The Home-Coming

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jul 28, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 29.

There are few joys greater than that of the forgiveness that comes after “owning up.” And there is no torture worse than that which comes from a conscious sin, committed in rebellion against God’s laws and God’s love, which is held on to and unconfessed. We may live in either of these conditions, as we will,—heaven or hell; and every one lives in one or the other state, tho he may not yet realize it. The more that one has experienced of the joy of living in conscious fellowship with God, the keener is the agony of conscious and self-willed separation from God. A man who, as the rule of his life, was so true to God that his heart was said to be perfect, or complete, before God, because of this very record and privilege felt the tortures of deliberate and unconfessed sin so keenly that he cried out,

“When I kept silence, my bones wasted away Through my groaning all the day long. For day and night Thy hand was heavy upon me: My moisture was changed as with the drought of summer.”

And when he had confessed his sin and had been restored to his place before God, he poured forth, in that same thirty-second psalm, a song of joy and thanksgiving that has never stopped sounding through the ages, and that never will stop while sinners leave their sin to return to an all-forgiving Father. Therefore “for this let every one that is godly pray unto Thee in a time when Thou mayest be found.”—S. S. Times.