Hope Presbyterian Church In Winston-salem Sermons

Scripture: Psalm 34:1-22 “There is no such thing as a Secret Service Christian. Being a Christian is not a private and personal thing.” R.C. Sproul “God’s grace calls you to suffer and it calls you to wait, but it never calls you to stand in your own strength or to stand alone. Ps. 34:15, ‘The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry.’ That’s the story of the life of every believer, because you and I are never alone in our trouble. Perhaps the question is, will I recognize God’s care when it comes? God’s care comes in a variety of packages. God’s care is not always relief from circumstances, release from trouble. There are many moments in our lives when the very thing that causes us to wonder about God’s care is his care. He knows that trouble will reveal our hearts or display his glory. Often trouble is a tool of care in the hands of the One who knows best what we need. He cares; therefore, make sure your definition of his care is not too narrow.” Paul David Tripp New Morning M

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 5:1-14 “Many evangelicals act like they are still living in Jerusalem or Samaria. Consider, for example, the issue of . . . taking personal offense at the behavior and language of unbelievers. If I go to see a movie in Babylon, should I not expect the film to reflect Babylonian beliefs and values? As a Christian, I may disagree strongly with those beliefs and find the values utterly contrary to God’s law, but surely that should not be surprising. Nor, if I am living in exile in Babylon, does it make sense to be offended that Babylonians act like Babylonians, or that they fail to make films that reflect the beliefs and values of Jerusalem . . . It is hard to live in exile, hard to be surrounded by people who do not share our deepest convictions. It is much easier to be reactionary in Babylon, and more satisfying, too, because being offended by them makes us feel so very righteous. Besides, it is disappointing to be stuck in Babylon when what we really want is to l

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 4:17-32 How little people know who think that holiness is dull. When one meets the real thing, it is irresistible.” – C.S. Lewis “The sin I once feared to lose became a delight to dismiss. You turned them out and took their place, pleasanter than any pleasure.” – Augustine “The deepest word that can be spoken about sanctification is that it is a progress towards true humanity. Salvation is, essentially considered, the restoration of humanity to men . . . The greatest saints of God have been characterized, not by haloes and an atmosphere of distant unapproachability, but by their humanity. They have been intensely human and lovable people with a twinkle in their eyes.” – James PhillipsThe post Irresistible Holiness first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 4:1-14 “[The difference between the husband and the wife] is not one of worth, ability, or intelligence, but of role. It is functional, not organic. It is based on the exigencies of the dance, not on a judgment as to talent. In the ballet, in any intricate dance, one dancer leads, the other follows. Not because one is better (he may or may not be), but because that is his part. Our mistake…is to think that equality and diversity are irreconcilable. The common notion of equality is based on the image of the march. In a parade, really unequal beings are dressed alike, given guns of identical length, trained to hold them at the same angle, and ordered to keep step with a fixed beat. But it is not the parade that is true to life; it is the dance. There you have real equals assigned unequal roles in order that each may achieve his individual perfection in the whole. Nothing is less personal than a parade; nothing more so than a dance. Marriage is a hierarchical game p

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 4:1-14 “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.” – Martin Lloyd-Jones “Hoping for others is hard, but not the hardest. Praying for others is hard, but not the hardest. The hardest task for people who believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ is in ‘living the sort of life that makes people say, ‘Ah, so that’s how people are going to live when righteousness takes over our world.’” – Cornelius Plantinga “The purpose of our lives is to remove the veil f

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 3:20-21 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 Come ye sinners, poor and wretched Weak and wounded, sick and sore; Jesus, ready, stands to save you, Full of pity, joined with power. He is able, He is able; He is willing; doubt no more. Let not conscience make you linger, Nor of fitness fondly dream; All the fitness he requires Is to feel your need of Him. This He gives you, this He gives you, ‘Tis the Spirit’s rising beam. – Joseph Hart “A needy heart is a praying heart. Dependency is the heartbeat of prayer . . . If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 3:14-19 “Desire lies at the heart of who God made us to be, who we are at our core. Desire is both our greatest frailty and the mark of our highest beauty. Our desire completes us as we become One with our Lover, and it separates us from Him and brings death as it wars against His will.” ―Dan Allender, To Be Told: Know Your Story, Shape Your Future “The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we drink in every night.” ―John Piper, A Hunger for God “FOMO [‘fear of missing out’] is real just as longings are real, and the fast track to the future carries along my desire, making it feel out of reach and unavailable to me, but available for what seems like everyone else.” ―Mollie Johnson, “Being Single” Lover, I’m off the streets I’m gonna go where the bright

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 3:1-13 “If Christian leaders and influencers and organizations do fall on hard times, if we lose favor and become a persecuted minority, it might actually mark the beginning of our truest impact.” Scott Sauls, From Weakness to Strength “The powers of evil fight with terrible intensity a battle that has already been lost, whereas believers by grace fight with humble boldness a battle that has already been won. John “Jack” Miller, Powerful Evangelism for the Powerless “It is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. ‘See how they love one another,’ they say, for they themselves are animated by mutual hatred; ‘how they are ready even to die for one another,’ they say, for they themselves will sooner put to death.” Tertullian, The ApologyThe post Hidden in Plain Sight first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 2:19-22 “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.” —C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity “Spread for thee the festal board See with richest dainties stored To thy Father’s bosom pressed Yet again a child confessed Never from His house to roam Come and welcome, sinner, come!” —Tho

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 2:14-18 “In his letter to the Philippians Paul writes about his own identity culturally. He calls it “the flesh,” that is, all that we have as human persons that comes from our history and heritage. He says in Phil. 3:4, “If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless. But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them dung, that I may gain Christ and be found in him.” Each one of us needs to substitute whatever our own cultural history, cultural identity, cultural heritage, racial identity—whatever we like to put in there—in pl

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 2:11-13 “How does one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life, if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life?” —Christopher Wiman “One way or another, we are always remembering, of course. There is no escaping it even if we want to, or at least no escaping it for long, though God knows there are times when we try to, don’t want to remember. In one sense the past is dead and gone, never to be repeated, over and done with, but in another sense, it is of course not done with at all or at least not done with us. Every person we have ever known, every place we have ever seen, everything that has ever happened to us – it all lives and breathes deep in us somewhere whether we like it or not, and sometime it doesn’t take much to bring it back to the surface.” —Frederick Buechner “Forgetfulness leads to exile, while redemption is the secret to redemption.” —Baal Shem TovThe post Far Away No Longer! first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 2:1-10 “Sin is a breach of trust, the illicit reach of unbelief, an assertion of autonomy.” —Bruce Waltke “Grace doesn’t sell well; you can hardly even give it away, because it works only for losers and no one wants to stand in their line.” —Robert Farrar Capon “Come with thy heart hard, dead, cold, full of wickedness; come as a blood-red sinner; this is the way to come to Christ!” —John Bunyan “When God pardons, he does not say he understands our weakness or makes allowances for our errors; rather he disposes of, he finishes with, the whole of our dead life and raises us up with a new one. He does not so much deal with our derelictions as he does drop them down the black hole of Jesus’ death. He forgets our sins in the darkness of the tomb. He remembers our iniquities no more in the oblivion of Jesus’ expiration. He finds us, in short, in the desert of death, not in the garden of improvement; and in the power of Jesus’ resurrection, he puts us on his shoulders r

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 1:15-23 “What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it – the fact that he knows me.  I am graven on the palms of his hands.  I am never out of his mind.  All knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me.  I know him because he first knew me, and continues to know me.  He knows me as friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when his eye is off me, or his attention distracted from me, and no moment therefore when his care falters.  This is momentous knowledge.  There is unspeakable comfort – the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates – in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good.  There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love for me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in th

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 1:11-14 “Great Father of mercies, Thy goodness I own, And the covenant love of Thy crucified Son; All praise to the Spirit, Whose whisper divine Seals mercy and pardon and righteousness mine.” —John Stocker “The movement of God’s Spirit is very gentle, very soft – and hidden. It does not seek attention. But that movement is also very persistent, strong and deep.” —Henri Nouwen “He who dwells in a house, keeps the house in repair; so the Spirit dwelling in a believer, keeps grace in repair.  Grace is compared to a river of the water of life (John 7:38).  This river can never be dried up because God’s Spirit is the spring that continually feeds it.” —Thomas WatsonThe post Blessed Assurance first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 1:3-10 “All these civilizing goods — from television to supermarkets — are merely means which smooth our path through the world and make it easier to travel. But what will it profit us, if we make smooth social and technical progress on this level road and no longer know where we are going, in whose name we are living, and what the goal of our destiny is? For then perfectionism in the way in which we master life leads precisely to a life which has not been mastered. Then we shall be wandering aimlessly over a smooth and level plain. May it not be that our neuroses and our predilection for psychiatrists derive from the fact that we have become a heap of misery in this great empty plain? What good are our refrigerators, what good is the well-oiled apparatus of our style of living, if we no longer know what we are living for? Albert Einstein once said that we live in an age of perfect means and confused ends. The question which is inherent in that statement I consid

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 1:3-14 “There’s one more voice you may need to adjust. It’s the voice in your head whispering, There’s not enough. Not enough resources, spots in the best schools, teacher’s attention, opportunities, friends who will provide the right type of influence. Not enough hours in the day, funds in the account, time to protect the planet, chances to do things over. Fear of scarcity is alive and blooming inside the minds of most parents. That’s what sends their voices into the pinched and panicky zone. Fear is behind the rushing, hovering, chiding, and pleading that sours our conversations with our children . . .   For as long as I have practiced therapy with families, parents have been worried about scarcity . . . Relinquish the fear and you open a door to enchantment.” —Wendy Mogel, Voice Lessons, 4. “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 hi

Series: God’s New HumanityScripture: Ephesians 1:1-2 “Nobody can emerge from a careful reading of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians with a privatized gospel. For Ephesians is the gospel of the church. It sets forth God’s eternal purpose to create through Jesus Christ a new society which stands out in bright relief against the sombre background of the old world. For God’s new society is characterized by life in place of death, by unity and reconciliation in place of division and alienation, by the wholesome standards of righteousness in place of the corruption of wickedness, by love and peace in place of hatred and strife, and by unremitting conflict with evil in place of a flabby compromise with it.” —John Stott “The Gospel does not become public truth for a society by being propagated as a theory or as a worldview and certainly not as a religion. It can become public truth only insofar as it is embodied in a society (the church) which is both “abiding in” Christ and engaged in the life of the world.” —Lesslie N

Series: In His Own Words: The Real JesusScripture: John 20:1-18 “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 an handkerchief.” —George Herbert, from ‘The Dawning” in Herbert: Poems, 131. “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 “I have come to feel that the primary reality of which we have to take account in seeking for a Christian impact on public life is the Christian congregation. How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the l

Series: In His Own Words: The Real JesusScripture: John 18:1-12 “The secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: he was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn’t allow you that. He doesn’t let you off that hook. Christ says: No. I’m not saying I’m a teacher, don’t call me teacher. I’m not saying I’m a prophet. I’m saying: ‘I’m the Messiah.’ I’m saying: ‘I am God incarnate.’ And people say: No, no, please, just be a prophet. A prophet, we can take. You’re a bit eccentric. We’ve had John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey, we can handle that. But don’t mention the ‘M’ word! Because, you know, we’re gonna have to crucify you. And he goes: No, no. I know you’re expecting me to come back with an army, and set you free from these creeps, but actually I am the Messiah.” —Bono in conversation with Michka Assayas “What will he do when he comes as judge,

Series: In His Own Words: The Real JesusScripture: Matthew 28:16-20 “A sacrament is an outward sign by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of His good will towards us in order to sustain the weakness of our faith, and we in turn attest our piety toward Him in the presence of the Lord and of His angels and before men . . . A sacrament is never without a preceding promise but it is joined to it as a sort of appendix, with the purpose of confirming and sealing the promise itself, and of making it more evident to us and in a sense ratifying it.  By this means God provides first for our ignorance and dullness, then for our weakness … as our faith is slight and feeble unless it be propped [up] on all sides and sustained by every means, it trembles, wavers, totters, and at last gives way.” —John Calvin “Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.” —Galway Kinnell Q: What is baptism? A: Baptism is a sacrament, wherein the washing with water, in the name of the Father, and of the Son,