Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

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Sunday School – Will Resume in September
Hope Café 10:15 a.m.
Worship 10:30 a.m.

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Ethan Smith

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The Language of the Heart: Praying our Joy

June 16, 2019 |

“I wince when I write the word father. I am one. It is my proudest calling. It is my deepest failure. There is no joy, no pain, no greater futility or pride, no dream, no nightmare that is deeper than my being a father. There is no forgiveness I long for more, nor accolade that will ever mean more to me than one of my children blessing me as a father.”

Dan Allender

“Most of the time we aim too low. We walk in shoes too small for us. We spend our days shooting for a little burst of approval or some small career victory. But there’s a joyful way of being that’s not just a little bit better than the way we are currently living; it’s a quantum leap better. … [Spiritual] joy is a delicious, if painful, longing. It starts with a taste of something eternal and then the joy consists of longing for that taste again.”

David Brooks, The Second Mountain

“God came down and lived in this same world as a man. He showed us how to live in this world, subject to its vicissitudes and necessities, that we might be changed—not into an angel or a storybook princess, not wafted into another world, but changed into saints in this world. The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances.”

Elisabeth Elliot, Keep a Quiet Heart

The Heartbeat of Hope: Equipped as Disciples of the Son

May 26, 2019 |

“No one will leave an addiction or compulsion unless a competing passion is offered that gives a taste of what the soul is meant to endure. Only Heaven is a big enough passion to draw us away from petty distractions and cheap addictions of this sorry world.”

Dan Allender, Bold Love

“The more you say no to self in the way that Jesus teaches us to, you become more yourself. You don’t cease to have a personality. The more you deny self, the more the ‘real you’ you become—the you that God intended you to be—the you that you sense in your better moments you should be. The you that God thought up in the first place.”

Sam Allberry, “Is God Anti-Gay?”

“[People with intellectual disabilities] are essentially people of the heart. When they meet others they do not have a hidden agenda for power or for success. Their cry, their fundamental cry, is for a relationship, a meeting heart to heart. It is this meeting that awakens them, opens them up to life, and calls them forth to love in great simplicity, freedom and openness. When those ingrained in a culture of winning and of individual success really meet them, and enter into friendship with them, something amazing and wonderful happens. They too are opened up to love and even to God. They are changed at a very deep level. They are transformed and become more fundamentally human.”

Jean Vanier

Every Story Whispers His Name

March 24, 2019 |

I would not have preached the honor and glory of the cross if I feared the death of the cross.”

The Apostle Andrew

“Seek what you seek; but remember that it is not where you seek it.”

Augustine, Confessions

“All that the world has to do to escape judgment is believe—for the simple reason that, by the gracious work of Jesus, it has in fact already escaped it. It need do nothing to earn that escape, and it certainly need not compile questionable lists of good works to prove that it deserves to escape. It need not negotiate with God, or be afraid of God, or try conning God into being lenient. It has only to believe that God in Jesus has settled all his problems of sin and to laugh loud and long at how graciously easy the whole business always was.”

Robert Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment

“Yielding to God’s will can be hard. And sometimes, it really hurts. But it always brings peace.”

John Perkins, Let Justice Roll Down

Grace Changes Everything (Even Our Bank Accounts)

March 3, 2019 |

Once we begin to understand and experience ‘wealth’ according to God’s definition of the term—that he himself is our only true riches and that in comparison to him money is a small and insignificant thing—our perspective on the value of persons will be reoriented. Our hierarchies of who is important and who is expendable, of who is noteworthy and who is not-worthy, of who deserves our friendship and who does not, completely fade away. Because in God’s economy, the poor in spirit—regardless of their so-called net worth—are the sole heirs of God’s riches.”

Scott Sauls, Irresistible Faith

“Hospitality is not so much a task as a way of living our lives and of sharing ourselves. … A life of hospitality begins in worship, with a recognition of God’s grace and generosity. Hospitality is not first a duty and responsibility; it is first a response of love and gratitude for God’s love and welcome to us.”

Christine Pohl
Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition

“The American dream—that hoary mythology that hard work always guarantees upward mobility—has for more than a century made the U.S. obsessed with material success and the exhaustive striving required to earn it. … The problem with this gospel—Your dream job is out there, so never stop hustling—is that it’s a blueprint for spiritual and physical exhaustion.”

Derek Thompson
“Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” The Atlantic

There is No Other Name

February 24, 2019 |

“Christianity is a religion of salvation, and the fact is that there is nothing in any of the nonChristian religions to compare with this message of a God who loved, and came after, and died for, a world of lost sinners.”

John Stott, Basic Christianity

“The gospel is not a preference. It’s not another piece of flair we add to our vest. It’s something far more beautiful and disturbing. The gospel is the power to raise the dead, to proclaim the greatness of God in a fallen and confused world.”

Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age

“It’s time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through
No right, no wrong, no rules for me
I’m free!”

Elsa, “Let it Go,” Frozen

My Feets is Tired, But My Soul is at Rest

December 30, 2018 |

“A common but futile strategy for achieving joy is trying to eliminate things that hurt: get rid of pain by numbing the nerve ends, get rid of insecurity by eliminating the risks, get rid of disappointment by depersonalizing your relationships. And then try to lighten the boredom of such a life by buying joy in the form of vacations and entertainment. … There is plenty of suffering on both sides, past and future. The joy comes because God knows how to wipe away tears, and, in his resurrection work, create the smile of new life. Joy is what God gives, not what we work up.”

Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

“‘We want suffering to be like pregnancy—we have a season, and it’s over, and there is a tidy moral to the story.’ I’ve come to sense that isn’t what faith is at all. What if there is never an end? What if the story never improves and the tests continue to break our hearts? Is God still good?”

Kara Tippetts, The Hardest Peace

“[The real heroes of the Civil Rights Movement] will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: ‘My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.’”

Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

The Mothers of Jesus: Rahab the Prostitute

December 16, 2018 |

“Even the size of our faith and the height of our holiness aren’t the basis of our hope. The value of our faith is based on the object of our faith.”

Bethany Jenkins, “Saints—They’re Just Like Us”

“Because you have loved me, O Lord, you have made me lovable.”

Augustine of Hippo

“We’re women and men who are so sinful and flawed that we deserve hell, but we’ve been so loved and welcomed that every spiritual blessing, adoption, tender fellowship with our Father and each other, forgiveness, reconciliation, and eternal life is ours. Christ’s accomplishments and perfections are ours now. Everything about us is different.”

Elyse Fitzpatrick, Because He Loves Me

Wisdom is Not a Fish That You Can Catch

August 5, 2018 |

“Christianity is a life to be lived and not a mere philosophy or point of view.”

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Life in the Spirit

“Dramatic, life-altering moments come only a few times during our lifetime—that’s why they’re dramatic. The rest of our lives are lived in the common, ordinary mundane. …  Dirty dishes in the sink is not just a worrisome ordeal in your otherwise uneventful day. It’s an opportunity to see glimpses of grace.”

Gloria Furman, “God Rules the Mundane”

“you bear the weight of all our grief
uncertainty and unbelief
oh, you restore our sanity
so we raise our voice
we raise an offering
would you come near
and quench our thirst
oh, lift our hearts
as the spirit bears the curse”

Derek Webb, “The Spirit Bears the Curse”

“To be joyful is to expect that life will reveal itself as God’s gift of grace …. To be joyful means to look out for opportunities for gratitude. … Indeed, it is really when the Holy Spirit comes and is present that one experiences true joy.”

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics