JOWETT

APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

John Henry Jowett, Congregational divine, was born at Barnard Castle, Durham, in 1864, and educated at Edinburgh and Oxford universities.  In 1889 he was ordained to St. James’s Congregational Church, Newcastle-on-Tyne, and in 1895 was called to his present pastorate of Carr’s Lane Congregational Church, Birmingham, where he has taken rank among the leading preachers of Great Britain.  He is the author of several important books.

JOWETT

Born in 1864

APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM[1]

[Footnote 1:  Reprinted by permission of A.C.  Armstrong & Son.]

Rejoicing in hope.—­Romans xii., 12.

That is a characteristic expression of the fine, genial optimism of the Apostle Paul.  His eyes are always illumined.  The cheery tone is never absent from his speech.  The buoyant and springy movement of his life is never changed.  The light never dies out of his sky.  Even the gray firmament reveals more hopeful tints, and becomes significant of evolving glory.  The apostle is an optimist, “rejoicing in hope,” a child of light wearing the “armor of light,” “walking in the light” even as Christ is in the light.

This apostolic optimism was not a thin and fleeting sentiment begotten of a cloudless summer day.  It was not the creation of a season; it was the permanent pose of the spirit.  Even when beset with circumstances which to the world would spell defeat, the apostle moved with the mien of a conqueror.  He never lost the kingly posture.  He was disturbed by no timidity about ultimate issues.  He fought and labored in the spirit of certain triumph.  “We are always confident.”  “We are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.”  “Thanks be unto God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

This apostolic optimism was not born of sluggish thinking, or of idle and shallow observation.  I am very grateful that the counsel of my text lifts its chaste and cheery flame in the twelfth chapter of an epistle of which the first chapter contains as dark and searching an indictment of our nature as the mind of man has ever drawn.  Let me rehearse the appalling catalog that the radiance of the apostle’s optimism may appear the more abounding:  “Senseless hearts,” “fools,” “uncleanness,” “vile passions,” “reprobate minds,” “unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, whisperers, backbiters, hateful to God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil things, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, unmerciful.”  With fearless severity the apostle leads us through the black realms of midnight and eclipse.  And yet in the subsequent reaches of the great argument, of which these dark