Hope Presbyterian Church In Winston-salem Sermons

Series: Witness UnhinderedScripture: Acts 10:1-8, 30-48 “There’s a direct correlation between the accuracy of our memory and the effectiveness of our mission.  If we’re not teaching people how to be saved, it’s perhaps because we’ve forgotten the tragedy of being lost. If we’re not teaching the message of forgiveness, it may be because we don’t remember what it was like to be guilty. And if we’re not preaching the cross, it could be that we’ve subconsciously decided that—God forbid—somehow we don’t need it.” Max Lucado “Beautiful people do not just happen.” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross “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 evi

Series: Witness UnhinderedScripture: Acts 11:1-18 “A religion that costs nothing is worth nothing! A cheap Christianity, without a cross, will prove in the end a useless Christianity, without a crown.” J.C. Ryle “You can survive on your own.  You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own.  But you cannot become human on your own.  Surely that is why, in Jesus’ sad joke, the rich man has as hard a time getting into Paradise as that camel through the needle’s eye.  Because with his credit card in his pocket, the rich man is so effective at getting for himself everything that he needs that he does not see that what he needs more than anything else in the world can be had only as a gift.  He does not see that the one thing a clenched fist cannot do is accept, even from God himself, a helping hand.” Frederick Buechner “Thou who wast rich beyond all splendor, All for love’s sake becamest poor; Thrones for a manger didst surrender, Sapphire-paved courts for stable floor. Thou who wast rich beyond

Series: Witness UnhinderedScripture: Acts 9:10-31 “We have been so soaked in the individualism of modern Western culture that we feel threatened by the idea of our primary identity being that of the family we belong to – especially when the family in question is so large, stretching across space and time. The church isn’t simply a collection of isolated individuals, all following their own pathways of spiritual growth without much reference to one another. It may sometimes look like that, and even feel like that. And it’s gloriously true that each of us is called upon to respond to God’s call at a personal level. You can hide in the shadows at the back of the church for a while, but sooner or later you have to decide whether this is for you or not.” T. Wright “Membership in a local church means joining your imperfect self to many other imperfect selves to form an imperfect community that, through Jesus, embarks on a journey toward a better future . . . together.” Scott Sauls “The Christian community is both a

Series: The Language of the HeartScripture: Proverbs 1: 20-23, 32 and Proverbs 4: 1-19 “The Christian life after all is a life, it is a power, it is an activity. This is the thing we so constantly tend to forget. It is not just a philosophy, it is not just a point of view, it is not just a teaching that we take up and try to put into practice. It is all that, but it is something infinitely more. The very essence of the Christian life, according to the New Testament teaching everywhere, is that it is a mighty power that enters into us; it is a life, if you like, that is pulsating in us. It is an activity, and an activity on the part of God.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones “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 co

Series: The Language of the HeartScripture: Proverbs 1: 20-33 and 9: 1-6, 13-18 “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. “People often think of Christianity as a kind of bargain in which God says “If you keep a lot of rules, I’ll reward you, and if you don’t, I’ll do the other thing.” I don’t think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, that part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole with all your innumerable choices all your life long you are slowly turning this central

Series: The Language of the HeartScripture: Proverbs 1:1-7 “The practice of gaining wisdom and becoming wise is a path that is traveled, not a door that is opened. We usually want the door.” Les Newsom “The fear of God is that affectionate reverence, by which the child of God bends himself humbly and carefully to his Father’s law.” Charles Bridges “Wisdom is for the humbly eager – one might almost say, for the lover, the suitor . . . It is not for the man ‘wise in his own eyes’: he thinks that he has arrived – and indeed he has, for he will never get a step further. His trouble is not intellectual; he is no fool . . . It is that he does not seriously want to be a better person; whereas the wise person is teachable to the end, open to God’s commands and chastening.” Derek KidnerThe post The Wisdom We Need first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

Series: The Language of the HeartScripture: Psalm 38 “Guilt is our inner police force, but if we give it too much emotional power, we risk turning into a police state.” Ruth Whippman, “Guilt Trip,” The New York Times “Repentance is as necessary to salvation by faith as the ankle is to walking. The one does not act apart from the other. … Faith is trusting in Christ; repentance is turning from sin. They are two sides of the same coin of belonging to Jesus.” Sinclair Ferguson, The Grace of Repentance “God has really forgiven you. He’s not like the person who forgives, but somehow you know you’d better not do it again because they won’t forgive you a second time. He doesn’t grant you a temporary truce and wait to get you later. God has really accepted you and made you his child.” Jack Miller, Saving GraceThe post The Language of the Heart: Praying Our Guilt first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

Scripture: Hebrews 2 “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.” Annie Dillard “The meritocracy gives you brands to attach to—your prestigious school, your nice job title—which work well as status markers and seem to replace the urgent need to find out who you are.” David Brooks “[we] are overwhelmed by a sense of frustration and bewilderment and a general loss of direction in life…[we] ask about the purpose of living. Do we exist merely in order to eat, drink, sleep, work, and die? Or is there meaning to life?… Why [are we] here in this world? Skillfully using a well-known passage in Psalm 8,

Series: The Language of the HeartScripture: Psalm 133 “Getting saved is easy; becoming a community is difficult – damnably difficult.” Eugene Peterson  “I didn’t come to the conviction easily, but finally there was no getting around it; there can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart from an immersion and embrace of community. I am not myself by myself. Community, not the highly vaunted individualism of our culture, is the setting in which Christ is at play.” Eugene Peterson  “If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even when there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.” Dietrich Bo

Series: The Language of the HeartScripture: Psalm 42 “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 reality of God.” Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God’s World “The first step forward in knowing God better is the awareness that you do not yet know him fully.  It is ‘thirsting’ for God. It is discovering that he has water which can satisfy our deepest longings.  It is saying to him: ‘Lord, give me this water’ (John 4:15).” Sinclair Ferguson, Grow in Grace O, heart bereaved and lonely, Whose brightest dreams have fled Whose hopes like summer roses, Are withered crushed and dead Though link by link be broken, And tears unseen may fall Look up amid thy sorrow, To Him who knows it all. O, cling to thy Redeemer, Thy Savior, Brother, Friend Believe and trust His promise, To keep you till the end O watch and wait with patience, And question all you will His arms of love and mercy, Are round

Series: The Language of the HeartScripture: Psalm 121 “Of the evils that infect God’s world (moral and spiritual perversity, waste of good, and the physical disorders and disruptions of a spoiled cosmos), it can summarily be said: God permits evil; he punishes evil with evil; he brings good out of evil; he uses evil to test and discipline those he loves; and one day he will redeem his people from the power and presence of evil altogether. . . The doctrine of providence teaches Christians that they are never in the grip of blind forces (fortune, change, luck, fate); all that happens to them is divinely planned, and each event comes as a new summons to trust, obey and rejoice, knowing that all is for one’s spiritual and eternal good.” JI Packer “The vulnerability that leads to flourishing requires risk, which is the possibility of loss – the chance that when we act, we will lose something we value. Risk, like life, is always about probabilities, never about certainties. To risk is to open ourselves up to the ch

Series: The Language of the HeartScripture: Psalm 137 “Hope has two beautiful daughters.  Their names are anger and courage: anger at the way things are and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.” Saint Augustine “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 “Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.  He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.” 1 Peter 2: 21-23The post The Language of t

Series: The Language of the HeartScripture: Psalm 73 “Doubt is the ants-in-the-pants of faith; it keeps it alive and moving.” Frederick Buechner “A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.” Tim Keller, The Reason For God “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 “Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclus

Series: The Language of the HeartScripture: Psalm 3 “The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.” Frederick Buechner “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.

Series: The Language of the HeartScripture: Psalm 16 “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 vicissit

Series: The Language of the HeartScripture: Psalm 13 “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 wisdo

Series: The Heartbeat of HopeScripture: John 17:15, 2 Corinthians 5: 17-21, Galatians 5:25, 1 Peter 2:9-17 “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 “Th

Series: The Heartbeat of HopeScripture: John 13:34-35; John 15:1-16:1 “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,

Series: The Heartbeat of HopeScripture: Genesis 1:26-28; John 1:12-13; Romans 8:14-17; 1 John 3:1-2 “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

Series: The Heartbeat of HopeScripture: John 10: 7-10; 1 Peter 1:3-12 “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 i