Keen Thoughts, Grand Words

Abraham Kuyper had the God-given ability to think with exceptional acumen on a vast range of issues. But unlike some great thinkers, he also possessed the ability to speak and write with great clarity and force. Consider a small selection of his insightful comments.

• The redeemed soul possesses all things in Christ. He is a complete Savior. He lacks nothing. Having Him we are saved to the uttermost; without Him we are utterly lost and undone.
• Do not bury our glorious orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of a spurious conservatism.
• All those who consider themselves saved because they have holy emotions, or because they think themselves less sinful, and profess to make progress in sanctification—all these, however dissimilar they may be in all other things, have this in common, that they insist on being counted according to their own declaration, and not according to what God counts them to be.
• The sovereignty which reposes in an earthly king is only borrowed, derived, and laid upon him; but the sovereignty of the Lord our God is the source and fountainhead of all authority and of all binding force.
• We have gratefully to receive from the hand of God the institution of the state with its magistrates as a means of preservation. . . On the other hand . . . by virtue of our natural impulse, we must ever watch against the danger which lurks for our personal liberty in the power of the state.
• Politicophobia is not Calvinistic, is not Christian, is not ethical.
• One desire has been the ruling passion of my life. One high motive has acted like a spur upon my mind and soul. . . It is this: That in spite of all worldly opposition, God’s holy ordinances shall be established again in the home, in the school and in the state for the good of the people; to carve as it were into the conscience of the nation the ordinances of the Lord, to which Bible and Creation bear witness, until the nation pays homage again to God.