Somehow I made it all this distance without ever reading Abraham Kuyper’s original lecture on sphere sovereignty. That deficiency I have now corrected and, having just completed it, there is nothing I want to do so much as stand here on my office chair and sing a hymn.
Here is one gem is that is as relevant today as the day he wrote it.
“In any successful attack on freedom the state can only be an accomplice. The chief culprit is the citizen who forgets his duty, wastes away his strength in the sleep of sin and sensual pleasure, and so loses the power of his own initiative” (“Sphere Sovereignty,” Abraham Kuyper).
The American economy today is nothing so much as a long series of bank heists and carjackings, and as pleasant as it would be to blame it all on Obama, that poor guy is nothing more than the driver of the getaway car. The one waving the gun in the teller’s face is the American public, the same one that every greasy politician professes to have so much faith in.
So unless we have a reformation/revival like the Dutch had in the first part of the 19th century, we are truly done for. Without the Spirit of God animating the people, sphere sovereignty is nothing but a flow chart with boxes and lines for theologians to argue about. With the Spirit of God, and with any luck, we should be able to cover the floor with busted wineskins.