Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

Sunday Schedule:

9:00 a.m. – Worship
10:15 a.m. – Hope Café
10:45 a.m. – Worship

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Renew: Returning to the Heartbeat of Hope

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Renewing Discipleship: Hearing and Doing the Word

May 22, 2022 |

“The greatest single secret of spiritual development lies in personal, humble, believing, obedient response to the Word of God. It is as God speaks to us through his Word that his warnings can bring us to conviction of sin, his promises to assurance of forgiveness, and his commands to amendment of life. We live and grow by his Word.” 

John Stott

“Our bodies, our pleasures, our fears, our fatigue, our friendships, our fights – these are in fact the stuff of our formation and transformation into the frail but infinitely dignified creatures we were meant to be and shall become. Our moments of exaltation and our stifled yawns – somehow they go together, part of the whole life that we were meant to offer to God day by day, as well as Sunday by Sunday, the life that God has taken into his own life. It is the life that Christ himself assumed, and thus rescued and redeemed.” 

Andy Crouch, in Liturgy of the Ordinary, by Tish Harrison Warren 

“Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?” 

Jesus, Luke 6:46

Renewing Discipleship: The Working Word

May 15, 2022 |

“Christians feed on Scripture.  Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body.  Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.” 

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, 18.

“When a minister reads out of the Bible, I am sure that at least nine times out of ten the people who happen to be listening at all hear not what is really being read but only what they expect to be read. And I think that what most people expect to hear read from the Bible is an edifying story, an uplifting thought, a moral lesson—something elevating, obvious, and boring. So that is exactly what very often they do hear. Only that is too bad because if you really listen—and maybe you have to forget that it is the Bible being read and a minister who is reading it—there is no telling what you might hear.”

Frederick  Buechner

“The most precious part of each day for me is the 30-40 minutes I spend each morning before breakfast with the Bible.  All the rest of the day I am bombarded with the stories the world is telling about itself.  As I take time to immerse myself in the story the Bible tells, my vision is cleared, and I see things in another way.  I see the day that lies ahead in its place in God’s story.” 

Lesslie Newbigin

Stepping In

May 8, 2022 |

“The persons within God exalt each other, commune with each other, and defer to one another…. Each divine person harbors the others at the center of his being. In constant movement of overture and acceptance, each person envelops and encircles the others…. God’s interior life overflows with regard for others.” 

Cornelius Plantinga

“How do we relate to him now? How, where, and when is this loving relationship practically played out? The answer is in corporate worship. This is exactly what corporate worship is: the interaction between a groom and his bride. Corporate worship is the dialogue that takes place between two who love each other and take delight in each other’s presence.” 

Steve Klingbeil

We will dance on the streets that are golden
The glorious bride and the great Son of Man
Let every tongue and tribe and nation
Rejoice in the song of the Lamb

“We Will Dance,” David Ruis

Not Neglecting Such a Great Savior

May 1, 2022 |

“Over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living, which we know we are passing by. Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power.” 

Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion

“God speaks to us: not only to move us to do what he wants, but to enable us to know him so that we may love him.  Therefore God sends his word to us in the character of both information and invitation.  It comes to woo us as well as to instruct us; it not merely puts us in the picture of what God has done and is doing but also calls us into personal communion with the loving Lord himself.” 

JI Packer, Knowing God, 110.

“Of this gospel, I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace . . . to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ.” 

Ephesians 3:7-8

Waiting and Working for Heaven

June 14, 2020 |

“In Jesus Christ we witness the long-awaited vindication and effective demonstration of God’s kingship in the world.  The coming of Christ is the climax of the whole history of redemption as recorded in the Scriptures. The rightful king has established a beachhead in his territory and calls on his subjects to press his claims ever farther in creation.” 

Al Wolters, Creation Regained

“Most respectable Christians do have the biblical habit of praying for the kingdom to come, but when their lives are good their prayers for the kingdom sometimes fade. People whisper their prayers for the kingdom, so that God can’t quite hear them. ‘Your kingdom come,’ they say, ‘but not right away.’ When our earthly kingdoms have had a good year, we don’t necessarily long for the kingdom of God to break in.  We like our own setup just fine.” 

Cornelius Plantinga

“If we believe in the kingdom of God we will pray and we will hope for those without much hope left. We will drive through the fog of doubt that descends on even the keenest believers . . . We will work and study in the same direction as we hope. According to Lewis Smedes, hoping for others is hard, but not the hardest.  Praying for others is hard, but not the hardest. The hardest task for people who believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ is in living the sort of life that makes people say, ‘Ah, so that’s how people are going to live when righteousness takes over our world.’” 

Cornelius Plantinga

Renew: The True Hope of Heaven

June 7, 2020 |

“If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” 

Colossians 3:1-4

“Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakable will remain.” 

CS Lewis, The Great Divorce

“God does not make junk, and God does not junk what he made.”  

Al Wolters, Creation Regained

“Heaven means sharing in the blessedness of God so that in the very depths of our being there is divine contentment, joy, and fulfillment. There is total shalom: a sense of sheer well-being.  Every need is met.  Every longing is fulfilled.  Every goal is achieved. Every sense is satisfied. We see him. We are with him. He holds us and hugs us and whispers, ‘This is forever.’” 

Donald Macleod

“Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.” 

Thomas Moore

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

Renew: Expressing Christ’s Kingdom

May 24, 2020 |

“A debtor to mercy alone,
Of covenant mercy I sing;
Nor fear, with Thy righteousness on,
My person and offering to bring.
The terrors of law and of God
With me can have nothing to do;
My Savior’s obedience and blood
Hide all my transgressions from view.” 

Augustus Toplady

“Honestly, I want to be like Christ. But honestly, I want to be like the Christ who turned the water into wine, not the Christ who thirsted on the cross. I want to be the clothed Christ, not the one whose garment was stripped and gambled away. I want to be the Christ who fed the five thousand, not the one who hungered for forty days in the wilderness. I want to be the free Christ, walking through the wheatfields with His disciples, not the imprisoned Christ who was deserted by them . . . This is the dark side of Christianity, the side we don’t see when we sign up. That if we want to be like Christ, we have to embrace both sides of His life. What else could it mean when the Bible talks about the “fellowship of His sufferings?”

Ken Gire, The Reflective Life

“He who is forgiven little, loves little.”

Luke 7:47

Renew: Christ’s Kingdom

May 17, 2020 |

“Grace is God loving, God stooping, God coming to the rescue, God giving himself generously in and through Jesus Christ.” 

John Stott

“No matter how much we give lip service to the notion of free grace and dying love, we do not like it. It is just too …  indiscriminate.  It lets rotten sons and crooked tax farmers and common tarts into the kingdom, and it thumbs its nose at really good people.  And it does that, gallingly, for no more reason than the Gospel’s shabby exaltation of dumb trust over worthy works.” 

Robert Capon

“Grace cannot prevail … until our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed.” 

Robert Capon

“Savior, if of Zion’s city,
I through grace a member am,
Let the world deride or pity,
I will glory in Thy name.
Fading is the worldling’s pleasure,
All his boasted pomp and show;
Solid joys and lasting treasure
None but Zion’s children know.” 

John Newton

Renewing Good News

May 10, 2020 |

“It is high time that Christians should rediscover that the very heart of their faith is that Jesus Christ did not come to make a contribution to the religious storehouse of mankind, but that in him God reconciled the world unto himself.” 

Dr. W.A. Visser’t Hooft, first General Secretary to the World Council of Churches.

“Jesus is not ‘the Great’; he is the only. He has no peers, no rivals, and no successors.” 

John Stott

“I am grateful for Shinto, for Buddhism, and for Confucianism. I owe much to these faiths . . . Yet these three faiths utterly failed to minister to my heart’s deepest needs. I was a pilgrim journeying upon a long road that had no turning. I was weary. I was footsore. I wandered through a dark and dismal world where tragedies were thick . . . Buddhism teaches great compassion . . . but since the beginning of time, who has declared, ‘this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many unto the remission of sins’?” 

Toyohiko Kagawa

“The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore – on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him ‘meek and mild’ and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.” 

Dorothy Sayers