Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

Sunday Schedule

Sunday School – Will Resume in September
Hope Café 10:15 a.m.
Worship 10:30 a.m.

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Sermons

The latest sermon from our pastors is posted here each week.

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The Language of the Heart: Praying our Joy

June 16, 2019 |

“I wince when I write the word father. I am one. It is my proudest calling. It is my deepest failure. There is no joy, no pain, no greater futility or pride, no dream, no nightmare that is deeper than my being a father. There is no forgiveness I long for more, nor accolade that will ever mean more to me than one of my children blessing me as a father.”

Dan Allender

“Most of the time we aim too low. We walk in shoes too small for us. We spend our days shooting for a little burst of approval or some small career victory. But there’s a joyful way of being that’s not just a little bit better than the way we are currently living; it’s a quantum leap better. … [Spiritual] joy is a delicious, if painful, longing. It starts with a taste of something eternal and then the joy consists of longing for that taste again.”

David Brooks, The Second Mountain

“God came down and lived in this same world as a man. He showed us how to live in this world, subject to its vicissitudes and necessities, that we might be changed—not into an angel or a storybook princess, not wafted into another world, but changed into saints in this world. The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances.”

Elisabeth Elliot, Keep a Quiet Heart

The Language of the Heart: Praying our Lament

June 9, 2019 |

“Prayer delights God’s ear; it melts His heart; it opens His hand. Plead with Him earnestly, either He will remove the affliction or remove the impatience.”

Thomas Watson

“Worship is meant to consist of much more than singing happy and thankful songs. And ultimately, I had missed something about God himself – the fact that He is not afraid of our struggle, pain, confusion, or even our anger. More than that, he wants us to bring those things to Him in song, and He so intended to underscore this desire for us that He gave us more examples of tearful and pain-filled ‘praising’ than he did jubilant and triumphant celebration . . . If Scripture regulates worship, as we believe, then it calls for something more daring, more poignant, and, yes, more costly than we would prefer to give. Again and again the message of the Psalms re-echoes: ‘To wrestle with God is worship. Bring your broken and turbulent heart with you.’”

Ewan Kennedy

“It is an act of faith and wisdom to be sad about sad things.”

Zack Eswine

“Is there nothing to sing about today? Then borrow a song from tomorrow; sing of what is yet to be.”

Charles Spurgeon

The Heartbeat of Hope: Engage the World by the Power of the Holy Spirit

June 2, 2019 |

“There has been a long tradition which sees the mission of the Church primarily as obedience to a command.  It has been customary to speak of ‘the missionary mandate.’  This way of putting the matter is certainly not without justification, and yet it seems to me that it misses the point.  It tends to make mission a burden rather than a joy, to make it part of the law rather than part of the gospel.  If one looks at the New Testament evidence one gets another impression.  Mission begins with a kind of explosion of joy.  The news that the rejected and crucified Jesus is alive is something that cannot possibly be suppressed.  It must be told.  Who could be silent about such a fact?”

Lesslie Newbigin

“In service which Thy will appoints, there are no bonds for me;
For my inmost heart is taught “the truth” that makes Thy children “free;”
And a life of self–renouncing love is a life of liberty.”

Anna Waring

“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.’ The hardest task is simple, persistent faithfulness in our work and in our attitudes – the kind of faithfulness that shows we are being drawn forward by the magnet force of the kingdom of God.”

Cornelius Plantinga

The Heartbeat of Hope: Equipped as Disciples of the Son

May 26, 2019 |

“No one will leave an addiction or compulsion unless a competing passion is offered that gives a taste of what the soul is meant to endure. Only Heaven is a big enough passion to draw us away from petty distractions and cheap addictions of this sorry world.”

Dan Allender, Bold Love

“The more you say no to self in the way that Jesus teaches us to, you become more yourself. You don’t cease to have a personality. The more you deny self, the more the ‘real you’ you become—the you that God intended you to be—the you that you sense in your better moments you should be. The you that God thought up in the first place.”

Sam Allberry, “Is God Anti-Gay?”

“[People with intellectual disabilities] are essentially people of the heart. When they meet others they do not have a hidden agenda for power or for success. Their cry, their fundamental cry, is for a relationship, a meeting heart to heart. It is this meeting that awakens them, opens them up to life, and calls them forth to love in great simplicity, freedom and openness. When those ingrained in a culture of winning and of individual success really meet them, and enter into friendship with them, something amazing and wonderful happens. They too are opened up to love and even to God. They are changed at a very deep level. They are transformed and become more fundamentally human.”

Jean Vanier

The Heartbeat of Hope: The Embrace of the Father

May 19, 2019 |

“Salvation is membership in the family of God . . .The creation of a family with children is the reason for all of God’s activity.  This is how he intends to show his glory . . . Our sonship to God is the apex of creation and the goal of redemption . . . The story of Paradise lost becoming Paradise regained is the story of God’s grace bringing us from alienation from him to membership in his family . . . Our self-image, if it is to be biblical, will begin just here. God is my Father (the Christian’s self-image always begins with the knowledge of God and who he is!); I am one of his children (I know my real identity); his people are my brothers and sisters (I recognize the family to which I belong and have discovered my deepest ‘roots’).”

Sinclair Ferguson

“You sum up the whole of the New Testament teaching in a single phrase, if you speak of it as a revelation of the Fatherhood of the Holy Creator. In the same way, you describe it as the knowledge of God as one’s holy Father. If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means the he does not understand Christianity very well at all.”

J.I. Packer

“If the love of the father will not make a child delight in him, what will?”

John Owen

The Heartbeat of Hope: True Hope for Real Life

May 12, 2019 |

“People who believe in the resurrection, in God making a whole new world in which everything will be set right at last, are unstoppably motivated to work for that new world in the present.”

N.T. Wright

“For centuries, philosophers, theologians, novelists, and artists have described the human predicament and then prescribed a cure, or at least a salve.  They have then estimated the likelihood that the prescription will work. That is, they’ve offered a prognosis. Hope is the reach of our hearts for the cure.  It’s the reach of our hearts toward what we think will fulfill us, secure us, save us – and not just us, but also the whole world. To be a Christian is to participate in this very common human enterprise of diagnosis, prescription, and prognosis, but to do so from inside a Christian view of the world, a view that has been constructed from Scripture and that centers on Jesus Christ the Risen Savior.”

 Cornelius Plantinga

“O Israel, hope in the LORD!”

Psalm 130:7

The Heartbeat of Hope: The Good News Really Is Good

May 5, 2019 |

“The church’s great news to a dying world is that there is a living God, whose love for his creation is inexhaustible . . . The church has no other and no better message. This is her great declaration.”

Lewis Allen

“The world is drowning in its efforts at life; it does not need lifeguards who swim to it carrying barbells.”

Robert Farrar Capon

“The religious see God as useful; gospel-believing Christians see God as beautiful.”

Tim Keller

“I am throwing all my good works overboard, and lashing myself to the plank of free grace; for I hope to swim to glory on it.”

Charles Spurgeon

A Parable About Loving Your Neighbor

April 28, 2019 |

“You can get all A’s and still flunk life.”

Walker Percy

“Can I see another’s woe, and not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another’s grief, and not seek for kind relief?”

William Blake, “On Another’s Sorrow”

“…[Compassion] means not indifference to our times and our neighbors: it means absorption in time. And absorption in our neighbors. It means forgetfulness of self in others. It means entering into every man’s hopes and fears, longing and despairs … It means not that we should live one life, but a thousand lives – bind ourselves to a thousand souls by the filaments of so loving a sympathy that their lives become ours.”

B.B. Warfield

Train Wreck Conversion

April 21, 2019 |

“The life of discipleship is not a matter of coming up with a Gospel I can live with; it’s a matter of learning to live with all of the scandal of the Gospel–and that can take a lifetime. Graham Greene’s ‘whiskey priest’ doesn’t for a moment think that the church should revise its doctrine and standards in order to make him feel comfortable about his fornication–even if he might lament what seems to be a denial of some feature of his humanness. All of his doubts and suspicion and resistance are not skeptical gambits that set him off in search of a liberal Christianity he can live with; they are, instead, features of a life of sanctification, or lack thereof. And no one is surprised by that. The prayer of the doubter is not, ‘Lord I believe, conform to the measure of my unbelief,’ but rather: ‘Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief.’”

James K.A. Smith

“Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer.”

John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Jesus was the only one that ever raised the dead,” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then there’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can . . .”

Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”