Point Hope Presbyterian

There are things about ourselves we're absolutely certain we would never do until the moment we're doing them. That's the uncomfortable mirror this week's passage holds up. It's also where the deepest grace of the gospel shows up.

In this week's message from Mark 14:66–72, Pastor Rob continues our series through the Gospel of Mark with the story of Peter's threefold denial of Jesus. Hours earlier, Peter had promised Jesus he would die before he ever denied him. Now he's standing in a courtyard warming himself by a fire, and a servant girl asks a simple question: weren't you with Jesus? Three times Peter is asked. Three times he denies it. Then the rooster crows.

Rob's point is that Peter wasn't lying when he made that promise, he meant it. His real problem was that he trusted his own knowledge of himself more than he trusted what Jesus said was true about him. It didn't take an army or a trial to expose that; for Peter, it only took a servant girl and a little pressure. The things we're most certain we would never do are so often exactly the things we end up doing and once we're in the middle of doing them, we rarely stop ourselves. We just keep going.

But this passage isn't only a mirror, it's also a window into who Jesus is. Jesus knows the worst about Peter, and it does not change what Jesus does for him. Even before Peter denies him, Jesus has already promised, "after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee." Restoration was settled before the failure ever happened. That's the shape of grace in this passage and it isn't earned by Peter passing the test. It's a gift, secured entirely by Jesus.

Listen to the full sermon on Podbean, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Search Point Hope Presbyterian Church. You can also find it on our website and YouTube channel.

Most of us have never once said it out loud, but we've all done it: quietly put God on trial in our hearts. Weighed the evidence, reached a verdict, and decided exactly what kind of God he's turned out to be.

In this week's message from Mark 14:53–65, Pastor Rob follows Jesus from the garden of Gethsemane into the middle of the night, where he stands bound before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council. They already know their verdict before the trial even starts. Witness after witness is called, but none of their stories agree, there's no real case against him, and they condemn him anyway.

Rob's point is that this isn't only a story about a corrupt trial two thousand years ago. It's a mirror. We reach conclusions about God's character all the time, quietly, in the dark, without ever needing anyone to agree with us. When he doesn't come through the way we expected, when he confronts the places in our lives we'd rather he leave alone, we start collecting our own evidence. It doesn't have to be the truth. It just has to be our truth.

Here's where the passage turns. When the high priest finally asks Jesus directly, "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?" Jesus breaks his silence and answers, "I am," reaching all the way back to the burning bush where God first spoke his name to Moses. He isn't defending himself. He's revealing himself. And even after that, the council still calls the truth a lie.

That's the whole message in one line: the truth is condemned as a lie so that the guilty might go free. Jesus doesn't walk out of that courtroom, because in order for the truth to set us free, the truth himself couldn't go free. He was condemned in our place so we wouldn't have to be.

If you've been quietly weighing evidence against God this week, we hope this message feels less like an accusation and more like an invitation to bring it into the open. Sit with it in prayer, or share it with someone who might be carrying the same quiet case against him. We'd love for you to bring it with you this Sunday too. We gather at 10:00 AM at the Daniel Island Recreation Center — 160 Fairbanks Drive, Charleston, SC.

🎧 Listen to the full sermon on Podbean, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts — search Point Hope Presbyterian Church. You can also find it on our website and YouTube channel.

Betrayal only happens between people who've let each other in. You can be disappointed by a stranger, wounded by an enemy, insulted by an acquaintance — but you can't be betrayed by them. Betrayal requires closeness. That's what makes this week's passage so hard to read, and so hard to look away from.

In this week's message from Mark 14:43–52, Pastor Rob follows Jesus straight out of the agony of Gethsemane and into his arrest, Judas arriving with a kiss, a crowd with swords and clubs, and the disciples who had spent three years eating, laughing, and grieving alongside Jesus scattering into the dark the moment things turn. One young man in the crowd runs off naked rather than be caught anywhere near him. It isn't Jesus' enemies who wound him here. It's his friends.

Rob's point is that every betrayal does three things at once: it rejects something, it protects something, and it reveals something. Judas doesn't betray Jesus with a sword, he does it with a kiss, the very sign meant to communicate love. And what's actually being rejected in this scene isn't a plan, a doctrine, or a version of the kingdom the disciples didn't sign up for. It's a person. It's easy to walk away from an idea. It is far harder, and far more costly, to walk away from someone you actually know.

So what are the disciples protecting when they reject him? Not their safety, exactly, but themselves. The life they had already decided they could not lose. Jesus had been telling them from the beginning that following him meant losing their lives to find them. When that moment actually arrived, they discovered they would rather protect the life they had than trust the one offering something better.

And what gets revealed, in the end, is simply who they really are. Judas is sorry, but the object of his sorrow is himself, not Jesus. That's the quiet warning underneath this whole passage: most of us don't relate to Jesus primarily as a person we know and love. We relate to him as a set of beliefs, a moral code, a theology we agree with. And it is a lot easier to walk away from an idea than a friend.

Here's the good news buried inside this hard passage: Jesus remains committed to saving us even when we abandon him. That's the whole of the gospel in one line. He knew exactly what his closest friends were about to do, and he went to the cross for them anyway.

Most of us walk through life quietly convinced that we have what it takes — enough grit, enough good intentions, enough willpower — to make it through whatever comes. Until the test isn't multiple choice anymore, and we find out how little of that confidence was ever true.

In this week's message from Mark 14:26–42, Pastor Rob follows Jesus and his disciples out of the upper room and into the garden of Gethsemane, where two things are laid bare in the space of a single passage: something painfully true about us, and something wonderfully true about Jesus.

Peter, walking with Jesus toward the Mount of Olives, hears him say plainly: you will all fall away. Peter's answer is instant — even though they all fall away, I will not. He means it. He isn't lying. But Rob's point is that Peter's real problem was never his sincerity — it was that he trusted his own assessment of himself over Jesus's assessment of him. Told to watch and pray in the garden a little while later, Peter falls asleep instead. Not because he didn't understand what Jesus asked of him, but because he didn't think he needed it.

That's the weakness Jesus exposes — the quiet confidence we all carry that says I'm enough, I'll figure it out, this isn't that big of a deal. And then Jesus does the second, larger thing this passage is about: he embraces the cup we deserve. Praying Abba, Father… not what I will, but what you will, Jesus takes on the cup of God's wrath against sin — asking three times for another way, and met three times with the Father's silence. There was no other way. So he drank it, to the very last drop, so we wouldn't have to.

If this message finds you in a season of quietly editing your own story — or if you already know the parts you'd rather leave unnamed — we hope it feels less like exposure and more like an invitation. Bring your real story with you this Sunday. We gather at 10:00 AM at the Daniel Island Recreation Center — 160 Fairbanks Drive, Charleston, SC.

Listen to the full sermon on Podbean, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts — search Point Hope Presbyterian Church. You can also find it on our website and YouTube channel.

There's a room in this week's passage where everything else stops. Jerusalem is packed with pilgrims, lambs are being sacrificed across the city, and in the middle of all that noise, Mark's Gospel zooms in on one small upper room — one table, one loaf, one cup, thirteen men. And in that room, a question surfaces that none of us really want to ask out loud.

In this week's message from Mark 14:12–25, Pastor Rob walks through the Passover meal Jesus shares with his disciples the night before the cross — the same meal that would become the Lord's Supper. As they eat, Jesus says plainly that one of them will betray him. And instead of pointing fingers, every disciple at the table asks the same haunting question: "Is it I?"

Rob's point is that this small, quiet scene is actually the story that makes sense of our story. It's deeply personal — this was never a meal about logistics and to-do lists, it was a meal about people, because God himself is personal. It's darker than we want to admit — the betrayal doesn't come from outside the room, it comes from within it, from people who loved Jesus and still failed him, which is a truer picture of the human heart than we'd like to admit. And it's brighter than we can imagine — because Jesus doesn't respond to the darkness with condemnation. He takes bread, breaks it, and says, "take, and eat," reaching all the way back to the garden where those same words once unraveled the world, and redeeming them. This time, what's taken and eaten isn't ruin. It's rescue.

If this message finds you in a season of quietly editing your own story — or if you already know the parts you'd rather leave unnamed, then we hope it feels less like exposure and more like an invitation.

🎧 Listen to the full sermon on Podbean, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts — search Point Hope Presbyterian Church. You can also find it on our website.

In this week's message from Mark 14:1–11, Pastor Rob steps into the moment things finally boil over. Two days before Passover, the chief priests and scribes are plotting to kill Jesus. At a dinner in Bethany, a woman breaks open an alabaster flask of costly perfume and pours it over his head, an act of worship worth more than 300 days' wages, and the dinner guests turn on her indignantly. Judas, one of the twelve, slips away to sell Jesus out for money. Four groups of people. Four visceral reactions. And Rob's point is not that these people are strangers to us. They're religious insiders, some of Jesus' closest company, which means this passage isn't really about the outsiders at all.

Here's the searching truth underneath it: Simon the leper and the woman with the perfume had appraised Jesus and found him worth everything they had. The chief priests, the indignant guests, and Judas had appraised him too, and decided he was worth nothing. There's no neutral ground in this passage. Crown him or kill him. Those are the only two postures on offer.

But Rob pushes further, because most of us don't recognize ourselves in either camp. We're not plotting against Jesus. We're also not pouring out everything we have on him. We've found a third way to live: comfortable indifference. Not running toward him, not running away. Not wrestling with him, not delighting in him either. He's just not really in the picture. And here's the uncomfortable logic Rob names directly: the fact that you don't want Jesus out of your life doesn't mean you've actually crowned him with it. The absence of hatred isn't the same as love.

Because here's the deeper truth this passage keeps circling: the opposite of love was never hate. It's indifference.

So what do you do with that, once you see it? Rob is careful here. Guilt can't make Jesus more beautiful to your heart. Shame can't do it. Pressure can't do it. There's only one thing that can, and it's the gospel itself, the reason Jesus was even in that house in Bethany to begin with, days away from laying down his own life for the very people who couldn't yet see his worth.

Takeaways to carry into your week:

If this message meets you in a season of quiet distance from Jesus, we hope it feels less like an accusation and more like an invitation. Bring whatever you're carrying with you this Sunday. We gather at 10:00 AM at the Daniel Island Recreation Center — 160 Fairbanks Drive, Charleston, SC.

Listen to the full sermon on Podbean, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts — search Point Hope Presbyterian Church. You can also find it on our website and YouTube channel.

Every one of us is chasing something we'd call the good life. Full. Secure. Meaningful. Lasting. We may not use those words, but we're building toward it every day — and if you scratch beneath that vision, you'll find the same thing underneath it every time: ourselves at the center.

In this week's message from Mark 13:24–37, Pastor Rob closes out three weeks in one of the most challenging chapters in the Gospel of Mark — and arrives somewhere unexpectedly tender. Jesus has just walked his disciples through loss after loss: homes abandoned, the temple in ruins, a city scattered. And then, in the middle of all that collapse, he does something surprising. He doesn't merely warn them. He shows them himself — coming in glory so bright that, by comparison, the sun and moon go dim.

This isn't a science lesson or a weather forecast. It's an invitation. Jesus is telling a story meant to capture hearts, not just convey information.

If this message meets you in a season of chasing something that keeps disappointing you, share it with someone who might need to hear it too. And we'd love for you to bring whatever you're carrying with you this Sunday. We gather at 10:00 AM at the Daniel Island Recreation Center — 160 Fairbanks Drive, Charleston, SC.

Listen to the full sermon on Podbean, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts — search Point Hope Presbyterian Church. You can also find it on our website and YouTube channel.

Most of us have a plan for our lives. And most of us, at some point, have watched that plan quietly fall apart.

In this week's message from Mark 13:1–23, Pastor Rob continues through the Olivet Discourse — Jesus' longest teaching section in the Gospel of Mark — and arrives at something deeply personal. This is not a passage about predicting the future. It is a passage about what happens to us when the life we were counting on begins to collapse. And what we do in those moments says everything about where our hearts have actually been resting.

Takeaways to carry into your week:

If this message meets you in a season of pressure, share it with someone who might need it. And if you are carrying something heavy right now, we would love for you to bring it on Sunday. We gather at 10:00 AM at the Daniel Island Recreation Center — 160 Fairbanks Drive, Charleston, SC.

Listen to the full sermon on Podbean, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts — search Point Hope Presbyterian Church. You can also find it on our website and YouTube channel.

There is a quiet illusion most of us carry through daily life, the belief that if we plan carefully enough, invest wisely enough, and stay intentional enough, we can keep things stable. That the life we are building is mostly under our control.

Then something shakes.

In this week's message from Mark 13:1–13, Pastor Rob opens one of the most misunderstood passages in the Gospel of Mark, the Olivet Discourse, not as a roadmap for end-times speculation, but as something far more personal and far more urgent. Jesus, walking out of the temple with his disciples just after pointing to a widow who gave everything she had, turns their attention toward something they cannot yet see. The temple they are marveling at, all those massive stones and gleaming columns, will come down. Every stone thrown. Nothing left standing.

It is a conversation ender. And it is meant to be.

Because Jesus is not just talking about a building. He is talking about everything we quietly treat as permanent. Our plans. Our futures. The assumptions we carry that we have never even named. He is asking his disciples, and he is asking us: what are you actually building your life on?

There is a difference between knowing about someone and truly knowing them. It is the difference between reading a biography and sitting across the table from a friend. And according to Jesus, that difference is everything.

In this week's message from Mark 12:28–44, Pastor Rob Hamby opens in the tension of Jerusalem — where the religious experts of Jesus' day could recite the greatest commandment word for word and still be told, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." Not far. But not in.

It is a quiet, unsettling phrase — and Rob doesn't let it pass too quickly. Because the scribes didn't miss the kingdom for lack of information. They missed it because somewhere along the way, they stopped seeking. They stopped asking. They assumed they had arrived, and in that assumption, they stopped growing close to the King himself.

This is a sermon that asks us to close the gap — not between our beliefs and our behavior, but between our knowledge of Jesus and our nearness to him. The community around us is not starving for more information. They are starving to be seen, heard, loved, and pursued. And if we know the King — if we truly know and love him — that is exactly what we will do.

Takeaways to carry into your week: