Hope Church PCA

Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

Sunday Schedule:

9:00 a.m. – Outdoor Worship
10:00 a.m. – Sunday School
10:45 a.m. – Hope Café
11:00 a.m. – Indoor Worship

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Sermons

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

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Navigating the Unknown

September 19, 2021 |

“As we might guess, far from gradually becoming extinct in adulthood, our fears increase throughout our lives. What was once a small family of worries quietly conducts an aggressive breeding program to become a teeming community of palpable fears and private anxieties. The code by which fear and anxiety live is primal: multiply. As we possess more things, care about more people, accumulate more bad experiences, and watch the evening news, it is as if we absorb fear. If they are not obvious in your own life, perhaps it’s because you have been living in a war zone your entire life. At first you noticed every gunshot. After a while the mayhem blends in with the rustle of the trees, the TV, and the children playing in the other room. Fear gradually becomes the background noise of everyday life.” 

Ed Welch, Running Scared

“Oh! I love God’s ‘shalls’ and ‘wills.’ There is nothing comparable to them. Let a man say ‘shall,’ what is it good for? ‘I will,’ says man, and he never performs; ‘I shall,’ says he, and he breaks his promise. But it is never so with God’s ‘shalls.’ If He says ‘shall,’ it shall be; when He says ‘will,’ it will be.” 

Charles Spurgeon

God’s Promised People into God’s Promised Land

September 12, 2021 |

“Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add nor subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligence which, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle, and an end. I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death when he said: “There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.” 

Clyde Kilby

“In this scene set in shadows,
Like the night is here to stay,
There is evil cast around us
But it’s Love that wrote the play.
And in this darkness
Love will show the way.” 

David Wilcox

“The church is the model home for the Kingdom of God.” 

Harvie Conn

The God of the Mission

September 5, 2021 |

“Tomorrow can bring us nothing,
But He will bear us through:
Who gives the lilies clothing
Will clothe His people, too:
Beneath the spreading heavens
No creature but is fed;
And He Who feeds the ravens
Will give His children bread.”

William Cowper, “Sometimes a Light Surprises”

“The prodigal son, we are told, went to a far country and there spent all that he had. A far country! It is this unique definition of our human condition that we must assume and make ours as we begin our approach to God. A man who has never had that experience, be it only very briefly, who has never felt that he is exiled from God and from real life, will never understand what Christianity is about. And the one who is perfectly ‘at home’ in this world and its life, who has never been wounded by the nostalgic desire for another Reality, will not understand what is repentance.”

Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent

“Before the pandemic, we knew we were going to die, but we did not believe it. Maybe we believed it, but considered it a problem to be dealt with later. In the meantime, exercise and a reasonable diet was the tithes we paid to our fears. We believed we had time. … It seems that Covid-19 has dealt a collective trauma to the American consciousness and that the full fruit of that trauma remains uncertain. One thing is clear: Our previous normal was not as good as we thought it was.“

Esau McCaulley, “We Weren’t Happy Before the Pandemic, Either”

Mission and the Messiness of Life

August 29, 2021 |

“Open wide the window of our spirits, O Lord, and fill us full of light; Open wide the door of our hearts, that we may receive and entertain thee with all our powers of adoration and love. Amen.”

Christina G. Rossetti, from Prayers from the Heart by Richard J. Foster

“There was a bird who… perched atop the corner of the world and built three nests. One of gold, one of silver and one of clay…. In the nest of gold she cleansed her coat daily, in the nest of silver she brought back her food. In the nest of clay she laid her eggs. On the day the fires came the nests of gold and silver met in a lucid river rushing to the sea while the nest of clay withstood the heat. Amen. The nest of clay was forged for eternity atop the corner of the world, while the ocean floor was covered in gold, silver, and sand.”

“Via Rail,” by Kaddisfly

“That’s the business of hope: broken things. And days like today make it clear that things are off the rails. We’ve got our work cut out for us. Oh God, there’s a new widow in the world. Our hearts are broken with her and for her. And only a mystery can heal them. Put me to work, Lord. Let me be about the business of the broken until it’s made right.”

“Fare Forward, Thomas McKenzie,” a eulogy by Pete Peterson

Following Jesus Into Broken Places

August 22, 2021 |

“Anything you are passionate about, you talk about!  A man who never says a word about the lady that he loves ought to be questioned.  A lady who is too embarrassed to bring up or ever mention the name of the one she says she loves ought to be questioned, because that which you are passionate about you talk about.  There is no greater message and there is no greater person than the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ!  God has invited us to be passionate about the gospel because we are passionate about Him.  We are in desperate need today for passionate Christians who don’t need to apologize.”

Dr. Tony Evans

“God uses men (and women) who are weak and feeble enough to lean on him.”

Hudson Taylor

“If a commission by an earthly king is considered an honor, how can a commission by a Heavenly King be considered a sacrifice?”

David Livingston

“Oh sing to the LORD a new song; sing to the LORD, all the earth!  Sing to the LORD, bless his name; tell of his salvation from day to day.  Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples!”

Psalm 96:1-3

“God REVEALS His glory to all nations in order to RECEIVE glory from all peoples through worship.”

Operation World View

“You did not choose me, but I chose you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide…”

 Jesus (John 15:16)

A Centered Life of Faith and Works

August 15, 2021 |

“A pretty good test of a man’s religion is how it affects his pocketbook.” 

Francis J. Grimke

“It cannot be denied that too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong and the powerful and against the weak and oppressed—this, despite the gospel.” 

Howard Thurman

“We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Such a Great Cloud of Witnesses

August 8, 2021 |

“There will always be worse deaths than you expected. But [God] says he raises you from them, and if you believe that, you’re finally free.”

Robert Capon

“[The] outpouring love & support I’ve received has made me realize I’m more than my accomplishments and gymnastics which I never truly believed before.”

Simone Biles

“In whatever trouble comes to us, we should always set our eyes on God’s purpose to train us to think little of this present life and inspire us to think more about the future life. For God knows well that we are greatly inclined to love this world by natural instinct. Thus, He uses the best means to draw us back and shake us from our slumber, so that we don’t become entirely stuck in the mire of our love for this world.”

 John Calvin

Gospel Gratitude in Everyday Relationships

August 1, 2021 |

“That she was his half, she had no doubt at all. He needed her. At times she knew with a joyous ache that she completed him, just as she knew with the same joy that she needed him and he completed her. How beautiful a thing it was, she thought, to be a half, to be completed by such another half! When had there ever been such a yearning of halves toward each other, such a longing, even in quarrels, to be whole. And sometimes they would be whole.”

Wendell Berry, “A Jonquil for Mary Penn” in Fidelity

“As I look back over the years of my pragmatic parenting, I’m saddened, but I am also gladdened, for you’ve always been faithful to your covenant love, even when I was overbearing and under-believing. The move from parenting by grit to parenting by grace has been a fitful but fruitful journey. Take me deeper; take me further.”

Scotty Smith, “A Prayer for Parenting and Re-Parenting by Grace”

“Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, white-washing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory if being in His grace you do it as your duty. To go to Communion worthily gives God great glory, but to take food in thankfulness and temperance gives Him glory too. He is so great that all things give Him glory if you mean they should. So then, my brethren, live.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Principle or Foundation”

New Clothes

July 25, 2021 |

Q. Since we have been delivered from our misery by grace through Christ without any merit of our own, why then should we do good works?

A. Because Christ, having redeemed us by his blood, is also restoring us by his Spirit into his image, so that with our whole lives we may show that we are thankful to God for his benefits, so that he may be praised through us, so that we may be assured of our faith by its fruits, and so that by our godly living our neighbors may be won over to Christ.

Heidelberg Catechism #86

“Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.”

Huckleberry Finn

“Sin is a spiritual and moral malignancy. Left unchecked, it can spread throughout our entire inner being and contaminate every area of our lives. Even worse, it often will ‘metastasize’ from us into the lives of other believers around us.”

Jerry Bridges, Respectable Sins

“… [T]rue sanctification is all about growing in humility, dependence, and gratitude. Joy blossoms in our hearts not as we try harder and harder to grow, but as we see more clearly the depths of our sin and understand more fully our utter helplessness. Only then will we take our eyes off ourselves and look to Christ for all that we need in life and in death. Only then will we truly cherish our Savior and believe that we need him every minute of every day, and that without him we can do nothing (John 15:5).”

Barbara Duguid, Extravagant Grace

The Mathematics of Grace

July 18, 2021 |

“I wonder
If there is any image more beautiful
Than the embrace of the one
Who trains, equips, releases you
And when you fail
Still embraces you
And reminds you that your value
Comes from who you are
Not what you did.”

 Sarah Yardley

“The life of grace is not an effort on our part to achieve a goal we set ourselves. It is a continually renewed attempt simply to believe that someone else has done all the achieving that is needed and to live in relationship with that person, whether we achieve or not. If that doesn’t seem like much to you, you’re right: it isn’t. And, as a matter of fact, the life of grace is even less than that. It’s not even our life at all, but the life of that Someone Else rising like a tide in the ruins of our death.”

Robert Capon, Between Noon & Three

“If Christ isn’t really King, then another god with another story of change is needed to get through the day.”

Brian Fikkert and Kelly Kapic, Becoming Whole