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Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

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You are here: Home / Archives for Advent 2017

Advent 2017

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True Glory

December 24, 2017 | David Speakman

“Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed—as a matter of cold, hard fact—all it’s cracked up to be, then even at best our efforts are misleading. The Word became flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God… who for us and for our salvation,” as the Nicene Creed puts it, “came down from heaven.” Came down. Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see. It is the Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms. It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast.”

—Frederick Buechner

True Life

December 17, 2017 | David Speakman

“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”

—Mary Oliver

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay Attention.
Be Astonished.
Talk about it.”

—Mary Oliver

“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”

—G.K. Chesterton

“Salvation is  . . . membership in the family of God . . . The creation of a family with children is the reason for all of God’s activity.  This is how he intends to show his glory . . . Our sonship to God is the apex of creation and the goal of redemption . . . The story of Paradise lost becoming Paradise regained is the story of God’s grace bringing us from alienation from him to membership in his family . . . Our self-image, if it is to be biblical, will begin just here. God is my Father (the Christian’s self-image always begins with the knowledge of God and who he is!); I am one of his children (I know my real identity); his people are my brothers and sisters (I recognize the family to which I belong and have discovered my deepest ‘roots’).”

—Sinclair Ferguson, Children of the Living God

True Light

December 10, 2017 | David Speakman

“Christmas, then, is not a dream, a moment of escapism.  Christmas is the reality, which shows up the rest of “reality.”  And for Christmas, here, read Christianity.  Either Jesus is the Lord of the world, and all reality makes sense in his light, or he is dangerously irrelevant to the problems and possibilities of today’s world.  There is no middle ground.  Either Jesus was, and is, the Word of God, or he, and the stories Christians tell about him, are lies.”

—N.T. Wright

“‘He came down from heaven’ can almost be transposed into ‘Heaven drew earth up into it,’ and locality, limitation, sleep, sweat, footsore weariness, frustration, pain, doubt, and death are, from before all worlds, known by God from within. The pure light walks the earth; the darkness, received into the heart of Deity, is there swallowed up. Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned?”

—C. S. Lewis

“There are theological reasons for observing a serious Advent without being swallowed up prematurely by the Christmas rush. Advent offers an unparalleled opportunity to take a fearless inventory of the darkness in our world and in our hearts, into which the True Light will come.”

—Fleming Rutledge

True God

December 3, 2017 | Ethan Smith

“The first thing that hit me when I started reading through the Gospels was the thought that Jesus had come to earth in the first place. … To exchange heaven for a place, and to exchange eternity for time, was an act of humility I don’t think any of us can understand.”

—Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What

“If we are to be named as who we really are, then it will have to come from the outside. A loving community can help do this—but even a loving community has its limits. Ultimately, in order for you to matter, in order for you to bear meaning—you will have to be Named in the same way you were called into existence. You will have to be Named by God—the kind and wise knower of your soul.”

—Roger Edwards, “Your Name Matters”

“How do you reconcile your love for someone with the revelation that they have behaved badly?”

—Savannah Guthrie, The Today Show

 

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