Coming Back

“I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely: for mine anger is turned away from him.” — Hosea 14:4 (KJV)

Moody’s last chapter is for people who have drifted away from God. The old word for it is “backsliding”. Perhaps you once felt close to God, prayed and read your Bible, and loved going to church, but now it feels distant. Moody has good news for you.

He points out something important from the prophet Jeremiah: God never left them; they left him. God asks, “What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me?” Moody asks his readers the same: has God changed? “Men are apt to think that God has changed; but the fault is with them.”

Jeremiah also uses a picture of “broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” A cistern was a tank for storing water. God is “the fountain of living waters”, but his people dug their own leaky tanks instead. Moody says the world’s pleasures, money and popularity are like that. They cannot satisfy someone who has tasted God.

He gives a slightly cheeky example. He used to tell young women, “My friend, you think more of your ear-rings than of the Lord.” They would deny it. Then he would ask: if you lost one earring, wouldn’t you be upset and go looking for it? They admitted they would. But they had drifted from God without it troubling them at all.

Today it might be our phones, or a game, or a sports team. What would you search for if you lost it? And are you searching for God like that?

Moody says God pleads with backsliders like a parent longing for a child who has gone away and never writes home. He quotes a verse that he says has brought back more wanderers than any other: “know therefore and see that it is an evil thing and bitter, that thou hast forsaken the LORD thy God.” Moody says he has seen hundreds come back, and every one admitted that leaving God had been bitter.

But the verse at the top of this chapter is God’s promise: “I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely.” You don’t have to earn your way back. You only have to turn round, like the prodigal son, and come home.

Moody died in 1899, in the same room in Northfield where he had been born. Some months before, he had said:

“Some day you will read in the papers that D. L. Moody, of East Northfield, is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now.”

That is the way to God: not through being good enough, but through Jesus, who gives new life that even death can’t end. Whether you are coming to him for the first time or coming back after drifting away, the door is open.

One thing to do this week: if you have drifted from God, come back this week. Read Luke 15:11–24, and then tell God honestly where you have been. If you are close to God, pray for one friend who has drifted, and think of one way to show them you care.