Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

Sunday Schedule:

9:30 a.m. – Sunday School
10:30 a.m. – Worship Service via Livestream

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Sermons

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

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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

Perfecting Love

April 19, 2020 |

“Well, now
If little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you
Little by little
If suddenly you forget me
Do not look for me
For I shall already have forgotten you”

Pablo Neruda

“What we love we shall grow to resemble”

Bernard of Clairvaux

“The supreme happiness in life is the assurance of being loved;
Of being loved for oneself, even in spite of oneself.”  

Les Miserables

Help My Unbelief

April 12, 2020 |

“Death and the hells of dereliction and abandonment eat people up, exhaust them, scrape them out, and bring them to nothing. Jesus is already empty, already poor, already nothing, for God is everything in him; and so the inexhaustible life of God meets death and eats it up and exhausts it.” 

Rowan Williams, A Ray of Hope

“I find that Holy Week is draining; no matter how many times I have lived through his crucifixion, my anxiety about his resurrection is undiminished – I am terrified that, this year, it won’t happen; that, that year, it didn’t. 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

“Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt?  If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.” 

Frederick Buechner

“Doubt is the ants-in-the-pants of faith; it keeps it alive and moving.”

Frederick Buechner

“Awake, sad heart, whom sorrow ever drowns;
Take up thine eyes, which feed on earth;
Unfold thy forehead, gathered into frowns;
Thy Saviour comes, and with Him mirth:
Arise, arise;
And with His burial-linen dry thine eyes:
Christ left His grave-clothes, that we might, when grief
Draws tears, or blood, not want a handkerchief.” 

George Herbert, from ‘The Dawning” in Herbert: Poems, 131.

I Thirst

April 10, 2020 |

The One who gives the calm of lakes and pools, the freshness of brooks and streams, the majestic depths of seas and oceans, the glory of pounding surf, the might of Niagara and the sprinkle of the garden fountain, the One from whose being flows the gift of the water of eternal life – this is the One who is dying of a terrible thirst on the Cross for the love of his lost sheep. 

Fleming Rutledge

“I dare not come and drink,” said Jill. “Then you will die of thirst,” said the Lion. “Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.” “There is no other stream,” said the Lion. 

C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

 

See the streams of living waters, springing from eternal love,
Well supply thy sons and daughters, and all fear of want remove;
Who can faint while such a river ever flows their thirst t’assuage?
Grace, which like the Lord, the giver, never fails from age to age.

John Newton, “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken”

Tears of a King

April 5, 2020 |

“It is not, then, God the grand co-commiserator who gives us the freedom to cry out, but God the Rock. This is the God we can trust with our pain, our confusion, and grief even when he gives no answers, precisely because he is big enough to be the only answer we need.” 

Derek Rishmawy, “The God Who Hears Our Lament”

 “Did you know Creation is talking to you?
Wherever you go and whatever you do?
God will keep giving you clue after clue
So you won’t forget to remember what’s true …
Let the whole earth remind you of what God has said
From the moment you wake up ’till you go to bed
Oh and even on days you forget what is true
Don’t forget to remember, God won’t forget you”

Ellie Holcomb, “Don’t Forget to Remember” 

“Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.”

Westley, The Princess Bride

Weak and Strong

March 29, 2020 |

“Oh, the safety and security of the saints, even in the worst of times – in the time of plague! God’s eye is upon them, his ear is open to their cry; Christ’s left hand is under their head, and his right hand doth embrace them, all the angels attending upon them.” 

William Bridge

“The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.” 

Edward Shillito

“We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, and straightforward men.” 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

All the Roots Grow Deeper When It’s Dry

March 22, 2020 |

“Prosperity will have its season – even when it’s here, it’s going by. And when it’s gone, we pretend we know the reasons, but all the roots grow deeper when it’s dry.”

David Wilcox

“No one has helped to provide salvation; God has done it all himself. The banquet of mercy is served up by one host.

Charles Spurgeon

“The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof grace–bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home free before they started… Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale.”

Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon and Three (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 114-15.