Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

Sunday Schedule:

9:30 a.m. – Indoor Worship Service & Livestream
10:00 a.m. – Sunday School
11:15 a.m. – Outdoor Worship Service

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Ethan Smith

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When the Anger of Jesus is Also the Welcome of God

March 28, 2021 |

“Come to your Temple here with liberation
And overturn these tables of exchange,
Restore in me my lost imagination,
Begin in me for good the pure change.”

Malcolm Guite

“Ponder the one truth that no one can reveal to you except God: he loves you just as much while you are sinning as he does while you are praying—probably more. That truth will never free you to sin; it will only free you to worship.”

Larry Crabb

“Almost everything that corrupts us is something we use to fill some kind of ache, some kind of emptiness…. And the joy of the Christian life is that those aches, those needs, that emptiness that we’re going to encounter because we’re human, is ultimately met in Christ, and that everything that we try to fill it with that is not Christ will never really fill it.”

Rich Mullins

The Cross, the Resurrection, and the Death of Scorekeeping

January 31, 2021 |

“She who dies with the most checked boxes wins, right? Wrong…. [Accomplishment and ambition] are simply not the drivers of our happiness. By the time many people figure this out on their own, they have spent a lifetime checking things off lists, yet are unhappy and don’t know why.”

Arthur Brooks

“We delude ourselves into thinking that our own salvation can be achieved by keeping books on others …. as if putting ourselves at the head of a whole column marching in the wrong direction somehow made us less lost than the rest of the troops. It would be funny if it were not fatal; but fatal it is, because grace works only in those who accept their lostness. Jesus came to call sinners, not the pseudo-righteous; he came to raise the dead, not to buy drinks for the marginally alive.”

Robert Capon

“At times I feel Christ’s presence flooding my meager heart. At other times I cling on for dear life, not knowing the end of the story. But I must stake my life in this claim: that Jesus is the resurrection and the life.”

Rebecca McLaughlin

All that I Need, I Have

January 17, 2021 |

“On the one hand [the Christian faith] is the most pessimistic religion in the world, for it recognizes the tragic and awful dimensions of man’s sin. But on the other hand it is the most optimistic religion in the world, for it recognizes the heightening dimensions of God’s grace and how God’s grace can come in and pick up…. Christianity, therefore, becomes the greatest pessimistic optimistic religion in the world…. God’s grace stands over man’s sin.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I could more easily contain Niagara Falls in a teacup than I can comprehend the wild, uncontainable love of God.”

Brennan Manning

“God’s blessings don’t pursue temporarily—but relentlessly…. When I’m in a wilderness, His mercy and goodness run after me. When I’m hurting, His grace hunts for me. When I’m plagued by problems, His goodness pursues me. No matter where I go, He has his two blessing men right there in hot pursuit: goodness and mercy, and no shadow of death can overshadow the goodness and mercy that shadows the child of God.”

Ann Voskamp

The Thing Everyone Needs This Christmas

December 20, 2020 |

Now some are lost in shopping malls and some on battlefields
And some are lost in suburbs and some on capitol hills
Some are lost on terminal wards or in a nursing home
And some are equally as lost in between their headphones
But whatever your coordinates on your map of shame
Rather close or far away we’re all lost just the same

The birth of births was like a death
Under that hallowed star
Still every father know and cares
Where his sons and daughters are

Bill Mallonee, “Every Father Knows”

“It’s still not Christmas, but it’s also still not the great last Advent, the last coming of Christ. Through all the Advents of our life that we celebrate runs the longing for the last Advent, when the word will be: ‘See, I am making all things new’ (Rev. 21:5).”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger

O King within the child within the clay,
O hidden King who shapes us in the play
Of all creation. Shape us for the day
Your coming Kingdom comes into its own.

Malcom Guite, O Rex Gentium (O King of the Nations)

“Remember that this God in whose hand are all creatures, is your Father, and is much more tender of you than you are, or can be, of yourself.”

John Flavel, Keeping the Heart

When the Wrong Seems Oft So Strong

November 29, 2020 |

Broken bottles, broken plates
Broken switches, broken gates
Broken dishes, broken parts
Streets are filled with broken hearts
Broken words never meant to be spoken
Everything is broken

Bob Dylan, “Everything is Broken”

A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes, does various unessential things, and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

When we read in the Old Testament that God is just and righteous …. it is much more like a verb than a noun, because it refers to the power of God to make right what has been wrong. That in itself sounds inoffensive enough, but the radical message underlying it, and the one we resist, is that God does this right-making in spite of our resistance.

 Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion

True News for a Fake News Culture

November 22, 2020 |

“Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”

CS Lewis

“Anything must be true before it can significantly claim other merits. Without truth all else is worthless.”

Felix Fernandez

“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that unless we love the truth we cannot know it.”

Blaise Pascal

The Antisocial Distance of God

October 18, 2020 |

The list goes on forever
Of all the ways I could be better, in my mind
As if I could earn God’s favor, given time
Or at least congratulations …
I’ve spent my whole life searching desperately
To find out that grace requires nothing of me

Sleeping at Last, “One”

“Your Christian life and mine don’t make any sense unless in the depth of our beings we believe that Jesus not only knows what hurts us, but knowing, seeks us out whatever our poverty, whatever our pain.”

Brennan Manning, “What It Means to Be Cool in Christ Jesus”

“The hands of the king are healing hands, and thus shall the rightful king be known.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, Return of the King

All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy

July 26, 2020 |

“I believe that God made me for a purpose—[to be a missionary to] China. But he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

Chariots of Fire

“Play is meaningful in itself. It justifies and rewards itself…. It pushes us to explore the world and to form bonds with new people. Play offers respite from the tyranny of work and  routine.”

Dan Doriani

“The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is to cry Father! from a full heart.”

George MacDonald

‘Work’s Work’ and Other Myths

July 19, 2020 |

26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Genesis 1:26-28

Shared Experience: Grace for Exiles

May 31, 2020 |

“We are sinners with the capacity to do great damage to ourselves and our relationships. We need God’s grace to save us from ourselves. But we are also God’s children, which means that we have great hope and potential—not hope that rests on our gifts, experience, or track record, but hope that rests in Christ. Because he is in us and we are in him, it is right to say that our potential is Christ.”

Timothy Lane and Paul David Tripp, Relationships: A Mess Worth Making

“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

“It is not merely that the rich man is obliged to meet the needs of those who are less well off than he is but also that each one of us must use the gifts which we have received either by nature or by the Holy Spirit, so that no one may say that we are keeping these things to ourselves and refusing to share them with our neighbors.”

Andreas, Catena

“What more sublime can be said of friendship, what more true, what more profitable, than it ought to, and has proved to, begin in Christ, continue in Christ, and be perfected in Christ.”

Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship