I. Note the awaking or arising of the soul out of sheer worldliness into a condition of godliness. A life of worldliness is unmanly, for it falls short of that for which man's capacities plainly indicate that he was born. It is undutiful, for it withholds from the Father of our spirits the trust and love and gratitude we owe to Him It is perilous, for even if we make no account of the direct retributions of the great day of judgment, the spirit of the worldly man is being trained and moulded into a character which will be lasting as his being, and will render him for ever unfit for the society of God and His Holy One.
II. I will arise out of this condition of estrangement, and seek reconciliation with my Father. God is the Creator, we are His creatures. He is the King, we are His subjects. But above all He is the Father, we are His children. It is no longer a philosophic and wild speculation, but the most certain and of practical truths, that God and man are Father and child. But it is likewise a truth certified by many signs, and above all, by our own consciousness, that the tie between this Father and child has been somehow broken. That we do not trust, that we do not love, that we do not obey, we know too well. We are in a state of estrangement from our Father, and such a state must ever be both criminal and miserable. Its consequences, if not averted by a timely healing of the breach, must be eternally disastrous. Say, with the Son in the parable, "I have sinned." The Father whom you have wronged so grievously, whose deep displeasure you have incurred, has not ceased to love you. He sees the misery to which you have reduced yourselves; He waits and watches for the first sign of your awaking to a sense of your sin, and He will welcome you back to His home.
J. Kennedy, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ix., p. 289.