Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

Sunday Schedule:

9:30 a.m. – Sunday School
10:30 a.m. – Morning Worship Service
5:45 p.m. – Outdoor Vespers Service

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Renew: Returning to the Heartbeat of Hope

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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

Renewing Real Life – Part 2

May 3, 2020 |

“God’s patience is not placidity, any more than his fierce anger is loss of control, his laughter cruelty or his pity sentimentality. When his moment comes for judgment, in any given case, it will be by definition beyond appeasing or postponing.” 

Derek Kidner

“If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make a final end to violence, that God would not be worthy of worship . . .  If I don’t believe that there is a God who will eventually put all things right, I will take up the sword and will be sucked into the endless vortex of retaliation. Only if I am sure that there’s a God who will right all wrongs and settle all accounts perfectly do I have the power to refrain.” 

Miroslav Volf

“Think how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might towards strangers? Far from it . . . Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference . . . God’s wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer . . . which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with his whole being.” 

Rebecca Manley Pippert

“He left His Father’s throne above, so free, so infinite His grace!
Emptied Himself of all but love; and bled for Adam’s helpless race.
‘Tis mercy all, immense and free, for O, my God, it found out me!
Amazing Love, how can it be that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?” 

Charles Wesley

Renewing Real Life

April 26, 2020 |

“Christians live by faith in Jesus Christ, and when their faith leans forward toward the coming of the Kingdom, they call it hope. The person who pursues [vocation] in hope, and who then shapes his or her life accordingly for service in the kingdom – such a person has a calling that will outlast every recession.” 

Cornelius Plantinga

“There is nowhere we can go where God isn’t already there. There is nowhere we can leave where God does not stay. Every bit of our skin, bone, thought, imagination, and feeling, every minute pleasure of our prosperity, every glass shard of our adversity is held, governed, and seen through to us by God. Life under the sun is a God-inhabited life. The bent world rests and rebels within the arms of God. The whole earth is full of his glory.” 

Zack Eswine

“The picture of Jesus as the coming Judge is the central feature of another absolutely vital and non-negotiable Christian belief: that there will indeed be a judgment in which the creator God will set the world right once and for all.  The word judgment carries negative overtones for a good many people in our liberal and postliberal world. We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s coming judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over.  It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands. In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.” 

N.T. Wright