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.

The gracious invitation of our text follows, 'I am the Lord, I change
not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.' Threatenings, and the
execution of these in acts of judgment, are no indication of a change in
the loving heart of God; and because it is the same, however we have
sinned against it and departed from it, there is ever an invitation and
a welcome. We may depart from Him, but He never departs from us. Nor
does He wait for us to originate the movement of ret