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Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

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You are here: Home / Archives for Good News From Mark

Good News From Mark

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Good Night and Good Morning

February 21, 2016 | David Speakman

“Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer.” —John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Jesus was the only one that ever raised the dead, “The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. If He did what He said, then there’s   nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left…” —Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

“How can this strange story of God made flesh, of a crucified savior, of resurrection and new creation become credible for those whose entire mental training has conditioned them to believe that the real world is the world which can be satisfactorily explained and managed without the   hypothesis of God? I know of only one clue to the answering of that   question, only one real hermeneutic of the gospel: a congregation which believes it.”

—Lesslie Newbigin

“Practice resurrection.”

—Eugene Peterson

 

The Power To Go Low

February 14, 2016 | Clyde Godwin

The descent to Hell is easy, and those who begin by worshipping power soon worship evil. —C.S. Lewis

On the cross, Jesus is getting what we deserve so we can get what he deserves. When you see the great reversal is for you, when you see that he gave up his cosmic wealth and came into our poverty so that you could be spiritually rich, it changes you. —Tim Keller, Jesus is King

But love without power is less that what it is meant to be. … This is why the love that is at 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. —Andy Crouch, Playing God – Redeeming The Gift Of Power

The Real Presence

February 7, 2016 | Clyde Godwin

The Passover meal had to be prepared in a certain way and had a distinct form. It included four points at which the presider, holding a glass of wine, got up and explained the feast’s meaning. The four cups of wine represented the four     promises made by God in Exodus 6:6-7. These promises were for rescue from Egypt, for freedom from slavery, for redemption by God’s divine power, and for a renewed relationship with God. The third cup came at a point when the meal was almost completely eaten. The presider would use words from Deuteronomy 26 to bless the elements — the bread, the herbs, the lamb — by explaining how they were symbolic reminders of various aspects of the early Israelites’ captivity and deliverance. For example, he would show them the bread and say, “This is the bread of our affliction, which our fathers ate in the wilderness.”

One more example: I read some years ago in National Geographic that after a forest fire in Yellowstone National Park, some forest rangers began a trek up a     mountain to survey the damage. One ranger found a bird of which nothing was left but the carbonized, petrified shell, covered in ashes, huddled at the base of a tree. Somewhat sickened by this eerie sight, the ranger knocked the bird over with a stick — and three tiny chicks scurried out from under their dead mother’s wings. When the blaze had arrived, the mother had remained steadfast instead of running. Because she had been willing to die, those under the cover of her wings lived. “And Jesus said, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you that kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings” Luke 13:34). He did indeed gather     Jerusalem’s children under his wings — and he was consumed. All real, life-changing love is costly, substitutionary sacrifice.

Jesus says, “Take it”. He lets us know that we have to take what he is doing for us. We have to receive it actively. It is common to distribute the Lord’s Supper and say, “Feed on Him in your hearts by faith.” You don’t get the benefit of food unless you take it and digest it. You can have a meal piled high in front of you, all the food cooked to perfection, and you could still starve to death. To be       nourished by a meal, you have to eat it. The excellent preparation of the food doesn’t help you if you’re not willing to pick it up and take it into yourself. Taking it is the same as saying, “This is the real food I need — Christ’s unconditional commitment to me.

—Timothy Keller, King’s Cross

The Cup

January 31, 2016 | David Speakman

“Go to dark Gethsemane,
Ye that feel the tempter’s power.
Your Redeemer’s conflict see;
Watch with Him one bitter hour.
Turn not from His griefs away;
Learn of Jesus Christ to pray.
Learn of Jesus Christ to pray.”
—James Montgomery

“Gethsemane is where we go when
there’s no place to go but God.”
—Ken Gire

“In the strange mercy of God, the cup of God’s righteous wrath against the sin of the world is given into the hands,
not of his enemies, but of his beloved Son.
And his Son will drink this cup down to its dregs.”
—Lesslie Newbigin

False or True

January 17, 2016 | Clyde Godwin

Until the unlimited,
Unbridled and unrelenting
Love of God
Takes root in our life,
Until God’s reckless
Pursuit of us captures
Our imagination,
Until our head knowledge
Of God settles
Into our heart
Through pure grace,
Nothing really changes.
—Fil Anderson

What can we expect from God? What is He really like? What will He do with us once our denial and sin is disrupted and our hurt and fury drawn forth?
It is in the dark struggles with God that we are surprised by His response to our anger and fear. What we receive from Him during difficult battle is not what we expect. We assume He wants order, conformity — obedient children. Instead, we find that He wants our passionate involvement and utter awe in the mystery of His glorious character…In the darkness of our emotional wrestling with God, we grow in our understanding of Him. When He does not respond to us as we expect, we learn about His surprising character. We attack Him with anger, but we do not receive His judgment in return. We plead desperately for Him to save us from terror, but He does not necessarily rescue us with immediate resolution of our circumstances. However, what He does reveal is His heart for us.
—Allender & Longman, The Cry of the Soul

Praise the Lord

January 3, 2016 | David Speakman

“My hallelujah has passed through the purgatory of my doubt.” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Let us praise and join the chorus
Of the saints enthroned on high.
Here they trusted Him before us,
Now their praises fill the sky.
Thou hast washed us with Thy blood,
Thou hast washed us with Thy blood,
Thou hast washed us with Thy blood,
Thou art worthy Lamb of God.”
—John Newton
“Worship is the strategy by which we interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves and attend to the presence of God.” —Eugene Peterson

The Ransom

December 27, 2015 | Clyde Godwin

One day, in the course of a rambling lecture, my old professor made a statement along these lines: “There is a new problem in our country. We are becoming a nation that is dominated by large institutions — churches, businesses, governments, labor unions, universities — and these big institutions are not serving us well. I hope that all of you will be concerned about this. Now you can do as I do, stand outside and criticize, bring pressure if you can, write and argue about it. All of this may do some good. But nothing of substance will happen unless there are people inside these institutions who are able to (and want to) lead them into better performance for the public good. Some of you ought to make careers inside these big institutions and become a force for good — from the inside.”

It is part of the enigma of human nature that the “typical” person —immature, stumbling, inept, lazy —is capable of great dedication and heroism if wisely led. Many otherwise able people are disqualified to lead because they cannot work with and through the half-people who are all there are. The secret of institution building is to be able to weld a team of such people by lifting them up to grow taller than they would otherwise be.

—Servant Leadership, Robert K. Greenleaf

Worth the Wait

December 20, 2015 | David Speakman

“Waiting on God isn’t about the suspension of meaning and purpose. It’s part of the meaning and purpose that God has brought into my life.  Waiting on God isn’t to be viewed as an obstruction in the way of the plan.  Waiting is an essential part of the plan.  For the child of God, waiting isn’t simply about what the child will receive at the end of his wait.  No, waiting is much more purposeful, efficient, and practical.  Waiting is fundamentally about what we will become as we wait.” —Paul David Tripp

“Waiting is active. Most of us think of waiting as something very passive, a hopeless state determined by events totally out of our hands. But there is none of this passivity in scripture. Those who are waiting are waiting very actively. They know that what they are waiting for is growing from the ground on which they are standing. That’s the secret. The secret of waiting is the faith that the seed has been planted, that something has begun. Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it.” —Henri Nouwen

“It’s hard to wait, so hard to wait.” —Flo Paris

The Pleasure of God

December 13, 2015 | Clyde Godwin

Christ came to prove that God came to tell the truth, that God keeps his promises. Christmas means God can be trusted.  —John Piper

Nothing is more wonderful for a sinner to receive than mercy.  —Philip Ryken

We can recognize Jesus the same way the shepherds recognized him: by his humility. When we see him wrapped in the swaddling cloths of his humanity – and even more, when we see him dying in the naked agony of the cross – we know he is the Christ God has sent to save us.  —Philip Ryken

Praise Changes Things

December 6, 2015 | Clyde Godwin

Sabbath is the stranger you’ve always known. It’s the place of homecoming you’ve rarely or never visited, but which you’ve been missing forever. You recognize it the moment you set eyes on it. It’s the gift that surprises you, not by its novelty, but by its familiarity. It’s the song you never sang but, hearing it now, know inside out, its words and melody, its harmonies, its rhythm, the way the tune quickens just before the chorus bursts. Its been asleep in you all this time, waiting for the right kiss to wake it.

Life is meant to be much different — fuller, richer, deeper, slower — from what it is.
— The Rest of God, Mark Buchanan

But in fact the real difficulty, because the supreme mystery with which the gospel confronts us, does not lie here at all. It lies, not in the Good Friday message of atonement, nor in the Easter message of resurrection, but in the Christmas message of incarnation. The really staggering Christian claim is that Jesus of Nazareth was God made man — the second person of the Godhead became the ‘second man’ (I Corinthians 15:47), determining human destiny, the second representative head of the race, and that He took humanity without loss of deity, so that Jesus of Nazareth was as truly and fully divine as He was human. Here are two mysteries for the price of one — the plurality of persons within the unity of God, and the union of Godhead and manhood in the person of Jesus. It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. ‘The Word was made flesh’ (John 1:14);God became man; the divine Son became a Jew, the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. And there was no illusion or deception in this; the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the incarnation.
— Knowing God, J.I. Packer

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