Hope Presbyterian Church In Winston-salem Sermons

Series: In His Own Words: The Real JesusScripture: John 14:1-6 “We believe that all religions are basically the same. They all believe in love and goodness. They only differ on matters of Creation, sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation . . . We believe that each man must find the truth that is right for him. We believe there is no absolute truth, except the truth that there is no absolute truth. We believe in the rejection of creeds, and the flowering of individual thought.” —Steve Turner “The uniqueness of Christ is not a peripheral teaching of the Christian faith. If we lose our sense of absolute dependence on what Jesus did, it will erode away the whole of the faith until little remains. But equally important to holding to the uniqueness of Christ is not acting arrogant or superior to those who do not agree or who are not Christians. Nothing so quickly discredits this biblical claim than if we make it without love, or in pride, defensiveness, conceit, or if we refuse to discuss it at all . . . This introd

Series: In His Own Words: The Real JesusScripture: John 11:1-7, 17-44 “I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as ‘God on the cross.’ In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us.

Series: In His Own Words: The Real JesusScripture: John 10:11-21, 27-30 “Being confident of the goodness of the Lord shouldn’t be confused with an assumption that because God is good, he will give me the things I have set my heart on. In his grace, God is freeing you from the small confines of your little definition of what is good so that you can experience the huge and satisfying good that he has planned for you . . . This is the bottom line. The good that God promises me isn’t a situation, possession, position, or relationship. The good that he promises me is himself. What could possibly be a better gift?” —Paul Tripp “The LORD God is a sun and a shield; the LORD bestows favor and honor. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.” —Psalm 84:11 “Savior, like a shepherd lead us, Much we need Thy tender care; In Thy pleasant pastures feed us, For our use Thy folds prepare: Blessed Jesus, blessed Jesus, Thou hast bought us, Thine we are; Blessed Jesus, blessed Jesus, Thou hast bought us, Thi

Series: In His Own Words: The Real JesusScripture: John 10:1-10 “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.” —Charles Spurgeon “If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist. If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have sent us a comedian or an artist. If God had perceived that our greatest need was political stability, he would have sent us a politician. If he had perceived that our greatest need was health, he would have sent us a doctor. But he perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death, and he sent us a Savior.” —D. A. Carson I would not have the restless will That hurries to and fro, Seeking for some great thing to do, Or

Scripture: Galatians 3:1-14

Series: In His Own Words: The Real JesusScripture: John 8:12 “Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection.  Made for joy, we settle for pleasure.  Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance.  Made for relationships, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment.  But new creation has already begun.  The sun has begun to rise.  Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world.  It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds, and stewards of the new day that is dawning.  That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God’s new world, which he has thrown open before us.” —N.T Wright – Simply Christian, 237. “”He came down from heaven” can almost be transposed into “Heaven drew earth up into it,” and locality, limitation, sleep, sweat, footsore weariness, frustration, pain, dou

Series: In His Own Words: The Real JesusScripture: John 6:25-40 “Everybody’s got a hungry heart.” —Saint Springsteen “To be human is to be animated and oriented by some version of the good life, some picture of what we think counts as “flourishing.” And we want that. We crave it. We desire it. This is why our most fundamental mode of orientation to the world is love. We are oriented by our longings, directed by our desires. We adopt ways of life that are indexed to such visions of the good life, not usually because we “think through” our options but rather because some picture captures our imagination.” —James K.A. Smith “Self-indulgence tends to suppress gratitude; self-discipline tends to generate it. That is why gluttony is a deadly sin: oddly, it is an appetite suppressant. The reason is that a person’s appetites are linked: full stomachs and jaded palates take the edge from our hunger and thirst for justice. And they spoil the appetite for God.” —Cornelius Plantinga “Blessed are those who hunger and thir

Series: In His Own Words: The Real JesusScripture: John 2:13-22 “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 “Our Lord’s injunction to ‘judg

Series: In His Own Words: The Real JesusScripture: John 2:1-11 “On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken. It will be said on that day, “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the LORD; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.” —Isaiah 25:6-9 “It cost God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.” —C.S. Lewis “O Lord, refresh our sensibilities. Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in, and sauces which are never the sa

Series: In His Own Words: The Real JesusScripture: John 1:19-29 “Good, upstanding, proper people, who consider themselves regular human beings with no real weaknesses or guilt, cannot understand this passage. They offer grace no entrance gate, the gate that sin by its very nature is . . . Because such people lack nothing, that which they most need – which means everything – is not brought to them. Even the love of God does not bandage the person who has no wounds . . . whoever has not fallen will never be lifted, and whoever is not soiled will not be cleansed.” —Charles Peguy “As ‘the Lamb of God’, Jesus saves the anti-godly world out of its fallenness into sin by means of his substitutionary atoning death on the Cross. Precisely in the place where the Johannine Jesus for the first time comes into actual view, right here, he appears as the Crucified One. Already in the beginning, therefore, the end is present, and the hearers/readers know that the way of the preexistent and incarnate Word leads to the Cross.

Series: In His Own Words: The Real JesusScripture: John 1:6-8; 20:30-31 “Can a modern person really subscribe to a creed? It seems rather narrow and probably a bit unsophisticated.  Shouldn’t you have an open mind? Shouldn’t you be your own person? In the modern world, belief in a creed is considered a sign of intellectual failure. You can’t be bound to a creed, so it is said, and be a truly critical thinker.” —Ray Cannata, Rooted   “We believe in marxfreudanddarwin We believe that everything is ok as long as you don’t hurt anyone to the best of your definition of hurt, and to the best of your knowledge. We believe that everything’s getting better, despite evidence to the contrary. The evidence must be investigated. You can prove anything with evidence. We believe that all religions are basically the same. They all believe in love and goodness. They only differ on matters of Creation, sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation. We believe that man is essentially good. It’s only his behavior that gets him down. Thi

Scripture: Psalm 42 “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed…. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.” — Elie Wiesel, Night “We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.” ―C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed “I had a dream that I was waking at the burning edge of dawn And all that rain had washed me clean, all the sorrow was gone I had a dream that I was waking at the burning edge of dawn And I could finally believe the Kin

Series: Advent 2017Scripture: John 1:1-18 “Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed—as a matter of cold, hard fact—all it’s cracked up to be, then even at best our efforts are misleading. The Word became flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cov

Series: Advent 2017Scripture: John 1:1-13 “Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” —Mary Oliver “Instructions for living a life: Pay Attention. Be Astonished. Talk about it.” —Mary Oliver “You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.” —G.K. Chesterton “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

Series: Advent 2017Scripture: John 1:1-9 “Christmas, then, is not a dream, a moment of escapism.  Christmas is the reality, which shows up the rest of “reality.”  And for Christmas, here, read Christianity.  Either Jesus is the Lord of the world, and all reality makes sense in his light, or he is dangerously irrelevant to the problems and possibilities of today’s world.  There is no middle ground.  Either Jesus was, and is, the Word of God, or he, and the stories Christians tell about him, are lies.” —N.T. Wright “‘He came down from heaven’ can almost be transposed into ‘Heaven drew earth up into it,’ and locality, limitation, sleep, sweat, footsore weariness, frustration, pain, doubt, and death are, from before all worlds, known by God from within. The pure light walks the earth; the darkness, received into the heart of Deity, is there swallowed up. Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned?” —C. S. Lewis “There are theological reasons for observing a serious Advent without being swallowe

Series: Advent 2017Scripture: John 1:1-3 “The first thing that hit me when I started reading through the Gospels was the thought that Jesus had come to earth in the first place. … To exchange heaven for a place, and to exchange eternity for time, was an act of humility I don’t think any of us can understand.” —Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What “If we are to be named as who we really are, then it will have to come from the outside. A loving community can help do this—but even a loving community has its limits. Ultimately, in order for you to matter, in order for you to bear meaning—you will have to be Named in the same way you were called into existence. You will have to be Named by God—the kind and wise knower of your soul.” —Roger Edwards, “Your Name Matters” “How do you reconcile your love for someone with the revelation that they have behaved badly?” —Savannah Guthrie, The Today Show The post True God first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

Series: Worship in Spirit and TruthScripture: Romans 11:30-12:2 “Missions is not the ultimate goal of the Church. Worship is. Missions exists because  worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever.” —John Piper Let the Nations Be Glad “The liturgy of my night—lock the doors, brush my teeth, get a glass of water, turn out the lights, pull back the covers, crawl into bed, curl up, close my eyes—is a repetitive, mundane, and good thing, through which I’ve learned to slow down, to let go of the day behind me, and go to sleep. Similarly, corporate worship trains us, over time, to cease striving to make our own way and mourn own righteousness and to receive God’s means of grace.” —Tish Harrison Warren Liturgy of the Ordinary “The parallel between worship and other areas of human lif

Series: Worship in Spirit and TruthScripture: Numbers 6:22-27; Romans 15:13 “We wonder, What does worship have do with my work? . . . The work we do together each week in gathered worship transforms and sends us into the work we do in our homes and offices . . . we are people who are blessed and sent; this identity transforms how we embody work and worship in the world, in our week, even in our small day.” —Tish Harrison Warren “In the daily rhythms for everyone everywhere, we live our lives in the marketplace of this world: in homes and neighborhoods, in schools and on farms, in hospitals and businesses, and our vocations are bound up with the ordinary work that ordinary people do. We are not great shots across the bow of history; rather, by simple grace, we are hints of hope.” —Steve Garber “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” —C.S. LewisThe post Blessed and Sent by God’s Good Word first appeared on

Series: Worship in Spirit and TruthScripture: 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

Series: Worship in Spirit and TruthScripture: Matthew 26:26-28; 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 “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 For the bread which you have broken, For the wine which you have poured, For the words, which you have spoken, Now we give you thanks O Lord. By this pledge that you do love us, By