future.  So this is the confidence with which we should cheer ourselves when we look upon the past, and when we anticipate the future.  The sins that have been in our past have deserved that we should have been swept away, but we are here still.  Why are we?  Why do we yet live?  Because we have to do with an unchanging love, with a faithfulness that never departs from its word, with a purpose of blessing that will not be turned aside.  So let us look back with this thought and be thankful; let us look forward with it and be of good cheer.  Trust yourself, weak and sinful as you are, to that unchanging love.  The future will have in it faults and failures, sins and shortcomings, but rise from yourself to God.  Look beyond the light and shade of your own characters, or of earthly events to the central light, where there is no glimmering twilight, no night, ’no variableness nor shadow of turning.’  Let us live in God, and be strong in hope.  Forward, not backward, let us look and strive; so our souls, fixed and steadied by faith in Him, will become in a manner partakers of His unchangeableness; and we too in our degree will be able to say, ’The Lord is at my side; I shall not be moved.’

A DIALOGUE WITH GOD

     ’Return unto Me, and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of
     Hosts.  But ye say, Wherein shall we return?’—­MALACHI iii. 7
     (R.V.).

In previous sermons we have considered God’s indictment of man’s sin met by man’s plea of ‘not guilty,’ and God’s threatenings brushed aside by man’s question.  Here we have the climax of self-revealing and patient love in God’s wooing voice to draw the wanderer back, met by man’s refusing answer.  These three divine utterances taken together cover the whole ground of His speech to us; and, alas! these three human utterances but too truly represent for the most part our answers to Him.

I. God’s invitation to His wandering child.

The gracious invitation of our text presupposes a state of departure.  The child who is tenderly recalled has first gone away.  There has been a breach of love.  Dependence has been unwelcome, and cast off with the vain hope of a larger freedom in the far-off land; and this is the true charge against us.  It is not so much individual acts of sin but the going away in heart and spirit from our Father God which describes the inmost essence of our true condition, and is itself the source of all our acts of sin.  Conscience confirms the description.  We know that we have departed from Him in mind, having wasted our thoughts on many things and not having had Him in the multitude of them in us.  We have departed from Him in heart, having squandered our love and dissipated our desires on many objects, and sought in the multiplicity of many pearls—­some of them only paste—­a substitute for the all-sufficient simplicity of the One of great price.  We have departed from Him in will, having reared up puny inclinations and fleeting passions against His calm and eternal purpose, and so bringing about the shock of a collision as destructive to us as when a torpedo-boat crashes in the dark against a battleship, and, cut in two, sinks.