Hope Presbyterian Church In Winston-salem Sermons

Series: JudgesScripture: Judges 3: 7-11 “Behind every agonizing ‘No’ from God is his ‘Yes’ to something better, his ‘Trust Me’ with the timing, and his ‘I AM with you right now’”. Walter Henegar  “When the scriptural people of God seek redemption, they want personal salvation, and they express their desire in what sounds like a cry of the heart.  But to them redemption goes far beyond personal salvation. When biblical people want God to redeem, what they want is freedom and righteousness throughout the land.  They want God to unseat Pharaoh or Caesar. They want God to drive the Midianites back across the border. They’re Exodus people, after all. They’re Passover people. They have a history of being squeezed by Egypt, Babylon, or Rome.  In their eyes, God’s redemption means justice is coming, liberation is coming, the King of all the earth is coming!” Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God’s World  “Answer me this question, and I will tell you — Has God the Spirit taught you that you are accursed? Has he made you f

Series: JudgesScripture: Judges 2:6-3:6 “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, Exclusion and Embrace “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 This life, therefore, is not righteousness but growth in

Series: JudgesScripture: Judges 1:1-7, 22-26, 33; 2:1-5 “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction; jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion “If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God, except precisely that point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, then I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing him.  Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battlefront besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.” Martin Luther “You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth.  You can point with it, too.” Anne Lamott “. . . always being prepared to make

Series: JudgesScripture: Judges 1:1-7; 19-21; 27-28; 33; 2: 1-5 “And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.” G.K. Chesterton “Grace is not opposed to effort; it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.” Dallas Willard “‘Yet even now,’ declares the Lord, ‘return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.’” Joel 2: 12-13The post Incomplete Resolution first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

Series: JudgesScripture: Judges 1:1, 2: 11-13; 3:7; 17:6, and 21:25 “Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause . . . The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience . . . Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable…. To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” Flannery O’Connor “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and

Scripture: 1 Samuel 28:3-20 “I cannot believe that the men who occupy the pulpits of this land, assuming that they are men of ordinary intelligence and common sense and that they have, as they ought to have as leaders, some little knowledge, at least, of the Word of God, are without some convictions on the subject (of race prejudice), that they do not know that it is wrong, contrary to every principle of Christianity.” Francis J. Grimke “Everything we do should hasten the day when ‘the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.’” Dr. Carl Ellis “In the stillness of the quiet, if we listen, we can hear the whisper of the heart giving strength to weakness, courage to fear, hope to despair.” Howard Thurman “The humblest peasant is as free in the sight of God as the proudest monarch that ever swayed a scepter. Liberty is a spirit sent from God and like its great Author is no respecter of persons.” Henry Highland GarnetThe post The Witch at Endor first appeared o

Series: The Long-Expected JesusScripture: Isaiah 64:1-4; John 1:14 “If I am told over and over to repent, to change, to orient my life to God, nothing will ever happen. I will cling to the Gucci luggage—not that I could afford it—and the earthly status symbols more desperately than ever. I don’t need to hear exhortations to repent. I need power from outside myself to make me different . . . A power from outside is coming, a power that is able to make a new creation out of people like us, stones like us, people who have no capacity of ourselves to save ourselves.” Fleming Rutledge “How can you live with the terrifying thought that the hurricane has become human, that fire has become flesh, that life itself became life and walked in our midst? Christianity either means that, or it means nothing. It is either the most devastating disclosure of the deepest reality of the world, or it is a sham, a nonsense, a bit of deceitful playacting. Most of us, unable to cope with saying either of those things, condemn oursel

Series: The Long-Expected JesusScripture: Isaiah 9:2,6-7; Revelation 21:1-5 “How will God deliver from arrogance, war, oppression, and coercion? Surely the book of Isaiah indicates frequently that God was powerful enough to destroy his enemies in an instant, yet again and again, when the prophet comes to the heart of the means of deliverance, a childlike face peers out at us.” John Oswalt “In this season of Advent, I’m glad, once again to affirm that there’s only one government and one peace sufficient to meet the needs of my sinful heart and the issues in this broken world. You are the King of which David, at his best, was just a hint and hope. Having conquered death and the devil, you now reign from a throne of grace—advancing your kingdom of peace, justice, and righteousness in the hearts of your people, among the nations of the world, and in every sphere of your creation.”  Scotty Smith, “An Advent Prayer in Praise of the Kingship of Jesus” “There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark peak high up i

Series: The Long-Expected JesusScripture: Zechariah 9:9-13 “The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear.” Buddy the Elf “Advent begins in the dark and yearns for the light. Advent aches for the day when we shall not learn war anymore…. And when [Jesus] comes, we shall sob. Sob with relief at his return. Sob with humiliation and sadness at what we have done to one another. But he shall not turn away to let us get ourselves together. He shall gather us up in his arms, with laughter in his eyes, and rise with us to the life immortal. And our dark hearts will no longer be dark. Our deepest desire will be to be ruled by him, who rules with grace. We will love him because he has loved us.” Paul N. Walker “We need communal rhythms that make deliberate space for both grief and joy. For me, the old saying rings true: Hunger is the best condiment. Abstaining, for a moment, from the clamor of compulsive jollification, and instead leaning into the reality of human tragedy and of my own need and

Series: The Long-Expected JesusScripture: Haggai 2: 1-9 “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” Andy Bernard “Communion between God and man is the end to which both creation and redemption are the means; it is the goal to which both theology and preaching must ever point; it is the essence of true religion; it is, indeed, the definition of Christianity.” J.I. Packer “O Christ! He is the fountain, the deep sweet well of love! The streams on earth I’ve tasted, more deep I’ll drink above! There to an ocean fullness, His mercy doth expand, And glory, glory dwelleth, in Emmanuel’s land.” Anne Ross Cundel Cousin “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 achieved. Every sense is satisfied. We see him. We are with him. He holds us and hugs us and whispers,

Series: The Long-Expected JesusScripture: Micah 5:1-5a “We live in a noisy culture where we often feel we have to scream just to be heard, where the din of social media outrage overpowers the call of our embodied communities, where it seems impossible to hear a still, small voice. Advent bids us to quiet down, repent, and lean into longing. Redemption is sneaking into our corner of the universe, just as it was announced to some unsuspecting shepherds on the night of Christ’s birth. Returning to Christ and resting in him isn’t an escape from the darkness of the world. It’s a proclamation that, in the midst of darkness, there remains another way—the only way.” Tish Harrison Warren, “Practicing Advent in a Time of Turbulence” “Augustus’s empire is like a well-lit room at night: the lamps are arranged beautifully, they shed pretty patterns, but they have not conquered the darkness outside. Jesus’ kingdom is like the morning star rising, signaling that it is time to blow out the candles, to throw open the curtains

Series: Witness UnhinderedScripture: Acts 28:14b-31 “We all long for Eden and are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature is soaked with the sense of exile.” J.R.R. Tolkien  “The enthusiasms of my conversion have worn off. For whole stretches since the dream, since the baptism, my belief has faltered, my sense of God’s closeness has grown strained, my efforts at living in accord with what I take to be the call of the gospel have come undone…. Once upon a time, I thought I had arrived. Now I have arrived at a middle.” Lauren Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis  “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  “Is there nothing to sing about today? Then borrow a song from

Series: Witness UnhinderedScripture: Acts 20:17-38 “Ministry is not first about telling people what to do, but about telling them who they are, so that obedience will flow out of celebration.” Paul David Tripp “It shouldn’t be an easy walk from the pew to the weight bench, but it is made easy by a Christianity that looks more like a spiritual fitness program than a Gospel balm . . . The church is not like CrossFit; it is more like the hospital, or even the morgue. It is not a place where bad people go to be made good, but a place where bad people are loved in their badness.” Conor Gwin, “My Church is Not CrossFit” “The church is not in the world to teach sinners how to straighten up and fly right. That’s the world’s business; and on the whole it does a fairly competent—even gleefully aggressive—job of it. The church is supposed to be in the forgiveness business. Its job in filling pulpits is to find derelict nobodies who are willing to admit that they’re sinners and mean it. It’s supposed to take sheep who ca

Series: Witness UnhinderedScripture: Acts 17:16-34 “I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.” Anne Lamott “Longing for God arises in every human soul because it is part of the soul’s standard equipment. We have been endowed by our Creator with a sensus divinitatis (‘a sense of divinity’), wrote John Calvin, and everywhere in the world, even when it expresses itself as idolatry, the sense of divinity is the seed of religion. God has made us for himself. Our sense of God runs in us like a stream, even though we divert it toward other objects. We human beings want God even when we think that what we really want is a green valley, or a good time from our past, or a loved one. Of course we do want these things and persons, but we also want what lies behind them. Our ‘inconsolable secret,’ says C.S. Lewis, is that we are full of yearnings, sometimes shy and sometimes passionate, that point us beyond the things of earth to the ultimate rea

Series: Witness UnhinderedScripture: Acts 16:6-15 “Before grace renews the heart, there is grace preparing us for grace.” Charles Spurgeon “The gospel declares that no matter how dutiful or prayerful we are, we can’t save ourselves. What Jesus did was sufficient.” Brennan Manning “I didn’t start out understanding that hospitality was this robust practice. I thought of it more as entertaining, coffee and donuts or casseroles or whatever, but hospitality is significant when you look at the Scriptures. It’s significant, and it wasn’t coffee and donuts. It was struggling with Jews and Gentiles and how people were going to get along together and be in the church together and be one body.” Christine PohlThe post Even Worshipers of God Need Jesus first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

Series: Witness UnhinderedScripture: Acts 15:1-21 “Grace is free, but it ain’t cheap.” Pierce Pettis “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 The post Free Grace Alone From the First to the Last first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

Series: Witness UnhinderedScripture: Acts 14:8-23 “No room remains empty for long.  If God is driven out, the gods come trooping in.” Lesslie Newbigin “Idols are non-gods and as such are much more congenial to us than God, for we not only have the pleasure of making them, using our wonderful imaginations and skills in creative ways, but also of controlling them.  They are gods with all the God taken out so that we can continue to be our own gods.” Eugene Peterson “Those who make idols become like them; so do all who trust in them. O Israel, trust in the LORD!” Psalm 115: 8-9a “Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love . . . Salvation belongs to the LORD!” Jonah 2: 8-9The post Superstition and the Living God first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

Series: Witness UnhinderedScripture: Acts 13:1-4, 42-52 “World evangelization requires the whole church to take the whole Gospel to the whole world.” The Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization  “Mission means inviting all the peoples of the earth to hear the music of God’s future and dance to it today.” Christopher J.H. Wright “C.T. Studd, born to privilege, gifted athletically, and trained at Eton and Cambridge, turned his back on wealth and served Christ for decades against unimaginable odds, first in China and then in Africa. He penned these words: Some want to live within the sound of church or chapel bell; I want to build a rescue shop within a yard of hell.” D.A. CarsonThe post The Village Church and the Global Gospel first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

Series: Witness UnhinderedScripture: Acts 12:1-24 “And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” 1 Corinthians 2: 1-5 “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 “Why is power a gift? Because power is for flo

Series: Witness UnhinderedScripture: Acts 11:19-30 “Probably more trouble is caused in the Christian life by an inadequate or mistaken view of [the doctrine of justification by grace through faith] than any other.  When the child of God loses his sense of peace with God, finds his concern for others dried up, or generally finds his sense of the sheer goodness and grace of God diminished, it is from this fountain that he has ceased to drink. Conversely, if we can gain a solid grounding here, we have the foundation for a life of peace and joy.” Sinclair Ferguson, The Christian Life, p. 80 “It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world.  Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission – God’s mission . . . The idea of a missional church is far from a new idea . . . If we understand the church from our biblical theology as that community of people chosen and called since Abraham to be the vehicle of God’s b