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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Ethan Smith

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Held by His Love

May 28, 2023 |

“God descended in fire on Sinai to write the Law on tablets of stone; on that day, 3000 died. At Pentecost, God descended in fire on Zion to write his law on the tablets of his people’s hearts, and on that day 3000 were reborn. … God will graciously seal you with his Spirit so that you can know you are his forever and invite others into that eternal bond of love.”

David Cassidy

“The movement of God’s Spirit is very gentle, very soft—and hidden. It does not seek attention. But that movement is also very persistent, strong and deep. It changes our hearts radically. The faithful discipline of prayer reveals to you that you are the blessed one and gives you the power to bless others.”

Henri Nouwen

“This is what it means to be held
How it feels when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved
And to know that the promise was
When everything fell, we’d be held”

Natalie Grant

How He Loves Us So

May 21, 2023 |

“No one who meets Jesus ever stays the same. I have found that the doubts that afflict me from many sources—from science, from comparative religion, from an innate defect of skepticism, from aversion to the church—take on a new light when I bring those doubts to the man named Jesus.”

Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“Celebration belongs to God’s Kingdom. God not only offers forgiveness, reconciliation, and healing, but wants to lift up these gifts as a source of joy for all who witness them. … God rejoices and invites others to rejoice with him.”

Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son

“Welcome to the fallout
Welcome to resistance
The tension is here, the tension is here
Between who you are and who you could be
Between how it is and how it should be  …
Maybe redemption has stories to tell
Maybe forgiveness is right where you fell
Where can you run to escape from yourself?
Where you gonna go? Where you gonna go?
Salvation is here”

Switchfoot, “Dare You to Move”

Who Loves You?

May 14, 2023 |

“Christians find it easier to believe that God exists than that God loves them.”

Brennan Manning (paraphrasing Basil Hume)

“If the love of a father will not make a child delight in him, what will? Put, then, this to the venture: exercise your thoughts upon this very thing, the eternal, free, and fruitful love of the Father, and see if your hearts be not wrought upon to delight in him. … Sit down a little at the fountain, and you will quickly have a farther discovery of the sweetness of the streams. You who have run from him, will not be able, after a while, to keep at a distance for a moment.”

John Owen

“[Adoption] is the highest privilege that the gospel offers: higher even than justification. … In adoption, God takes us into his family and fellowship—he establishes us as his children and heirs. Closeness, affection and generosity are at the heart of the relationship. To be right with God the Judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is a greater.“

J.I. Packer

Safe

March 19, 2023 |

“The language of Christianity is the language of substitution. It is not primarily the language of morals. God is not presented as a mother saying ‘eat all your vegetables.’ Instead, Christianity is about a one-sided rescue—that we didn’t want and certainly didn’t deserve, and he did it anyway.”

Rod Rosenbladt

“Moved by the perfection of his holy love, God in Christ substituted himself for us sinners. That is the heart of the Cross of Christ.”

John Stott

“Self-help is the American gospel, which translates into self-congratulation and self-protection. … Jesus looks at us and he knows that we cannot help ourselves. He looks at us this very day in the same way he looked at every human being that he encountered during his earthly life: with infinite sadness for our predicament, yet with unquenchable love and with unflinching resolve to rescue us from certain condemnation and death, whatever it took, wherever it led, whatever the price. ‘Self-help’ is crucified with Christ.”

Fleming Rutledge

God Wins

March 12, 2023 |

“Give us faith to be strong
Father, we are so weak
Our bodies are fragile and weary
As we stagger and stumble to walk where you lead
Give us faith to be strong”

Andrew Peterson, “Faith to Be Strong”

“The love that is the heartbeat of the Christian story—the Father’s love for the Son, and through the Son, for the world—is not simply a sentimental feeling or a distant, ethereal theological truth, but has been signed and sealed by the most audacious act of true power in the history of the world, the resurrection of the Son from the dead. Power at its best is resurrection to full life, to full humanity. Whenever human beings become what they were meant to be, whenever death cannot finally hold its prisoners, then we can truly speak of power.”

Andy Crouch, Playing God

“God is God, and there is no hope for non-gods who want to be gods, except through the God-man who became a curse for us.”

Kevin DeYoung

It’s the Hope that Kills You

February 26, 2023 |

“Hast Thou not bid me seek Thy face,
And shall I seek in vain?
And can the ear of sovereign grace,
Be deaf when I complain?
No still the ear of sovereign grace,
Attends the mourner’s prayer.
Oh may I ever find access,
To breathe my sorrows there.” 

Anne Steele

“When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.” 

Stephen Crane

“If we remember God’s grace, we lose the pride that would make us a Pharisee and the despair that would make us a cynic.” 

Merold Westphal

Wholeheartedness

January 29, 2023 |

“This world has nothing for me
And this world has everything
All that I could want
And nothing that I need”

Caedmon’s Call, “This World”

“Our sticky fingers are motivated by desire for control just as much as for power—our tendency is to protect against the unknown future, especially against a future of need or dependence. This is illusory because of, well, the way life works in its unpredictability, but also because our thirst for security and control is just as ruthlessly insatiable as our hunger for love. Today, material comforts, in all of their abundance, are the yardstick of well-being. We can now meet all of our material needs in a way that shoves God into a corner along with our emptied shopping bags and useless impulse purchases.”

Emily Hornsby, “New Research on Wealth Confirms What Jesus Said 2,000 Years Ago”

“Jesus—upon whom the Father looks and says, ‘This is my beloved Son’—is the only rich man in the world; we, who spend our whole lives in the pursuit of wealth, come in the end only to the poverty of death. And we complain bitterly, unable to make head or tail of such a cruel reversal. But in Jesus—who made his grave with the wicked in their moral poverty and with the rich man in the death of all his possessing—all the pointless pursuing and all the sad incomprehension are turned to our good. He waits for us in our deaths. Quite literally, there is nothing we need to do except die.”

Robert Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment

Not by Chance

January 22, 2023 |

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 |

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 |

“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