JOINING THE CHURCH

You have now been told very plainly that the Christian life is a life of prayer, a life of obedience, a life of love, a life of service, and a life whose aim is to be guided and inspired by the Word of God. Now, you boys and girls know whether it is the great ruling purpose of your heart to live such a life, and whether you are now, by the grace of God, endeavoring to live it. If you can, honestly, before God, say, "I am trying to live such a life by Divine help," then I have a message for you: He who is living such a life, by faith in Jesus, ought to become a member of his Church without delay.

Moses said unto Hobab: "We are journeying unto the place of which the Lord said, I will give it you: come thou with us, and we will do thee good: for the Lord hath spoken good concerning Israel. . . And it shall be, if thou go with us, yea, it shall be, that what goodness the Lord shall do unto us, the same will we do unto thee" (Num. 10:29-32). In the spirit of Moses we say unto you, join yourselves to the people of God, and we will do you good; for the Lord hath spoken good concerning his Church.

I. Let me give some reasons why you should join the Church:

1. In doing so, you enter an institution that has the highest standard of living of any institution in the world. All clubs and lodges have some kind of standard of attainment; but the Christian Church has God's own, and the standard is perfection. Holiness is the aim of the Church and of every true member of it. It will do you good to be a member of an organization with such an exalted ideal ever before it.

2. There you will find the helpful influence of the best example and noblest companionship. We are always influenced, more or less, by our associations. It is often an unconscious influence, hut it is very real. How important, then, that we should have good companions! And we will find them in the Church if anywhere in the world. Joshua was head and shoulders above his contemporaries in his moral character. Why? Because he associated with Moses, the mightiest man of God that ever walked the earth, the one man with whom God talked face to face as man talketh with his friend, and whose very face so shone with Divine glory that men could not look upon it (Ex. 33: II, and 34:2935). Is it any wonder that Joshua, associating intimately with such a man, became, himself, great.

Just before Garfield became President of the United States, he lectured on the importance of association and personal influence, before a body of schoolteachers. In his address he said: "I would rather sit on one end of a hewed log to study, if my old college president, Mark Hopkins, sat on the other end, than to study in the best building in the United States with an ordinary teacher." Now, all Christian boys and girls should come into the Church, and find their companionship there.

3.You will find the covenants and obligations of the Church a blessed means of grace to you. They are a wholesome stimulus and restraint for the young. When you join the Church, the world expects you to set it a wholesome example. That very expectation is a whip to constantly urge us Church members on to noble living, and is a blessing to us all.

Moreover, those who join the Church take a solemn vow to labor for its prosperity and for the glory of God, They obligate themselves to help make the audience on Sunday, and to help the Sunday-school and prayer-meeting, and to labor for the peace and prosperity and success of the Church in all its Christian efforts. This obligation is very wholesome to young converts. It gives them something to do, something definite and easily understood, and also something to be for God and the Church. The writer has been a member of the Church since childhood, and has been laboring for it ever since, first as leader of prayer-meetings and an officer in the Sabbath-school, then in the choir, then teacher, then preacher. That early service in the Church was of unspeakable value, helping, in no small degree, to hold me for Christ, and make me efficient in his Church. It will prove a blessed help to all.

4. When you join the Church, others take a covenant with God that they will watch over you, and pray for you, and help you to live the Christian life. Some Church members, I am sorry to say, forget these vows; but others do not forget them. They lovingly keep the young Church members in their eye, and pray for them, and watch over them with the tenderness of parents.

The famous temperance worker, Mary A. Woodbridge, was a member of my Church. At a time when she was fairly deluged with work, and Joseph Cook said she was doing enough work to tax the mental and physical resources of any three men in Ohio, she asked me for a list of the Church members, between three hundred and four hundred. I asked her what she wanted of them. She replied: "I want to call their names, individually, before God in prayer." In my pastorate in Allegheny, Pa., there was a deacon's wife and his sister that made more calls than I could, and watched over and prayed with, and prayed for, the Church members with a sleepless watchfulness and tender solicitude which was wondrously helpful. Dear young Christians, you can not afford to miss such helpful influences. Without them you may fall to rise no more.

5. God himself hath spoken good concerning his cause and his Church. He calls her his "Bride" and his "Body." He has said that, "as the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the Lord is round about his people." He says that he will guard them "as the apple of his eye;" and no power shall be able to pluck them out of his hand, and "the gates of hell shall not prevail against his Church." Wonderful promises to his Church! Join it, and then you will share these covenanted blessings. Did it ever occur to you that God cares for little else in this world but the interests of his Church and kingdom? Everything else perishes. Cities and empires, and languages and arts perish, and are lost from the sight and the thought of men. But the one thing that rides triumphant over the waves of time, forever increasing in glory, is the Church of God. "Come with us, and we will do thee good, for the Lord hath spoken good concerning Israel."

6. I think that even obedience to Christ demands that we join the Church. Jesus has given to us the sacraments -- baptism and the Lord's Supper. He says of the latter: "This do in remembrance of me." It is the Church member only who regards this command, which is as obligatory as the command to keep the Sabbath or to revere God's name. This request was made on the night before Jesus died for us; it comes with all the pathos of Gethsemane and the agony of Calvary. Who can willingly ignore it by refusing to become numbered with the people of God?

7. Loyalty and gratitude to Jesus and the Church demand that all who have given their hearts to Jesus should join his people in the most open and formal way. Jesus says: "Whosoever, therefore, shall confess me before men, him will I confess, also, before my Father who is in heaven." "But whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he shall come in his own glory, and of his Father's, and of the holy angels" (Mat. 12:31, and Luke 9:26).

How could any one show more their ingratitude to the Savior, and be more manifestly ashamed of him, than when skulking about among sinners, the enemies of Jesus, and refusing to stand up and be counted as one of the covenant and avowed followers of Christ?

Still further, gratitude to the Church should lead us to join it. It is the live Church of Jesus that builds houses of worship, and supports ministers and missionaries and evangelists, and keeps in operation the means of grace. And when these means have brought saving grace to us, shall we not gratefully and gladly join the Church and pass on the blessing to others? Surely nothing could be more noble and appropriate!

8. Our own safety demands that we confess Christ in this most public way by joining the Church. It always helps people to take a bold position, to commit themselves irrevocably. When Caesar and his soldiers landed on the inhospitable shores of Britain, they burned their ships. There was now nothing but the sea behind them and the wild forests and wilder men before them. They. now were sternly committed to their task. They had to conquer or perish. So should a young Christian commit himself irrevocably to the service of Jesus Christ. When Cæsar was conquering Gaul, he noticed great clouds of smoke rolling over the land from Helvetia (now called Switzerland). This was the cause of it: The Helvetians (Swiss) had learned about the rich plains of Gaul (France), and they had resolved, as a nation, to move down, out of their mountainous country, into the richer plains of Gaul; to take what they could carry with them, and to burn all the rest. So they set lire to cities and villages and homes and barns and fences and harvests, that there might be no temptation to return. That is the way the Christian pilgrim should set out for heaven. He should abandon forever the leeks and the garlic of the old life of Egyptian bondage of the world (Num. I 1:5), and enter the Church of Christ, and be committed as a child of God.

This is the only path of safety. Anything else is simply playing with religion, trying it a few days to see how it works. Religion never works when undertaken in that spirit. Come out from the world of sin, and commit yourself to Jesus and his Church, and keep as close to Jesus as you can, and be as efficient in his service as possible. Any other course simply invites failure, and makes it an ultimate certainty. On that awful night of Peter's failure and denial of Jesus, "Peter followed him afar off unto the high priest's palace, and went in and sat with the servants to see the end" (Mat. 26:58). He was out skulking among the enemies of Jesus. If Peter had kept close to the side of Jesus, close enough to have asked Jesus to lean upon him when he was faint from the cruel scourging, close enough to take his handkerchief and wipe the accursed spittle from Jesus' face, and the blood drops that trickled down from the crown of thorns, he would not have been guilty of cursing and swearing and denying his Lord, the dark sins that almost cost him his soul's salvation. O children, if you expect to follow Jesus at all, get into his Church, and keep as close to his side as possible. There is no other place of safety.

I have given reasons enough why you should all join the Church. Let us now ask:

II. When you should join the Church. I must say plainly, offer yourself to the Church at once, as soon as you have the witness of the Spirit and Scriptural evidence that you are a child of God. On the day of Pentecost, three thousand were converted in the morning, men, women, and children, and they joined the Church before night. I am persuaded we shall never improve on this Scriptural method of promptness in receiving converts into the bosom of the Church.

"But," some one says, "you would not receive children into the Church, would you?" Certainly I would, and nobody more gladly. Who has a better right to the privileges of the Church, or more need of them, than the child convert? I think the officers of the Church and Christian parents make no blunder so cruel and detrimental, and so fatal, as when they keep young children out of the Church, "to see if they will hold out."

If a farmer saw a lamb born in the bleak March weather, out on the hillside, would he leave it there until June "to see if it would hold out?" No farmer, who was not a fool, would do that with a lamb worth ten cents. Yet precisely that is what is done with many child Christians. Instead of being taken into the fold of Christ, and nursed and nourished, they are left out on the devil's common, among the wolves of sin, to see if they will hold out. The very time when they need the most care, they are the most neglected. O, cruel mistake! often, how fatal! During a series of meetings, a Christian mother came often to the writer and begged him to pray for her son, a young man twenty years old. It was her sad, anxious, parting request. Yet that son was converted when he was ten years old, and begged the privilege of joining the Church; but his mother refused. She wanted to see if he would hold out. And he didn't. Another earnest, prayerful mother made the same mistake with her boy. She wept and prayed over her mistake for thirty years, and died, at last, with her son still outside. The writer heard her say, one day, as the great tears rolled down her face: "I would give my right arm in a minute, to have it cut off, if I could have my boy back again where he was, and have the chance over again." O mothers, your child is a young convert only once; the wheels of time will never roll backward to bring you back your wasted opportunity.

Within a month, a pastor, formerly from Boston, told the writer that he was once summoned to the bedside of a dying Boston merchant, who told him the following: "When I was a boy ten years old, I was converted, and had a clear, unmistakable religious experience. But nobody thought of asking me or any other child, in those days, to join the Church. I was utterly neglected, and my light went out. My whole life has been wasted and wrecked. Now pray for me. I want to get back to that boyhood faith before I die." May God keep the pastors and Church officers and Christian parents and teachers from making this blunder, which is, oftentimes, little less than a crime against souls! And may God enable you, dear children, who have given your hearts to Jesus, or any other young converts, to humbly go to the Church and offer yourselves as candidates for membership!

III. What Church should you join? That is a question to be decided by your location and surroundings, and the providence of God and the Bible, and the promptings of the Spirit in answer to prayer. Study the Word, and pray and seek to know God's will, and then find your Church home, and enter it, and go to work for Jesus with all your heart.

The Church is a school. Who are in school? Postgraduate students in the university, college students, academy students, students in the high school, grammar school, primary school. And there is the little boy with his primer under his arm, just starting for school. To him, also, the school opens its door, and nobody has a better right to it than he. So nobody has a better right to the school of Christ than the convert just beginning to learn about Jesus.

The Church is a home. Who are in the home? There are the aged grandparents, white-haired and ready for heaven; there, too, are father and mother, and young men and maidens, and boys and girls; and there, too, is the little babe just born. And the whole household circles around the cradle, and nobody gets so much loving care as the little babe; for no one needs so much. So should it be in our Churches, and fortunate are the converted children who find such a Church home.

There is something defective in a piety that does not want to enter the Church school and learn about Jesus, or that does not want to enter the Church home, and become one of the family of Christ.

O, Church of the living God, Church of the prophets and apostles, and martyrs, and saints, Church of my sainted dead, "if I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I prefer not thee above my chief joy!"

QUESTIONS

1. What reasons can you give why converts should join the Church?
2. When should you join?
3. In what respect is the Church like a school?
4. How is it like a home?

Sing: "I love thy Kingdom, Lord."