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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Worship in Spirit and Truth

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Worship is a Verb

November 26, 2017 |

“Missions is not the ultimate goal of the Church. Worship is. Missions exists because  worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever.”
—John Piper

Let the Nations Be Glad

“The liturgy of my night—lock the doors, brush my teeth, get a glass of water, turn out the lights, pull back the covers, crawl into bed, curl up, close my eyes—is a repetitive, mundane, and good thing, through which I’ve learned to slow down, to let go of the day behind me, and go to sleep. Similarly, corporate worship trains us, over time, to cease striving to make our own way and mourn own righteousness and to receive God’s means of grace.”
—Tish Harrison Warren

Liturgy of the Ordinary

“The parallel between worship and other areas of human life should not surprise us, because, in one sense, worship is all of life.”

—John Frame
“A Fresh Look at the Regulative Principle”

Blessed and Sent by God’s Good Word

November 19, 2017 |

“We wonder, What does worship have do with my work? . . . The work we do together each week in gathered worship transforms and sends us into the work we do in our homes and offices . . . we are people who are blessed and sent; this identity transforms how we embody work and worship in the world, in our week, even in our small day.”

—Tish Harrison Warren

“In the daily rhythms for everyone everywhere, we live our lives in the marketplace of this world: in homes and neighborhoods, in schools and on farms, in hospitals and businesses, and our vocations are bound up with the ordinary work that ordinary people do. We are not great shots across the bow of history; rather, by simple grace, we are hints of hope.”

—Steve Garber

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

—C.S. Lewis

Life Together

November 12, 2017 |

“Getting saved is easy; becoming a community is difficult – damnably difficult.”

—Eugene Peterson

“I didn’t come to the conviction easily, but finally there was no getting around it; there can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart from an immersion and embrace of community. I am not myself by myself. Community, not the highly vaunted individualism of our culture, is the setting in which Christ is at play.”

—Eugene Peterson

“If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even when there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.”

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Love the one you’re with.”

—Stephen Stills

Feasting on the Word

November 5, 2017 |

“A sacrament is an outward sign by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of His good will towards us in order to sustain the weakness of our faith, and we in turn attest our piety toward Him in the presence of the Lord and of His angels and before men . . . A sacrament is never without a preceding promise but it is joined to it as a sort of appendix, with the purpose of confirming and sealing the promise itself, and of making it more evident to us and in a sense ratifying it.  By this means God provides first for our ignorance and dullness, then for our weakness … as our faith is slight and feeble unless it be propped [up] on all sides and sustained by every means, it trembles, wavers, totters, and at last gives way.”

—John Calvin

For the bread which you have broken,
For the wine which you have poured,
For the words, which you have spoken,
Now we give you thanks O Lord.

By this pledge that you do love us,
By your gift of peace restored,
By your call to heaven before us,
Sanctify our lives O Lord.

With our sainted ones in glory,
Seated at our Father’s board,
May the Church that waits now for Thee,
Keep love’s tie unbroken Lord.

In your service Lord defend us.
In our hearts keep watch and ward.
In the world where’r you send us,
May your kingdom come O Lord.

—Dr. Louis Benson

The Sign and Seal of God’s Promise

October 29, 2017 |

“A sacrament is an outward sign by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of His good will towards us in order to sustain the weakness of our faith, and we in turn attest our piety toward Him in the presence of the Lord and of His angels and before men . . . A sacrament is never without a preceding promise but it is joined to it as a sort of appendix, with the purpose of confirming and sealing the promise itself, and of making it more evident to us and in a sense ratifying it.  By this means God provides first for our ignorance and dullness, then for our weakness … as our faith is slight and feeble unless it be propped [up] on all sides and sustained by every means, it trembles, wavers, totters, and at last gives way.”

—John Calvin

“Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.”

—Galway Kinnell

Q: What is baptism?
A: Baptism is a sacrament, wherein the washing with water, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, doth signify and seal our ingrafting into Christ, and partaking of the benefits of the covenant of grace, and our engagement to be the Lord’s.

—Westminster Shorter Catechism 94

Giving Ourselves to the Ministry of the Word

October 22, 2017 |

“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

“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

“How dare we speak, if God has not spoken? By ourselves we have nothing to say. To address a congregation without any assurance that we are bearers of a divine message would be the height of arrogance and folly. It is when we are convinced that God is light (and so wanting to be known), that God has acted (and thus made himself known), and that God has spoken (and thus explained his actions), that we must speak and cannot remain silent. As Amos expressed it, ‘The lion has roared; who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken; who can but prophesy?’ (3:8) . . . God has spoken. If we are not sure of this, it would be better to keep our mouth shut. Once we are persuaded that God has spoken, however, then we too must speak. A compulsion rests upon us. Nothing and nobody will be able to silence us”

—John Stott, Between Two Worlds, 96

The Declaration of Dependence

October 15, 2017 |

Like a flash of lightning, prayer exposes for a nanosecond what I would prefer to ignore: my own true state of fragile dependence.
—Philip Yancey
Prayer
I do not control the action; that is a pagan concept of prayer, putting the gods to work by my incantations or rituals. I am not controlled by the action; that is a Hindu concept of prayer in which I slump passively into the impersonal and fated will of the gods and goddesses. I enter into the action begun by another, my creating and saving Lord, and find myself participating in the results of the action. I neither do it, nor have it done to me; I
will to participate in what is willed.
—Eugene Peterson
The Contemplative Pastor
America is the land of pioneers and possibilities. We blaze our own trails and control our own destinies. I take care of myself and think that taking care of you is your job. This  attitude infects the American church, where we all too easily overlook the significance of the New Testament metaphor for the church as a family of God. … You cannot read the New Testament with integrity and think that being a Christian boils down to you, Jesus, and your Bible. We are the family of God, brothers and sisters with Christ.
—Wendy Widder
The Story of God Bible Commentary: Daniel

Gracious Offering and Eager Doxology

October 8, 2017 |

“If we are not giving away our money in remarkable portions, we have not grasped (or we are not currently remembering) Christ’s generosity in saving us. Let’s put it even more starkly: you will always give effortlessly to that which is your salvation, to those things that give your life meaning. If Jesus is the one who saved, your money flows out easily into his work, his people, and his causes. If, however, your real religion is your appearance, your social status, your pleasure, and your security, your money flows most easily into those items and symbols . . . To give largely and liberally, not grudging at all times, requires a new heart – an old heart would rather part with its lifeblood than with its money.”

—Tim Keller

“The trouble with being rich is that since you can solve with your checkbook virtually all practical problems that bedevil ordinary people, you are left in your leisure with nothing but the great human problems to contend with: how to be happy, how to love and be loved, how to find meaning and purpose in your life. In desperation the rich are continually tempted to believe that they can solve these problems too with their checkbooks, which is presumably what led Jesus to remark one day that for a rich man to get to Heaven is about as easy for a Cadillac to get through a revolving door.”

—Frederick Buechner

“If Christ were only a cistern, we might soon exhaust his fullness, but who can drain a fountain? Myriads of spirits have drawn their supplies from him, and not one has murmured at the scantiness of his resources. Away, then, with this lying traitor unbelief, for his only errand is to cut the bond of communion and make us mourn an absent Savior!”

—Charles Spurgeon

Growing True

October 1, 2017 |

“The certainty and completeness of God’s mercy [is] the magnet of confession . . . we run to his arms with our sin-sick hearts because we know there is grace sufficient, boundless, and free already there. We repent because we are forgiven, not to gain forgiveness . . . we are forgiven because he was forsaken, not because our contrition is adequate . . . we are cherished children of God despite our constant waywardness and the inevitable inadequacy of our confession.”

—Bryan Chapell

  “Absolution is neither a response to a suitably worthy confession, nor the acceptance of a reasonable apology. Absolvere in Latin means not only to loosen, to free, to acquit; it also means to dispose of, to complete, to finish. When God pardons, he does not say he understands our weakness or makes allowances for our errors; rather he disposes of, he finishes with, the whole of our dead life and raises us up with a new one.  He does not so much deal with our derelictions as he does drop them down the black hole of Jesus’ death. He forgets our sins in the darkness of the tomb. He remembers our iniquities no more in the oblivion of Jesus’ expiration. He finds us, in short, in the desert of death, not in the garden of improvement; and in the power of Jesus’ resurrection, he puts us on his shoulders rejoicing and brings us home . . . The work of redemption is done entirely by the redeemer, and not at all by the redeemed.”

—Robert Farrar Capon

“What I envy most about you Christians is your forgiveness.  I have nobody to forgive me.”

—Margaret Laski

Joining in God’s Song

September 24, 2017 |

“To Christ the Lord let every tongue
Its noblest tribute bring.
When He’s the subject of the song,
Who can refuse to sing?
Survey the beauties of His face
And on His glories dwell.
Think of the wonder of His grace
And all His triumphs tell.

Since from His bounty I receive
Such proofs of love divine,
Had I a thousand hearts to give
Lord, they should all be Thine!
A thousand men could not compose
A worthy song to bring,
Yet Your love is a melody
Our hearts can’t help but sing!”

—Samuel Stennett

 

“Words and music did for me what solid, even rigorous religious argument could never do, they introduced me to God, not belief in God, more an experiential sense of God.”

—Bono

 

“Chant down Babylon with music!”

—Bob Marley