Hope Presbyterian Church In Winston-salem Sermons

Series: The Gospel of GodScripture: Romans 4:1-25 “Probably more trouble is caused in the Christian life by an inadequate or mistaken view of this doctrine [of justification] 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 “Forgiveness remits our debts and cancels our liability to punishment; justification bestows on us a righteous standing before God.” John Stott, The Cross of Christ “Jesus, Thy blood and righteousness, My beauty are, my glorious dress; Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed, With joy I shall lift up my head.” Nicolaus Ludwig Von Zinzendorf “Faith is holding on to the faithfulness of God. Faith does not even look at itself. I go further. Faith is never inter

Series: The Gospel of GodScripture: Romans 3:20-31 “If I’m laden at all Then I’m laden with sadness That everyone’s heart Isn’t filled with the gladness Of love for one another” The Hollies “[The righteousness of God] is his just justification of the unjust, his righteous way of ‘righteoussing’ the unrighteous.” John Stott “Dumbledore gulped at the goblet, drained every last drop, and then, with a great, rattling gasp, rolled over onto his face.” Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince “To please God … to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness … to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.” C.S. Lewis

Series: The Gospel of GodScripture: Romans 3:9-20 “It was the kind of church where you could show your ugly heart to everybody and they just loved you harder and handed you a beer.” Harrison Scott Key “It can seem gentler and kinder to think of human beings as basically good, our intuitions basically correct and our motives basically pure. But then we run into the hard facts of greed, genocide, abuse, oppression, lies, tyranny, hatred, jealousy, violence, murder, enslavement and even mundane selfishness, impatience, arrogance or resentment in our own heart. … If I am a sinner, then my enemy and I have something in common: We are both wayward and in deep need of grace.” Tish Harrison Warren “We cannot present a reason for Christ to finally close off his heart to his own sheep. No such reason exists. Every human friend has a limit. If we offend enough, if a relationship gets damaged enough, if we betray enough times, we are cast out. The walls go up. With Christ, our sins and weaknesses are the very resumé item

Series: The Gospel of GodScripture: Romans 2:17-3:8 “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 “The way to God is wide open. There is nothing standing between the sinner and his God. He has immediate and unimpeded access to the Savior. There is nothing t

Series: The Gospel of GodScripture: Romans 2:1-16 “Inscribed on the very heart of God’s grace is the rule that we can be its recipients only if we do not resist being made into its agents; what happens to us must be done by us. We who have been embraced by the outstretched arms of the crucified God open our arms even for the enemies … so that together we may rejoice in the eternal embrace of the triune God.” Miroslav Volf “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 “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 dis

Series: The Gospel of GodScripture: Romans 1:26-32 “The fire of lust’s pleasures must be fought with the fire of God’s pleasures. If we try to fight the fire of lust with prohibitions and threats alone – even the terrible warnings of Jesus – we will fail. We must fight it with a massive promise of superior happiness. We must swallow up the little flicker of lust’s pleasure in the conflagration of holy satisfaction.” John Piper “Whatever our attractions, following Jesus means denying ourselves and taking up our cross. But if Jesus’ people are truly living in his ways, there’s room and joy and love enough for all.” Rebecca McLaughlin “My identity is in Christ and not my sexuality.” Sean Doherty

Series: The Gospel of GodScripture: Romans 1:18-32 “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 pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. … Salvation belongs to the LORD!” Jonah 2:8, 9c

Series: The Gospel of GodScripture: Romans 1:18-32 “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” Richard Neibuhr’s famous definition of American liberal Christianity “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 judgment in which the creator God will set the world right once and for all. The word judgment carries negative overtones for a good many people in our liberal and postliberal world. We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s coming judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands. In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and th

Series: The Gospel of GodScripture: Romans 1:13-17 “I just want to be forgiven. Can’t I be forgiven? I just want to be forgiven.” “Joel Maisel” in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel “A moralistic religion of self-salvation is our default setting as fallen creatures. If we are not explicitly and regularly taught out of it, we will always turn the message of God’s rescue operation into a message of self-help.” Michael Horton, Christless Christianity “The essence of faith is rest in the life and death of Jesus …. You may have a weak faith that you wish were stronger, but you have a strong Savior who could not be more powerful. If you are his, it is not because your trust never wavers but because his love never fails.” David Cassidy, Indispensable

Series: The Gospel of GodScripture: Romans 1:8-15 “I never wanted to follow Jesus. I never wanted to follow Jesus. I never wanted to follow Jesus. He rescued me, He rescued me. No turning back, no turning back.” – Red Mountain Music “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 “It is very common in Christian circles to assume that “the gospel” is something just for non-Christians. We presume that the gospel is a set of basic “A-B-C” doctrines that Christians do not need to hear or study once they are converted . . . Belief in the gospel is not just the way to enter the kingdom of God; it is t

Series: The Gospel of GodScripture: Romans 1: 1-7 “Fundamentally, the gospel is news. It’s good news—the good news about what our triune God has accomplished for His people: the Father’s sending His Son, the incarnate Jesus Christ, to live perfectly, fulfill the law, and die sacrificially, satisfying God’s wrath against us that we might not face hell, thereby atoning for our sins; and raising Him from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the victorious announcement that God saves sinners . . . The gospel is good news, not good advice or good instructions, just as J. Gresham Machen wrote: “What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel, not directions for saving myself but knowledge of how God has saved me. Have you any good news? That is the question that I ask of you.” Burke Parsons “But He gives more grace (James 4:6). This is one of the most encouraging verses in Scripture. It tells us that whatever we forfeit when we put self in the place of God, we cannot forfeit our salvation: ‘He

This was a delightful celebration of God’s faithfulness to Hope Church in the 25 years since it began. Enjoy some oldies but goodies, hear from our first two pastors, and reflect on all that God has done!

Series: Becoming the Church Jesus Longs ForScripture: John 13: 34-35; Galatians 5:13-15;Galatians 6:2 “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 “The p

Series: Becoming the Church Jesus Longs ForScripture: John 13: 34-35; Ephesians 4: 1-6 “Getting saved is easy; becoming a community is difficult – damnably difficult.” 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 Bonhoeffer “The biggest problem people have in searching for the perfect community is just that. You don’t find community; you create it through love. Look how this transforms the way you enter a room of strangers. Our instinctive thought is, “Who do I know? Who am I comfortable with?” There’s nothing wrong with those questions, but the Jesus questions that create commun

Series: When You PrayScripture: Colossians 1: 9-14 “To be right with God the judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the father is a greater.”  J.I. Packer “No matter how little you think you are, in God’s hand you will be used to accomplish his will in eternally significant ways. There are no little people and no big people, only consecrated or unconsecrated. The call on every Christian’s life is to seek the lowest place of service to God which he will then transform into consecrated leadership.” Francis Schaeffer “Prayerlessness leads to a strange powerlessness, emptiness, and burnout even in successful churches. Prayerfulness leads to an equally strange power, fullness, and energy, in even discouraging environments.”  Paul Miller

Series: When You PrayScripture: Jude 17-25 Christianity is not clay in the hands of the world-spirit to be molded by it, but is itself to be the moulder of public sentiment and everything else. Rev. Francis Grimke  Contemporary people tend to examine the Bible, looking for things they can’t accept; but Christians should reverse that, allowing the Bible to examine us, looking for things God can’t accept. Dr. Tim Keller  I will build my church.  Jesus

Series: When You PrayScripture: Luke 18: 9-14  “The world is drowning in its efforts at life; it does not need lifeguards who swim to it carrying barbells.”   Robert Farrar Capon “The religious see God as useful; gospel-believing Christians see God as beautiful.”  Tim Keller “I am throwing all my good works overboard, and lashing myself to the plank of free grace; for I hope to swim to glory on it.”   Charles Spurgeon

Series: When You PrayScripture: Luke 18: 1-8 “To persevere is to succeed.”   Thomas Sutcliffe Mort “By the mercy of God, we do not lose heart . . . We do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”   2 Corinthians 4:2, 16 “I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living! Wait upon the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!”   Psalm 27: 13-14

Series: When You PrayScripture: Matthew 6:5-13 “You  have said, “Seek my face.” My heart says, “Your face, Lord, do I seek.”  Psalm 27: 8 “All shall work together for good. Everything is needful that he sends; nothing can be needful that he withholds.”   John Newton “O Lord, you who own the cattle on a thousand hills, preserve us from living in an economy of scarcity where nothing and no one is good enough, causing us to live stingy and self-absorbed lives. Fill our hearts instead with your abundant life, so that we may be generous-spirited in all that we do and with everyone whom we meet. In the name of the One who makes more than enough.”   “A Prayer for Being Generous-Spirited” by David O. Taylor

Series: When You PrayScripture: Matthew 6:9-13 “I can resist everything except temptation.”   Oscar Wilde “O Lord, give me chastity and temperance – but not yet!”  St. Augustine “A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”  C