These excellent quotes are just too big for Twitter.
The Church has been trying to preach morality and ethics without the Gospel as a basis; it has been preaching morality without godliness; and it simply does not work. It never has done, and it never will. And the result is that the Church, having abandoned her real task, has left humanity more or less to its own devices.
Martin Lloyd-Jones in Preaching and Preachers
_____
On one occasion I had tea with Martin Lloyd-Jones in Ealing, London, and decided to ask him a question that concerned me. “Dr. Lloyd-Jones,” I said, “how can I tell whether I am preaching in the energy of the flesh or in the power of the Spirit?” “That is very easy,” Lloyd-Jones replied, as I shriveled. “If you are preaching in the energy of the flesh, you will feel exalted and lifted up. If you are preaching in the power of the Spirit, you will feel awe and humility.”
Edmund Clowney in Church Planter by Darrin Patrick
_____
. . . together with every race, whites are killing their babies and wallowing in their porn and taking their illegal drugs and leaving their wives and having babies without marriage. The difference is that when you develop patterns of sin in the majority race, they have no racial connotation. Since majority people don’t think of themselves in terms of race, none of our dysfunctions is viewed as a racial dysfunction. When you are the majority ethnicity, nothing you do is ethnic. It’s just the way it’s done. When you are a minority, everything you do has color.
John Piper in Bloodlines
______
Related to preaching the gospel as a different role than counseling in ministry:
What men and women need is to be brought to ‘a knowledge of the truth’; and if this is not done you are simply palliating symptoms, and patching up the problem for the time being. In any case you are not carrying out the great mandate given to the Church and her ministers.
Martin Lloyd-Jones in Preaching and Preachers
