FYI...periodic notes from Dr. Scott
Dr. Scott A. Lemenager
Special Assistant to the President & CEO
Evangelical Church Alliance
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7 Signs Someone May Be Suicidal
Death and Dying Summer 2020
Family Caregiver Alliance
Navigating the Grief Wheel
2020 Annual Conference
Putting Affairs in Order Before Death
Signs of Dying
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Words of Wisdom
The links to the left of this column are handouts and a PowerPoint presentation that were made for the Annual ECA Conference in 2020. Please feel free to use them and let me know what you think about the subject of "Death and Dying" that we all face in life and ministry. You will also see the sermon and lyrics from our Annual Conference of 2021.
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You can support the ECA through Amazon Smile if you shop Amazon. Visit AmazonSmile and type in Evangelical Church Alliance and then you will help us.
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What is the "New Reality?"
Violence is in the news because most people feed on the ever-present evil around us. As someone has said, "We are not thinking with our eyes instead of our minds." If you are able to monitor your screen time, what would it say? Violence rules and reigns! I pray sincerely that many ECA ministers will covenant with God to keep their focus on the things of God.
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It's one thing to go through a crisis grandly, yet quite another to go through every day glorifying God when there is no witness, no limelight, and no one paying even the remotest attention to us. The true test of a saint's life is not success but faithfulness. Oswald Chambers
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Martin Llyod-Jones said
The business of the gospel is to bring people to God. Not to fill churches! Not to have good statistics! But to reconcile men to God--to save them from the wrath to come.
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I read this recently.
"Pray like Nehemiah, Obey like Damiel, Lead like Moses, Build like Noah, Fight like David, Serve like Martha, Believe like Mary, Educate like Paul, Protect like Peter, and Love like Jesus!"
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"I will not violate the teaching of the text in order to somehow sound more appropriate for the culture." Voddie Baucham
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Steven Lawson is noted for saying, "The four Old Testament accounts that are most often scoffed at by unbelievers: 1) Real Adam and Eve, 2) Noah and the worldwide flood, 3) Sodom and Gomorrah, 4) Jonah and the fish...Jesus verbally affirmed all four."
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Last week I read from Owen Strachan the "Pulpits tomorrow will feature all sorts of messages: moralism, ritualism, communal betterism, prosperity, self-help. But only in sound pulpits will ring out the biblical doctrines of depravity, hell, blood atonement, regeneration, sovereign grace, eternal life. Let them ring!"
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Near the end of his life, Francis Shaeffer wrote "Here is the great evangelical disaster--the failure of the evangelical world to stand for truth as truth. We must not allow the Bible to be weakened by any compromise in its authority. No matter how subtle the means. This is especially so when those doing this call themselves 'Evangelical.' When we stand before Jesus Christ, we will find that it has been the weakness and accommodation of the Evangelical group on the issues of the day that has been largely responsible for the loss of the Christian influence."
Brothers and sisters, hold fast to the truth!
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Pastor John MacArthur has said that the greatest act of terrorism perpetrated against this nation was committed by the Supreme Court. Roe v. Wade
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RC Sproul has said,
"The tentacle of theology invades every area of life. In fact, true Christians should think about everything theologically because everything has theological significance. God creates the universe, he is the sovereign ruler over all things, then all things find their meaning and significance as they are related to Him." "There are no brute facts, there are no mute facts because every fact is tied to its creator so that meaning and significance are in relationship to God. A Christian worldview is shaped by a Christian's God view."
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I have a number of great thoughts from C.H. Spurgeon
"Doctrines in the head, without holiness in the life, are of no service." "If your theology doesn't change your behavior, it will never change your destiny." "He who does not long to know more of Christ knows nothing of him yet." "I may all the doctrines of the Bible, but unless I know Christ, there is not one of them that can save me." "There is no attribute of God more comforting to his children than the doctrine of Divine Sovereignty." "We shall grow in grace, but we shall never be more completely pardoned than when we first believed."
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Josh Buice has said
"Faithful preaching will be boring to unbelievers. Faithful singing will be unimpressive to unbelievers. Faithful praying will be pointless to unbelievers. Faithful giving will be illogical to unbelievers. Faithful worship will not entertain unbelievers. We need faithful churches."
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Church history has repeatedly and clearly proven one thing: once the highest view of scripture is abandoned by any theologian, group, denomination, or church; the downhill slide in both, theology and practice, is inevitable.
Dr. James White (Theologian)
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All people are biased
When you present the Gospel and defend it you might find that many people have an "inner Skeptic's dial." This dial is turned way up against biblical Christianity but turned way down when it comes to their views. Watch for the absurd, as the universe sprang into existence out of nothing (ex nihilo, nihil fit). Another is the application of mathematics to all phenomena is a coincidence rather than the result of divine planning.
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Faith is not an abstract hope about the future absent of reality, a subjective feeling divorced from truth, a leap in the dark, the power of positive thinking, nor a trick of the mind. True faith is only present when it leads to trust. All people everywhere have faith in the fundamental principles of life. Remember Hebrews 11:6 that without faith it is impossible to please God.
