Hope Presbyterian Church In Winston-salem Sermons

Series: Renew: Returning to the Heartbeat of HopeScripture: Matthew 11:1-6, Philippians 3:20-21, Revelation 7:9-10, Revelation 21:1-4 “In Jesus Christ we witness the long-awaited vindication and effective demonstration of God’s kingship in the world.  The coming of Christ is the climax of the whole history of redemption as recorded in the Scriptures. The rightful king has established a beachhead in his territory and calls on his subjects to press his claims ever farther in creation.”  Al Wolters, Creation Regained “Most respectable Christians do have the biblical habit of praying for the kingdom to come, but when their lives are good their prayers for the kingdom sometimes fade. People whisper their prayers for the kingdom, so that God can’t quite hear them. ‘Your kingdom come,’ they say, ‘but not right away.’ When our earthly kingdoms have had a good year, we don’t necessarily long for the kingdom of God to break in.  We like our own setup just fine.”  Cornelius Plantinga “If we believe in the kingdom of God

Series: Renew: Returning to the Heartbeat of HopeScripture: John 14:1-4, 1 Peter 1:3-5, 1 Corinthians 15:12-20, Revelation 21:1-7 “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”  Colossians 3:1-4 “Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakable will remain.”  CS Lewis, The Great Divorce “God does not make junk, and God does not junk what he made.”   Al Wolters, Creation Regained “Heaven means sharing in the blessedness of God so that in the very depths of our being there is divine contentment, joy, and fulfillment. There is total shalom: a sense of sheer well-being.  Every need is met.  Every longing is fulfilled.  Every goal is achieve

Series: Renew: Returning to the Heartbeat of HopeScripture: 1 Peter 4:7-11 “We are sinners with the capacity to do great damage to ourselves and our relationships. We need God’s grace to save us from ourselves. But we are also God’s children, which means that we have great hope and potential—not hope that rests on our gifts, experience, or track record, but hope that rests in Christ. Because he is in us and we are in him, it is right to say that our potential is Christ.” Timothy Lane and Paul David Tripp, Relationships: A Mess Worth Making “A life of hospitality begins in worship, with a recognition of God’s grace and generosity. Hospitality is not first a duty and responsibility; it is first a response of love and gratitude for God’s love and welcome to us.” Christine Pohl, Making Room “It is not merely that the rich man is obliged to meet the needs of those who are less well off than he is but also that each one of us must use the gifts which we have received either by nature or by the Holy Spirit, so that

Series: Renew: Returning to the Heartbeat of HopeScripture: Matthew 18:21-35 “A debtor to mercy alone, Of covenant mercy I sing; Nor fear, with Thy righteousness on, My person and offering to bring. The terrors of law and of God With me can have nothing to do; My Savior’s obedience and blood Hide all my transgressions from view.”  Augustus Toplady “Honestly, I want to be like Christ. But honestly, I want to be like the Christ who turned the water into wine, not the Christ who thirsted on the cross. I want to be the clothed Christ, not the one whose garment was stripped and gambled away. I want to be the Christ who fed the five thousand, not the one who hungered for forty days in the wilderness. I want to be the free Christ, walking through the wheatfields with His disciples, not the imprisoned Christ who was deserted by them . . . This is the dark side of Christianity, the side we don’t see when we sign up. That if we want to be like Christ, we have to embrace both sides of His life. What else could it mean w

Series: Renew: Returning to the Heartbeat of HopeScripture: Matthew 20:1-16 “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 NewtonThe post Renew: Christ’s Kin

Series: Renew: Returning to the Heartbeat of HopeScripture: Hebrews 1:1-4; Hebrews 2:1-4 “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 r

Series: Renew: Returning to the Heartbeat of HopeScripture: Psalm 2 “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

Series: Renew: Returning to the Heartbeat of HopeScripture: Psalm 1:1-6 “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 ju

Scripture: 1 John 4:7-21 “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 MiserablesThe post Perfecting Love first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

Scripture: John 20:19-31 “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 th

Scripture: John 19:28 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”The post I Thirst first a

Scripture: Luke 19:28-44 “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 BrideThe post Tears of a King first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

Series: JudgesScripture: Judges 16:18-31 “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 BonhoefferThe post Weak and Strong first ap

Series: JudgesScripture: Judges 10:6-16; Judges 11:29-36 “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 al

Series: JudgesScripture: Judges 6:19-40 “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. “For this is the will of God: your sanctification.” 1 Thessalonians 4:3 “The point of all this learning is to prepare to add one’s own contribution to the supreme reformation project, which is God’s restoration of all things that have been corrupted by evil . . . When Christians strive to make God’s purposes their own, they tilt forward to God’s restoration of all things, the final coming of the kingdom. They think about it, pray for it, study and work in ways that accord with it. Thinking personally as well as globally, they want the kingdom to come in t

Series: JudgesScripture: Judges 6:1-16 “When you’re so ashamed that you could die, God believes in you.  And you can’t do right even though you try, God believes in you. Blessed are the ones who grieve, the ones who mourn, the ones who bleed. In sorrow you sow but in joy you reap. God believes in you.” Pierce Pettis “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. “I wish you’d see yourself as beautiful as I see you. Why can’t you see yourself as beautiful as I see you?” The Avett Brothers, “Will You Return?”The post The Call of God first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

Scripture: Matthew 5:1-9

Series: JudgesScripture: Judges 5 “Worship is the strategy by which we interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves and attend to the presence of God.” Eugene Peterson “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 “Hymns are not only powerful, they sneak into our soul. As William Cowper sings, ‘Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings; it is the Lord who rises with healing in His wings.’ William Cowper was well aware of the power of hymns, as he wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘It is a noble thing to be a poet. It makes all the world so lively. I might have preached more sermons than even Tillotson did and better, and the world would have been still fast asleep. But a volume of verse is a fiddle that puts the universe in motion.’ Hymns have this ability to sneak in undetected and surprise us! And we desperately need the truth of the mercy of God to break through, to re

Series: JudgesScripture: Judges 4:1-24 “There is no attribute more comforting to His children than that of God’s Sovereignty. Under the most adverse circumstances, in the most severe trials, they believe that Sovereignty has ordained their afflictions, that Sovereignty overrules them, and that Sovereignty will sanctify them all . . . it is God upon the throne that we love to preach.  It is God upon His throne whom we trust.” Charles Spurgeon “It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor. And great mystery: to redeem our brokenness and lovelessness the God who suffers with us did not strike some mighty blow of power but sent his beloved son to suffer like us, through his suffering to redeem us from suffering and evil. Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.” Nicholas Wolterstorff “When opponents do their wo

Series: JudgesScripture: Judges 3:12-30 “The love of Christ is rich and free; Fixed on His own eternally; Nor earth, nor hell, can it remove; Long as He lives, His own He’ll love. His loving heart engaged to be Their everlasting Surety; Twas love that took their cause in hand, And love maintains it to the end. Love cannot from its post withdraw; Nor death, nor hell, nor sin, nor law, Can turn the Surety’s heart away; He’ll love His own to endless day.” William Gadbsy “How strange it is that a widow with only a handful of meal should be commanded to offer hospitality! It is once again the impossible that is set before us.  It would have been a dull commonplace to have fed the prophet from the overflowing larder of the rich man’s palace. But to work from an almost empty cupboard – that is the surprising way of the LORD!  He delights to hang great weights on apparently slender wires, to have great events turn on seeming trifles, and to make poverty the minister of the unsearchable riches of Christ.” J.H. Jowett