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Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

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8:30 & 11:00 a.m. – Worship
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You are here: Home / Archives for Ethan Smith

Ethan Smith

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The Promised Deliverer

December 3, 2023 | Ethan Smith

“‘The Son of Man,’ Jesus says, ‘comes at a time you don’t think’ (in an hour that seems like nothing to you). To be ready for that, therefore, all you have to do is wait in faith for nothing — that is, for death. And the only way of being unready is to cut short that waiting by unfaith — to dash off on material or spiritual excursions we think will give us life. But our life does not consist in the abundance of things we possess (Luke 12:15). Rather our life is hid with Christ in God (Col. 3:3) and the mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection. He who loses his life for Jesus’ sake, therefore, will find it.”
Robert Capon

“Oh, the devil’s singing over me an age old song
That I am cursed and gone astray
Singing the first verse so conveniently over me
He’s forgotten the refrain:
‘Jesus saves!’”
Shane & Shane

“The good news of Advent is not that we are faithful in our waiting (we often aren’t) but that God is faithful in his coming.”
Rich Villodas

The Gospel of God: Good News Illustrated

November 26, 2023 | Ethan Smith

“Probably more trouble is caused in the Christian life by an inadequate or mistaken view of this doctrine [of justification] than any other. When the child of God loses his sense of peace with God, finds his concern for others dried up, or generally finds his sense of the sheer goodness and grace of God diminished, it is from this fountain that he has ceased to drink. Conversely, if we can gain a solid grounding here, we have the foundation for a life of peace and joy.”
Sinclair Ferguson, The Christian Life

“Forgiveness remits our debts and cancels our liability to punishment; justification bestows on us a righteous standing before God.”
John Stott, The Cross of Christ

“Jesus, Thy blood and righteousness,
My beauty are, my glorious dress;
Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed,
With joy I shall lift up my head.”
Nicolaus Ludwig Von Zinzendorf

“Faith is holding on to the faithfulness of God. Faith does not even look at itself. I go further. Faith is never interested in itself and never talks about itself. That to me is a very good test. I always distrust people who talk about their faith. That is the characteristic of the cults. They always direct attention to themselves . . . the emphasis is on self. But faith looks at God, holds on to the faithfulness of God. Abraham ‘gave glory to God.’”
David Martyn Lloyd-Jones

The Gospel of God: He Ain’t Heavy

November 19, 2023 | Ethan Smith

“If I’m laden at all
Then I’m laden with sadness
That everyone’s heart
Isn’t filled with the gladness
Of love for one another”
The Hollies

“[The righteousness of God] is his just justification of the unjust, his righteous way of ‘righteoussing’ the
unrighteous.”
John Stott

“Dumbledore gulped at the goblet, drained every last drop, and then, with a great, rattling gasp, rolled over onto his
face.”
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“To please God … to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness … to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted
in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our
thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.”
C.S. Lewis

The Gospel of God: A Church with Broken Windows

November 12, 2023 | Ethan Smith

“It was the kind of church where you could show your ugly heart to everybody and they just loved you harder and
handed you a beer.”
Harrison Scott Key

“It can seem gentler and kinder to think of human beings as basically good, our intuitions basically correct and our
motives basically pure. But then we run into the hard facts of greed, genocide, abuse, oppression, lies, tyranny, hatred,
jealousy, violence, murder, enslavement and even mundane selfishness, impatience, arrogance or resentment in our
own heart. … If I am a sinner, then my enemy and I have something in common: We are both wayward and in deep
need of grace.”
Tish Harrison Warren

“We cannot present a reason for Christ to finally close off his heart to his own sheep. No such reason exists. Every
human friend has a limit. If we offend enough, if a relationship gets damaged enough, if we betray enough times, we
are cast out. The walls go up. With Christ, our sins and weaknesses are the very resumé items that qualify us to
approach him.”
Dane Ortlund

“Cheer up! God’s Spirit works in your weakness.”
Jack Miller

Love is an Open Door

October 1, 2023 | Ethan Smith

“I just want to be forgiven. Can’t I be forgiven? I just want to be forgiven.”
“Joel Maisel” in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

“A moralistic religion of self-salvation is our default setting as fallen creatures. If we are not explicitly and regularly
taught out of it, we will always turn the message of God’s rescue operation into a message of self-help.”
Michael Horton, Christless Christianity

“The essence of faith is rest in the life and death of Jesus …. You may have a weak faith that you wish were stronger, but
you have a strong Savior who could not be more powerful. If you are his, it is not because your trust never wavers but
because his love never fails.”
David Cassidy, Indispensable

Held by His Love

May 28, 2023 | Ethan Smith

“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 | Ethan Smith

“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 | Ethan Smith

“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 | Ethan Smith

“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 | Ethan Smith

“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

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