I. Observe carefully what it is which God here requires from the scornful and the simple. He prescribes none of those lofty performances which in other parts of Scripture are distinctly affirmed to lie far beyond men's power; it only asks that they would "turn at God's reproof;" and it manifestly assumes that they might turn if they would. God's call upon you is nicely adapted to the energies you actually possess. It is not a call to change your heart, and root out from the soul the ingrained love of evil; but it is a call that you reform your practice, and purge your life of its grosser evils. This you can do. We infer from this passage that every man who has a wish to repent has an instant task in which he is bound to engage: the task of ceasing to do evil and striving to do well; and therefore we set him to the task.
II. Consider the promise which God makes in the text, which evidently applies to those only who "turn at His reproof." Who can turn at God's reproof without the help of God's Spirit? And yet, according to our text, our turning is the condition of our obtaining the Spirit, so that our gaining what we need seems to take for granted that we have it already. There is undoubtedly something here that looks like contradiction, and the whole business of practical religion is involved in the removal of the difficulty. The unconverted man will tell us that, since he has not the Spirit, it is useless for him to make any effort to pray, or even to attempt a reformation of his practice. In all such objections there is a strange forgetfulness that the men whom the Bible addresses are already under the dispensation of the Spirit, not in the state of unredeemed creatures, but members for the most part of the visible Church. We cannot treat any such as beings in whom there are no actings of the Spirit of God. You may make an excuse of your helplessness; you may make an excuse of God's election; you may plead that the act of prayer presupposes that for which you are to pray, and the act of labour that for which you are to toil: but there is sufficient reason why the promises of the text have not been made part of your experience if you have failed to do that which, through the strength already communicated, you might have done: failed to obey the oft-repeated exhortation of the Lord, "Turn you at My reproof."
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 1539.
Reference: Proverbs 1:23. W. Arnot, Laws from Heaven,1st series, p. 72.