Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

Sunday Schedule:

8:30 & 11:00 a.m. – Worship
10:00 a.m. – Sunday School
10:15 a.m. – Hope Café

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The Apostles' Creed

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You Were Made for This

March 21, 2021 |

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. … There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. … But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” 

CS Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“The inner logic of this vision of holistic salvation is that the creator has not given up on creation and is working to salvage and restore the world (human and nonhuman) to the fullness of shalom and flourishing intended from the beginning. And redeemed human beings, renewed in God’s image, are to work toward and embody this vision in their daily lives.”

Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology

“[Niggle] went on looking at the Tree. All the leaves he had ever laboured at were there, as he had imagined them rather than as he had made them; and there were others that had only budded in his mind, and many that might have budded, if only he had had time.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, “Leaf by Niggle”

Soul and Body

March 14, 2021 |

“Even for God’s children death is a valley of shadows and darkness. But, as Richard Baxter put it, ‘Christ leads me through no darker rooms than he went through before.’ And in that darkness it’s not God but death that comes as a stranger. The one who stands beyond death will be the loving God for whom we have been longing all these years.” 

Neil Plantinga

“My present body – ‘brother ass,’ as Fancis of Assisi would have me call it – is like a student’s old jalopy; care for it as I will, it goes precariously and never very well, and often lets me and my Master down (very frustrating!). But my new body will feel and behave like a Rolls-Royce, and then my service will no longer be spoiled.” 

J.I. Packer

“In heaven I will be free to jump up, dance, kick, and do aerobics. If possible, somewhere, sometime before the party gets going, sometime before the guests are called to the banquet table at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, the first thing I plan to do on resurrected legs is to drop on grateful, glorified knees. I will quietly kneel at the feet of Jesus. The day is drawing near when I’ll be able to kneel again.” 

Joni Erickson Tada

The Disappointing, Disenchanting, and Dearly-loved Bride of Christ

March 7, 2021 |

“To be in Christ, is, by definition, to be part of something much bigger, more comprehensive, and more wonderful than you.”

Rankin Wilbourne

“Membership in a local church means joining your imperfect self to many other imperfect selves to form an imperfect community that, through Jesus, embarks on a journey toward a better future . . . together.”

Scott Sauls

“He can no longer have God for his father, who has not the church for his mother.”

Cyprian of Carthage

The Greatest Gift

February 21, 2021 |

“A church can become crowded with legitimate causes, concerns, and needs. And it can be hard to find Jesus.”

Ray Ortlund

“The work of the Holy Spirit is the honoring of Jesus Christ . . .  the work of the Holy Spirit is simply to thrill us with Christ.”

Dale Bruner

“Spirit of God, descend upon my heart.
Wean it from earth; through all its pulses move;
Stoop to my weakness, mighty as Thou art;
and make me love Thee as I ought to love.

I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
No sudden rending of the veil of clay,
No angel vision, no opening skies;
but take the dimness of my soul away.”

George Croly

Good News About Judgment

February 14, 2021 |

“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.” 

NT Wright, Surprised By Hope, 137.

“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, Exclusion and Embrace

“Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.  He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.” 

1 Peter 2: 21-23

The Presence of His Absence

February 7, 2021 |

“Lo! the incarnate God, ascended,
Pleads the merit of His blood;
Venture on Him, venture wholly;
Let no other trust intrude:
None but Jesus, none but Jesus,
Can do helpless sinners good.”

Joseph Hart

“The greatest impediment to the mission of the church is not the evils outside of the church (in our culture and our city), but the cynicism and apathy inside the church.” 

Rev. Sandy Willson

“Christ’s intercession reflects how profoundly personal our rescue is. If we knew about Christ’s death and resurrection but not his intercession, we would be tempted to view our salvation in overly formulaic terms. It would feel more mechanical than is true to who Christ truly is. His interceding for us reflects his heart . . . The intercession of Christ is his heart connecting our heart to the Father’s heart . . . What’s the point of saying Christ saves ‘to the uttermost’? We who know our hearts understand. We are to-the-uttermost sinners. We need a to-the-uttermost Savior.” 

Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly

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

The Eyes and Face, the Heart and Hands of God

January 24, 2021 |

“I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene . . . Jesus is too colossal for the pen of the phrase-mongers, however artful . . . No man can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word.” 

Albert Einstein

“At the cross, the most powerful man who ever lived submitted to the most brutal death ever died, to save the powerless. Christianity does not glorify violence. It humiliates it.” 

Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity

Larry King, when asked if he could interview anyone from all of history, said, “Jesus Christ . . . I would like to ask him if he was indeed virgin-born. The answer to that question would define history for me.”

 

“You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” 

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

The Who Behind the What and the How

January 10, 2021 |

“Readers looking for seven easy steps to cultural influence will have to look elsewhere – because I do not happen to believe that anything lasting is easy.  What we most have to learn about being creators of culture is the very thing we human beings find hardest to learn: everything about our calling, from start to finish, is a gift.  What is most needed in our time are Christians who are deeply serious about cultivating and creating but who wear that seriousness lightly – who are not desperately trying to change the world but who also wake up every morning eager to create.”

Andy Crouch

“Creation was a way for God to spend himself . . . Creation is an act of imaginative love.”  

Cornelius Plantinga

“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child.” 

G.K. Chesterton

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” 

C.S. Lewis

Proper Confidence

January 3, 2021 |

“The Gospel does not become public truth for a society by being propagated as a theory or as a worldview and certainly not as a religion. It can become public truth only insofar as it is embodied in a society (the church) which is both “abiding in” Christ and engaged in the life of the world.”

Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 39.

“Every Sunday millions of Christians recite the creed. Some sleepwalk through it thinking of other things, some puzzle over the strange language, some find offense in what it seems to say.  Perhaps few of them fully appreciate what a remarkable thing they are doing. Would they keep doing it if they grasped how different it made them in today’s world? Would they keep on saying these words if they really knew what they implied?

In a world that celebrates individuality, they are actually doing something together. In an age that avoids commitment, they pledge themselves to a set of convictions and thereby to each other. In a culture that rewards novelty and creativity, they use words written by others long ago. In a society where accepted wisdom changes by the minute, they claim that some truths are so critical that they must be repeated over and over again. In a throwaway, consumerist world, they accept, preserve, and continue tradition. Reciting the creed in worship is thus a counter-cultural act.” 

Luke Timothy Johnson, The Creed

“There is something beautiful and extraordinary about knowing that when you confess the Apostles’ Creed, there are people all over the world doing the same thing in different languages. Swedish Lutherans and Korean Presbyterians, African Pentecostals and Guatemalan Catholics, Chinese house churches and Egyptian Coptics – all can affirm, “this is what we believe.” 

Ray Cannata