the sea while the nest of clay withstood the heat. Amen. The nest of clay was forged for eternity atop the corner of the world, while the ocean floor was covered in gold, silver, and sand.”

“Via Rail,” by Kaddisfly

“That’s the business of hope: broken things. And days like today make it clear that things are off the rails. We’ve got our work cut out for us. Oh God, there’s a new widow in the world. Our hearts are broken with her and for her. And only a mystery can heal them. Put me to work, Lord. Let me be about the business of the broken until it’s made right.”

“Fare Forward, Thomas McKenzie,” a eulogy by Pete Peterson

Gospel Gratitude in Everyday Relationships

August 1, 2021 |

“That she was his half, she had no doubt at all. He needed her. At times she knew with a joyous ache that she completed him, just as she knew with the same joy that she needed him and he completed her. How beautiful a thing it was, she thought, to be a half, to be completed by such another half! When had there ever been such a yearning of halves toward each other, such a longing, even in quarrels, to be whole. And sometimes they would be whole.”

Wendell Berry, “A Jonquil for Mary Penn” in Fidelity

“As I look back over the years of my pragmatic parenting, I’m saddened, but I am also gladdened, for you’ve always been faithful to your covenant love, even when I was overbearing and under-believing. The move from parenting by grit to parenting by grace has been a fitful but fruitful journey. Take me deeper; take me further.”

Scotty Smith, “A Prayer for Parenting and Re-Parenting by Grace”

“Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, white-washing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory if being in His grace you do it as your duty. To go to Communion worthily gives God great glory, but to take food in thankfulness and temperance gives Him glory too. He is so great that all things give Him glory if you mean they should. So then, my brethren, live.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Principle or Foundation”