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Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

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You are here: Home / Archives for Ethan Smith

Ethan Smith

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Not by Chance

January 22, 2023 | Ethan Smith

Q. What do you understand by the providence of God?

A. God’s providence is his almighty and ever present power, whereby, as with his hand, he still upholds heaven and earth and all creatures, and so governs them that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, food and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, indeed, all things, come to us not by chance but by his fatherly hand.

Heidelberg Catechism #27

“He hath given me rest by his sorrow,
And life by his death.”

“Christian” in The Pilgrim’s Progress

“Remember I’ll always be here for you, even if you can’t see me. Because I love you.”

 “Chilli Heeler” in Bluey

The Best of All—God is with Us!

December 24, 2022 | Ethan Smith

21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:

23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel”

(which means, God with us).                                                                                                                                       

Matthew 1:21-23

Great David’s Greater Son

December 11, 2022 | Ethan Smith

“The early Christians did not say ‘look what the world is coming to!’ but ‘look what has come into the world!’”

Carl Henry

“So I’ve been waiting for the King
To come galloping out of the clouds while the angel armies sing
He’s gonna gather His people in the shadow of His wings
And I’m gonna raise my voice with the song of the redeemed
‘Cause all this darkness is a small and passing thing”

Andrew Peterson, “The Dark Before the Dawn”

“In short, we need to be forgiven. That’s the only way for our discontent to be healed. It will take more than a miracle worker or a divine genie—it will take a Savior. Jesus knows that to be our Savior he is going to have to die. And we will discover that in the process of dealing with what we thought were our deepest wishes, Jesus has revealed an even deeper, truer one beneath—and it is for Jesus himself. He will not just have granted that true deepest wish, he will have fulfilled it. Jesus is not going to play the rotten practical joke of giving you your deepest wish—until he has shown you that it was for him all along.”

Tim Keller, Jesus the King

The Grace of Smelling Salts

October 23, 2022 | Ethan Smith

“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out.”

Eugene Peterson, The Message paraphrase of Romans 12:1-2a

“Come broken and weary, come battered and bruised.
My Jesus makes all things new, all things new.
Come lost and abandoned, come blown by the wind.
He’ll bring you back home again, home again.

Rise up, oh you sleeper, awake,
The light of the dawn is upon you.
Rise up, oh you sleeper, awake,
He makes all things new, all things new.”

Andrew Peterson, “All Things New”

Memento Mori

October 2, 2022 | Ethan Smith

“We have incredible powers of self-deception and denial. Jesus sees and knows the truth about us that we most need to know. And because he loves us and is bent on blessing us, he is willing to tell us the truth, even though it might be uncomfortable for us to hear.”

Nancy Guthrie, Blessed

“The creative action of the Christian’s life is to prepare his death in Christ.”

 Flannery O’Connor, Memoir of Mary Ann

“What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”

Frederick Buechner, Godric

“One of the main ways we move from abstract knowledge about God to a personal encounter with him as a living reality is through the furnace of affliction. … While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy.”

Tim Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

The Recipe for Joy

September 4, 2022 | Ethan Smith

“We tend to think that sorrow and despair are more authentic and real than celebration and joy. The last thing we want to be—or be seen as—is happy-clappy. … Joy is not ‘toxic positivity.’ It does not insist that we pretend things are better than they are. It does not refuse to face grief or sorrow. But it does say that they are not all there is and that they are not all that needs to be faced.”

Tish Harrison Warren, “How to Cultivate Joy Even When It Feels in Short Supply”

“It is more blessed to give than to receive—that’s true. But for needy adults, who in this respect are like sick infants, something of value must be received before anything of value can be given. Receiving always precedes giving. And that never changes. We never outgrow our need to receive. It’s a beautiful thing to witness the humility that receives.”

Larry Crabb, Shattered Dreams: God’s Unexpected Path to Joy

“Joy is always all-encompassing; there is nothing of us left over to hate with or to be afraid with, to feel guilty with or to be selfish about. Joy is where the whole being is pointed in one direction, and it is something that by its nature a man never hoards but always wants to share. The second thing is that joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes. Even nailed to a tree.”

Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark

Is God Dead?

August 7, 2022 | Ethan Smith

“God isn’t a sadist who delights in using agony to teach us a lesson. But in the alchemy of redemption, God can take what is only sorrow and transform it into the very path by which we learn to love God and let ourselves be loved. This is the strange (and usually unwanted) way of abundant life—the dying necessary to bring resurrection.”

Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night

“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 human soul under the disciplined regimen of God works like muscles do under the disciplined regimen of a trainer. The more the soul is worked and stretched to its limits, the more able it becomes to endure suffering and enjoy God all at once. When this happens in us, we become the best kind of dangerous. The more we get pushed, the more pushing we can do, and the more able we become to show up for others in their toil and tribulation.”

Scott Sauls, Beautiful People Don’t Just Happen

Trading Trash for Treasure

July 31, 2022 | Ethan Smith

“Our pride drives us to establish our own righteousness. We strive all our life to see ourselves as keepers of rules we cannot keep, as loyal subjects of laws under which we can only be judged outlaws. Yet so deep is our need to derive our identity from our own self-respect … that we will spend a lifetime trying to do the impossible rather than, for even one carefree minute, consent to having it done for us by someone else.”

Robert Capon

“It is like this: the earth does not produce rain, nor is it able by its own power or work to get it. The earth simply receives it as a gift of God from above. It is the same with ‘passive’ righteousness. It is given to us by God without our deserving it or working for it. So let’s look at what the earth is able to do to get the rain each season so that it can be fruitful, and we will see how much we are able in our own strength and works to do to get heavenly and eternal righteousness. We see we will never be able to attain it unless God Himself, by the great gift of His Son, gives us Jesus’ perfect record, and gives us Jesus’ perfect righteousness.”

Martin Luther

Renewing Mission: The Movement of True Love

May 29, 2022 | Ethan Smith

“Ordinary love, anonymous and unnoticed as it is, is the substance of peace on earth, the currency of God’s grace in our daily life.”

Tish Harrison Warren

“All other gods are actually powerless, because there is no true power without love. And there is no true love without compassion, no true compassion without suffering. Which means Christ, the one who innocently and truly suffered, the one who truly feels with us, the only one who has shown God’s true love for us—only Christ has the power of God for salvation, which means only Christ can be worshiped as God and King.”

NT Wright

“Love moves toward people, even if that means confrontation. It doesn’t leave them alone in their suffering or in their selfishness. Sometimes people are so paralyzed that unless we intrude, unless we break through both of our natural reserves, we can’t love them. When I need to talk to one of our teenagers about something and know I’ll get an earful, I remind myself that love moves toward people. I don’t even need to know what to say—I can just move closer.”

Paul Miller

Seven Miles with Jesus

April 24, 2022 | Ethan Smith

“Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell a new powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story. … If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story.”

Ivan Illich

“If you win this golf tournament today, if you lose this golf tournament by 10 shots, if you never win another golf tournament again, I’m still going to love you. You’re still going to be the same person. Jesus loves you. And nothing changes.”

Meredith Scheffler

“Food may not be the answer to world peace, but it’s a start.”

Anthony Bourdain

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