Series: Promise-Keeping GodScripture: Genesis 3:1-19

“‘The Son of Man,’ Jesus says, ‘comes at a time you don’t think’ (in an hour that seems like nothing to you). To be ready for that, therefore, all you have to do is wait in faith for nothing — that is, for death. And the only way of being unready is to cut short that waiting by unfaith — to dash off on material or spiritual excursions we think will give us life. But our life does not consist in the abundance of things we possess (Luke 12:15). Rather our life is hid with Christ in God (Col. 3:3) and the mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection. He who loses his life for Jesus’ sake, therefore, will find it.”

Robert Capon

“Oh, the devil’s singing over me an age old song

That I am cursed and gone astray

Singing the first verse so conveniently over me

He’s forgotten the refrain:

‘Jesus saves!’”

Shane & Shane

“The good news of Advent is not that we are faithful in our waiting (we often aren’t) but that God is faithful in his coming.”

Rich VillodasThe post The Promised Deliverer first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

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 interested in itself and never talks about itself. That to me is a very good test. I always distrust people who talk about their faith. That is the characteristic of the cults. They always direct attention to themselves . . . the emphasis is on self. But faith looks at God, holds on to the faithfulness of God. Abraham ‘gave glory to God.’”

David Martyn Lloyd-JonesThe post The Gospel of God: Good News Illustrated first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

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. LewisThe post The Gospel of God: He Ain’t Heavy first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

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 items that qualify us to

approach him.”

Dane Ortlund

“Cheer up! God’s Spirit works in your weakness.”

Jack MillerThe post The Gospel of God: A Church with Broken Windows first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

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 to hinder. No sin can hold him back because God offers justification

to the ungodly. Nothing can keep him from Christ but his delusion that he has good works of his own that can satisfy

God. All he needs is need. All he needs is nothing. But, alas, sinners cannot part with their ‘virtues.’”

John Gerstner

“Thy mercy my God is the theme of my song; The joy of my heart and the boast of my tongue.

Thy free grace alone from the first to the last; Hath won my affections and bound my soul fast.”

John StockerThe post The Gospel of God: The Refuge of Mercy first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

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 distractions and cheap addictions

of this sorry world.”

Dan AllenderThe post The Gospel of God: Who is Judging Who? first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

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 DohertyThe post The Gospel of God: The Expulsive Power of a New Affection first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

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, 9cThe post The Gospel of God: The Great Exchange first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

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 the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.”

N.T. Wright, Surprised By Hope

“In Christ alone! – who took on flesh,

Fullness of God in helpless babe.

This gift of love and righteousness,

Scorned by the ones He came to save:

Till on that cross as Jesus died,

The wrath of God was satisfied –

For every sin on Him was laid;

Here in the death of Christ I live.”

Stuart Townsend and Keith Getty, “In Christ Alone”The post The Gospel of God: Wrath and Truth first appeared on Hope Church PCA.

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, IndispensableThe post Love is an Open Door first appeared on Hope Church PCA.