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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Words of Life

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Two Ways

September 4, 2016 |

“The person who knows that she is justified is a person of unbounded confidence and assurance. She knows that none of her failures can overturn the divine verdict.  It is guaranteed and settled in heaven forever.”—Sinclair Ferguson

“People often think of Christianity as a kind of bargain in which God says “If you keep a lot of rules, I’ll reward you, and if you don’t, I’ll do the other thing.” I don’t think that is the best way of looking at it.  I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, that part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before.  And taking your life as a whole with all your innumerable choices all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature, either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and other creatures and with itself or else into one that is in a state of war with God and with other creatures and itself.  To be the one kind of creature is heaven, that is joy and peace and knowledge and power.  To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”—C.S. Lewis

“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 post liberal 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

True Hope For Real Life

August 28, 2016 |

“Sanctification is the work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness.”—Westminster Shorter Catechism

“If the goal of sanctification is actually growing in humility and greater dependence on Christ, then the Holy Spirit is doing an excellent job. Through his ongoing struggles with indwelling sin, the maturing believer will spend many years learning that he is more sinful than he ever imagined, in order to discover that he is indeed far more loved than he ever dared to hope.”—Barbara Duguid, Extravagant Grace

“If we are ever to enter fully into the glorious liberty of the children of God, we are going to have to spend more time thinking about freedom than we do. The church, by and large, has had a poor record of encouraging freedom. It has spent so much time inculcating in us the fear of making mistakes that it has made us like ill-taught piano students: we play our pieces, but we never really hear them because our main concern is not to make music but to avoid some flub that will get us in trouble.”—Robert Capon, The Foolishness of Preaching

Coveting vs Longing

August 21, 2016 |

 “Comparison is the thief of joy.” — Theodore Roosevelt

“Whatever worldly thing we may covet – zealously striving to obtain and then retain – never seems to bring an end to our   desires. Covetousness, envy, jealousy, and greed always escalate into a vicious spiral, as we seek greater and greater gratification but find less and less contentment. . . . Striving to acquire the things of the world not only does not bring lasting happiness and peace, but it drives us to seek more. When “all we’ve ever wanted” is grounded in the temporal trappings of this world, it is never enough!” ― Brent Top

 “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” ― C.S. Lewis

And he said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” — Jesus, Luke 12:15

The Truth Will Set You Free

August 14, 2016 |

“We embrace lies—reams of them—about our bodies, our money, our sexuality, our food, our vocations, and our relationships. The temptation to construe reality along the contours of our lies—to literally build a false creation—is everywhere, and never more so than now. In fact, one could argue that the chief destructive force of contemporary Western culture is the unparalleled power and fertility of its lies. We are locked away in a hall of mirrors.

Redemption, however, is about learning to hate the lies, about learning to see again. And part of the calling of God’s people is to name the parody as it presents itself to us and make war upon it. We look for the particular lies that lead us (and our communities) into the poison fog of non-reality and then go after them (in word and deed) with a battle axe. We find the anti-Eden and burn it down. Hating is part of our task in the world.”—Greg Thompson

“An honest answer is like a kiss on the lips.” —Proverbs 24: 26

The Big Gulp

August 7, 2016 |

“You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.”― John Bunyan

… not just what is necessary for bare subsistence, but also what is necessary for living a life “becoming” or appropriate to human beings. The point is not to live on crusts of bread with bare walls and threadbare clothes. The point is that a fully human life is lived in a way free from being enslaved to our stuff.― Rebecca DeYoung

“It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.”― Mother Teresa

“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.”― Winston S. Churchill

“Until we can receive with an open heart, we’re never really giving with an open heart. When we attach judgment to receiving help, we knowingly or unknowingly attach judgment to giving help.”― Brené Brown

Be Generous

July 31, 2016 |

If we look at mankind in all its conditions, it is nothing but a vast wide stable full of great thieves.—Martin Luther

Every time I give, I declare money does not control me. Perpetual generosity is a perpetual de-deification of money.—Kent Hughes

Any temporal possession can be turned into everlasting wealth. Whatever is given to Christ is immediately touched with immortality.—A. W. Tozer

Give away your life; you’ll find life given back, but not merely given back—given back with bonus and blessing. Giving, not getting, is the way. Generosity begets generosity.”—Jesus, Luke 6:38, The Message

Sexual Healing

July 24, 2016 |

“I am a riddle to myself; a heap of inconsistencies.” —John Newton

“Though sin wars, it shall not reign; and though it breaks our peace, it cannot separate us from his love. Nor is it inconsistent with his holiness and perfection, to manifest his favor to such poor defiled creatures, or to admit them to communion with himself; for they are not considered as in themselves, but as one with Jesus, to whom they have fled for refuge, and by whom they live by faith.” —John Newton

“The path of the righteous is like the light of the dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. The way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know over what they stumble.” —Proverbs 4: 18-19

“The fire of lust’s pleasures must be fought with the fire of God’s  pleasures.  If we try to  fight the fire of lust with prohibitions and threats alone – even the terrible warnings of Jesus – we will fail.  We must fight it with a massive promise of superior happiness.  We must swallow up the little flicker of  lust’s pleasure in the conflagration of holy satisfaction . . . Our aim is not only to avoid something erotic but also to gain something excellent.” —John Piper

 

The Language of the Heart

July 17, 2016 |

“Love is the seed in you of every virtue and of all acts deserving  punishment.”—Dante

“The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of tasting without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.”—CS Lewis, Mere Christianity.

“We use an unfortunate idiom when we say of a man prowling the streets, that “he wants a woman.” Strictly speaking, a woman is what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be a necessary apparatus… [Real love] makes a man really want, not [even] a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious fashion, the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.”—CS Lewis, The Four Loves.

“It’s more than just words that got spoken; There was the language of the heart.”—David Wilcox

Choose Life

July 10, 2016 |

“A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.”  —Isaiah 42: 3

“God himself did not despise humanity, but became man for men’s sake.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“You can survive on your own.  You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own.  But you cannot become human on your own.  Surely that is why, in Jesus’ sad joke, the rich man has as hard a time getting into Paradise as that camel through the needle’s eye.  Because with his credit card in his pocket, the rich man is so effective at getting for himself everything that he needs that he does not see that what he needs more than anything else in the world can be had only as a gift.  He does not see that the one thing a clenched fist cannot do is accept, even from God himself, a helping hand.”—Frederick Buechner

“But all the while, there was one thing we most needed even from the start, and certainly will need from here on out into the New Jerusalem: the ability to take our freedom seriously and act on it, to live not in fear of mistakes but in the knowledge that no mistake can hold a candle to the love that draws us home. My repentance, accordingly, is not so much for my failings but for the two-bit attitude toward them by which I made them more sovereign than grace. Grace – the imperative to hear the music, not just listen for errors – makes all infirmities occasions of glory.” —Robert Farrar Capon

Light to the Eyes

July 3, 2016 |

The distinction between law and gospel is the highest art in Christendom. —Martin Luther

“Gospel freedom does not mean you get to do whatever you want,” he said. “It means you want good things.”—D.A. Carson

When I contemplated the relationship of justification by faith with functional idolatry, it helped me explore the ways I seek to find self-justification through violation of the law of God. As Keller noted, there is a reason why we lie. It is because we find greater comfort in believing falsehood rather than being  exposed by the truth. When we are justified by faith in Christ alone, we are freed to be a people who love truth and are willing to live exposed to the truth of God’s Word (Hebrews 4:12-13). —Tim Brister