How to return to God.
I. The first act of the awakened soul is usually an act of prayer, and it is most natural, and indeed most proper, that it should be so. The very act of expressing our need has a tendency both to bring about clearer views of what it is that we need, and to intensify our desire. Inward silence and reserve tend to benumb the faculties and to check the rising desires of the soul, when the outpouring of earnest supplication seems to stir us to our inmost depths.
II. Notice the urgency of this utterance, which God's love puts as it were in our mouths. There is only one kind of prayer that is at all appropriate in the lips of an awakened sinner, who finds himself without God in the world, but who desires to arise and go to His Father: and that is the urgent, specific entreaty for present forgiveness and salvation.
III. The divinely suggested utterance of our text is not only an urgent prayer, but it is also the expression of a distinct change in our moral attitude towards God. It marks the end of the life of aversion from God, and the beginning of a true conversion to God. "Take with you words" says the voice of Heavenly Love, "and turn unto the Lord." Let there be a distinct reversal of your former attitude of independence and alienation.
IV. When thus with all our hearts we truly seek Him, it will not be long before we become aware of something that seems at first to rise like a barrier between Him and us, shutting us off from all contact with Him. What about our sins? This experience is evidently foreseen in our text, where we have a most definite and specific request for an immediate and most necessary benefit. There stands the barrier, and nothing can be done until it is removed; and so the Father's love bids us pray, "Take away all iniquity."
When this fatal barrier is removed, then is the way clear and open to the Father's house; and may we not say into the Father's arms? "Receive us graciously." We need not fear going home to God. Their are no taunts on His lips, no frown on His brow; only infinite tenderness in His heart. He is too great to be otherwise than gracious; He has done too much to open up the new and living way not to be ready to welcome us home when at length we do come.
W. Hay Aitken, The Mission Pulpit,No. 72.
References: Hosea 14:1; Hosea 14:2. W. Aitken, The Love of the Father,p. 113.Hosea 14:1-3. G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p. 162.