Begotten Again — Unto a Living Hope

✦ The Song Leaps

Jowett marvels at something the early disciples did without thinking: they broke into doxology. Not planned worship. Not scheduled praise. Not the careful, measured response of the well-trained religious mind. A song that leapt — spontaneous, irresistible, uncalculated — the moment the grace of God came into view around a winding in the road.

The glory of grace strikes the chords of their hearts into music. Jowett sees the soul as an instrument — strung and tuned and waiting. And when the grace of God appears — around a corner, in a verse, in a morning before dawn — it strikes the chords. The music is not manufactured. It is struck. The way a hammer strikes a bell. The way light strikes a prism. The grace arrives — and the song follows. Not because the soul decided to sing. Because the soul could not help it. 🙏

✦ Before Growth — Birth

Jowett draws the distinction the world keeps missing. The world emphasizes process — culture, training, discipline, education, evolution. Improvement through effort. Progress through practice. Growth. And Christianity speaks of growth too — putting on, perfecting, increasing. The journal has recorded the growth for sixty-nine mornings.

But Jowett says: before the growth, there must be the birth. You can train a dead thing forever and it will not grow. You can educate a stone and it will not learn. You can discipline a corpse and it will not improve. The life must come first. And the life comes not from training but from being begotten again — born a second time, by the abundant mercy of God, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

The emphasis is not on what the soul does. The emphasis is on what God did. He begat. He gave the birth. He supplied the life. And everything that follows — the growth, the training, the increasing, the perfecting — is the unfolding of a life that He planted. 🙏

✦ A Wealth of Unveiled Glories

Jowett asks the question that opens the rest of the passage: into what manner of life? The birth has happened. The life has been given. But what kind of life is it? What are its possibilities? What is the spaciousness — Jowett's word, beautiful in its suggestion of room, of breadth, of open sky — of its prospects?

And the answer — the apostolic doxology — does not give a list. It gives a landscape. The doxology winds its way — like a path through mountains — among a wealth of unveiled glories. Not a summary. Not a formula. A journey through glory after glory, each one unveiled as the path turns. The life we are begotten into is not narrow. It is not confined. It is spacious — and the glories are unveiled one by one, morning by morning, entry by entry. 🙏

✦ Living and Life-Creating

Jowett takes the word living and refuses to let it pass as decoration. A living hope is not merely a hope that exists. It is a hope affluent in life. Rich with life. Overflowing with life. Generating life in everything it touches.

And Jowett names the contrast: there are dead hopes. Inoperative hopes. Hopes that sit on a shelf and do nothing — they generate no energy, impart no power, move no mill. The hope that says maybe things will get better — that is an inoperative hope. The hope that says I wish God would help — that is an ineffective hope. They are hopes in name only.

But the hope of the redeemed — the hope born from the resurrection of Jesus Christ — is living and life-creating. It does not sit. It operates. It does not wish. It stimulates. It does not wait passively for something to change. It creates life in the one who holds it. The hope itself is the power. The hope itself is the energy. The hope itself turns the mill. 🙏

✦ Superabundant — Exuberant — Overflowing

Jowett stacks the Bible's uses of the word living — and each one pulses with the same energy. Living Bread — not stale, not stored, not yesterday's provision. Bread that is alive today, nourishing today, sufficient today. Living Water — not stagnant, not collected, not sitting in a cistern. Water that flows, that moves, that never runs out. Living Fountains — not a well that must be pumped but a spring that rises on its own, from a source beneath the surface, unstoppable. The Living God — not a concept, not a doctrine, not a theological category. A God who is alive — present, active, moving, speaking, creating, sustaining, comforting.

And Jowett gathers the suggestion of them all into three words: superabundant life. Exuberant energy. Overflowing vitality. Not just enough. Not just sufficient. Overflowing. The bounty that is pressed down, shaken together, and running over. The river that rises until it cannot be crossed. The mercy that is new — not recycled, not rationed — new every morning. 🙏

✦ The Hope That Feeds the Will

Jowett closes with the practical effect of the living hope — and it is not a feeling. It is not an emotion. It feeds the will. The hope vivifies the will — gives it life, gives it energy, gives it the power to act. And the will that has been fed by living hope becomes steadfast and unmovable.

This is the will that Aquinas described — the will given readily to the service of God. This is the will that rises before dawn. The will that stays when the morning is dry and bare. The will that follows wherever He leads. And that will is not self-generated. It is fed. By the living hope. By the superabundant life. By the exuberant energy that flows from the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

Into all this powerful hope are we begotten again. Jowett ends where Peter began — with the birth. The abundant mercy of God begat us into this. Not into a dead religion. Not into an inoperative hope. Not into a mill without power. Into a living, life-creating, will-feeding, steadfast-making, overflowing hope. And the song that leapt to the lips of the early disciples — blessed be the God and Father — is the same song that leaps to the lips of every soul who has been born into it. 🙏