Several times people have broken into the church. Staff members arriving to begin the morning’s work have found everything in confusion: papers scattered all over the floor, drawers to desks and filing cabinets open and ransacked, locks broken. Only rarely has anything valuable been missed. Presumably the nocturnal visitors have been greatly disappointed in what they found. Quite obviously this is the wrong way to get into church and the wrong way to get out of a church the best of what a church has to offer.

But where there are just a few people who entertain this wrong burglarizing idea about how to get into a church and yet come on in anyway — how many folks there are who have wrong ideas about how to get into a church and because of those wrong ideas are staying out.

There are people who think one must swallow a great glob of unbelievable and unexplainable dogma in order to get into church. They aren’t about to do that so they don’t come into the church. “Presbyterians have a very strong faith,” remarked a clergyman of another denomination. “It takes a mighty strong faith to believe all they are supposed to believe.” Some people have the idea that membership in the Presbyterian Church is granted only to those who can place their hands on a Bible and swear acceptance of and full agreement with the Apostle’s Creed, the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Catechisms. Nothing could be farther from fact.

Dogmas and doctrine have nothing to do with coming into a Presbyterian Church. The only entrance requirement is a sincere desire to take Jesus Christ as one’s only Lord and Savior. There was a doubter in the first twelve disciples, you will remember. Dogma and doctrine troubled Thomas. This disciple had his doubts, his uncertainties, but about this much he was sure: He loved Jesus and wanted to be with Him. So Jesus made him welcome in the fellowship of that first church.

So now, in the Presbyterian Church and in any Church of our Lord Jesus Christ that I know anything about, you are required to swallow no great mass of doctrine you can’t understand and so couldn’t intelligently say you believed. You are welcomed on your statement of love for Jesus Christ and desire to follow Him and learn of Him.

“You look into Christ’s life, into His influence; you look at the needs of the world; you see how the one meets the other; you look into your own life and see how Christ’s life meets yours; and you say, ‘I shall follow this teacher and leader.’ From that time you are a Christian. You may be a very poor one. A man who en1ists is a very poor soldier the first few months, but he is a soldier from the moment he enlists; and the moment a man takes Christ to be the center of his life, that man has become a Christian.” (Henry Drummond)

The boys who died in the uniform of their country, who’s memory, always sacred to us, is publicly acknowledged in this memorial season, in the beginning of their soldiering didn’t know all there was to be known of military tactics. That’s exactly why some of them died when and as they did. They didn’t know much about soldiering. They didn’t have time to learn. But this much they knew — they loved country, and home, and freedom. They believed in them. And so they became soldiers and gave their lives for what they loved and believed in.

Napoleon on St. Helena, meditating on the meaning of Christ and His Church said: “I do not understand that man. He must have been more than human. I used to be able to get people to die for me. I got hundreds of thousands of them, but I had to be there. Now here I am on this island, and I can’t get a man. But He (Christ) gets hundreds of thousands of the best men in the world to lay down their lives for Him every day.”

You don’t get into church by swallowing a lot of indigestible doctrine. Doctrine is just an attempt to state truth, and as Henry Drummond says, “the only use of truth is that it can do somebody some good.” When we take Christ as our teacher and leader, we join His Church, “enter His school as scholars, sit at His feet, and learn what we can: and by doing His will in the practical things of life, we shall know of this and that doctrine whether it be of God.” (H. Drummond) We take little by little, parts of the Apostle’s creed, the confession of faith — as their truth becomes understandable and applicable to our living.

To get into church you don’t have to swallow dogma — you just follow Christ. You see Him and your heart goes out to Him and you begin to live with Him as the center of your life.

There are some other people who have another wrong idea of how to get into church and this wrong idea is keeping them out: they think people ought to achieve perfection in order to get into church. One finds many shades of difference in this category of wrong thinking about church membership.

There’s the fellow who frankly states: “No, I won’t come into the church because I’m not good enough.  The church is for honest respectable, solid citizens. I’m not of that group. The church is no place for me.”

Then there is the critic who says: “I won’t join the church because the church is full of hypocrites, people who profess faith in a life of high moral rectitude, love, and unselfish service, and yet live a life of shoddy expediency, cruel hatred, and selfish grasping. I can’t see any difference in the quality of life of church members and those outside the church, with the single exception that I find more sincerity outside the church where folks don’t profess to live on a high level. I’m just as good as the rank and file of the church members. I don’t steal. I pay my honest debts.  I try to be good to my family. Why do I need the church?”

Then there’s the man who says: “Even though the church may not require absolute perfection for membership, my conscience won’t let me join the church and keep on doing some of the things I’m doing now. I don’t think what I’m doing is really so bad. These habits don’t hurt me or my family, but I don’t think a church member ought to have them. I’m not going to be a hypocrite, so I won’t come into the church!”

What’s to be said to anyone who is kept out of the church because he has the idea that near perfection is a prerequisite to church membership? Just this: there is nothing in the scriptures which sets up such a standard — not even the shred of an intimation that such is God’s will for determining who shall be admitted to His household of loving salvation.

When Peter preached with power on the day of Pentecost and the first great ingathering of church members took place, what was the requirement for membership? A good name and reputation among one’s neighbors?  An affidavit to an unsullied business and social record?  A dozen character references? No. Listen. When Peter preached the gospel of Jesus Christ, telling the good news of God’s love for His children and His beginning a new day and opening up a new way for men to enter into a saving relationship with Him, the listeners to that sermon began to ask: “What must we do? What must we do?” Here is Peter’s famous answer – which has been the basis of church membership requirement ever since: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.”

Repent. What does that mean? Why, confess your sins, acknowledge that you aren’t perfect. Own up to what you’ve done that’s wrong. Turn from it. And following the example of Christ and accepting the new power to a new and better life which His Holy Spirit will bring into your being, walk in newness of life.

Why , according to St. Peter, the church is for sinners only. No one else need apply. A man can’t get in unless he openly, publicly, humbles himself and admits he’s not perfect but stands in desperate need of a savior from sin. If a man is not a sinner, then he doesn’t need the church. The church has no claim on him. He doesn’t need Christ. For Christ died for sinners. But the truth is that all have sinned and come short of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. The cross condemns all men of sin that it may save all those who repent of sin.

The church is the only organization in all the world which meets regularly to confess the sins of self and society and to seek through Christ a higher life for all. The church is the only organization which confesses not only sins of transgression, but also sins of omissions.  The church is the only organization in the world which keeps on saying week after week, year after year, century after century, “We have done those things we ought not to have done, we have left undone those things we ought to have done. O Lord, have mercy upon us sinners.” Only a member of this society of sinners could sincerely pray:

I never cut my neighbor’s throat,

My neighbor’ s purse I never stole,

I never spoiled his house and land,

But God have mercy on my soul

For I am haunted night and day

By all those things I have not done.

0 unattempted loveliness!

0 costly valor never won!

The church is not a society of perfect people, but rather a fellowship of imperfect people, who, realizing their many shortcomings and weaknesses are striving for perfection in Christ, and have banded themselves together because of their common faith in and known need for Jesus Christ, the friend of sinners.

There’s yet another wrong idea of how to get into church, which is held by many sincere people — an erroneous idea which is keeping them out of the church — the notion that they must undergo a violent emotional experience in order to become a church member. What Isaiah experienced in the temple when he saw the Lord high and lifted up with His train filling the sanctuary; what Paul experienced on the Road to Damascus when he saw the blinding light and heard the voice of Jesus say, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” this pattern of vivid transcendent spiritual experience remains the ideal in many an earnest heart as the only way that God can call people into His church. Until such a cataclysmic call is given the sincere seeker feels he must wait outside the ranks of the church.

I once knew a wonderfully fine woman who was waiting on some such experience before she would join the church. Her husband was a church officer. She taught her children religion in the home. She came with the whole family to church school and worship. She was sweet, and gentle in character. One by one her children grew to adolescence, came to communicant’s class, made professions of their Christian faith, took their place by their father’s side as church members and still she waited outside the church. Years passed. One of her children, a fine young man, grew suddenly ill and died. Not long afterward this mother made her profession of faith and joined the church. So far as I know she never experienced the emotional crisis she had waited for so long.  Certainly she made no mention of it. What then brought her to decision? I have always believed that she came to the point where she felt that far more important for her in God’s sight than waiting for an unusual emotional experience to usher her into church membership, was God’s purpose that in every experience of life she should be sheltered, supported, and sustained by God’s grace mediated to her through His church. So she came.

Christ never put coming to Him on any such basis of emotional crisis. “Whosoever will, let him come,” is the word of Christ to every man. If you want to be close to Christ, if you want to accept His offer of cleansing from sin; if you want to receive the church’s help in making your life more joyous, valuable, then come.  Your desire to have it so, is emotional experience enough.

Don’t wait to join the church until you have some upsetting emotional experience, but join the church now so that all life’s experiences will have added dimensions, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, socially. I say you can’t afford the day by day loss of the best life has to offer you by staying away from Christ and out of His church.

One of the most ancient symbols for the Christian church is a ship or boat. In fact the nave of a church where the congregation sits for worship, is a word derived from the Latin for boat, navis, and perpetuates this early symbol. The church of Christ is the boat provided for life’s journey. Climb into it and it carries you safely over the sea of life, supports you in the storms, and lands you safe in a heavenly port.

The church has thrown its sanctities about life’s common ventures transforming them into experiences of enabling and abiding value, so that any experience untouched by the grace of God through His church lacks incalculable dimensions of possible eternal glory. Take for example marriage. A man and a woman decide to live together. What a difference in that experience for those two whether it is begun entirely on a basis of biological attraction of a male and female beginning to cohabit, or whether the Church’s sanctities of the ideals of Christian marriage, home life, character standards, and unselfish service are thrown about that couple in all the ritual of a church wedding and the re1ationships of a Christian fellowship.

A child is born. What a difference in that experience whether the child opens its eyes to the 1ight of day unwanted, unclaimed, untrained, or whether he is born to loving parents who have prayed for his coming and brought him before God in the fellowship of the church to dedicate him and themselves through Christian baptism to the Father in Heaven, creator of all life.

A man begins his work. What a difference in that experience, whether the man is out to get for himself, or whether he has a sense of Christian vocation of working in partnership with God and in fellowship with His church. A thoughtful young Christian business man writes: “Religion was always more or less like an aspirin in a bottle or a raincoat in the closet. You take one when you have a headache; you put on the other when it rains. When you are feeling okay and it is sunny weather, you don’t even think about religion. Well, I have learned, the hard way; this is a long way from the truth. When I started reading the scriptures looking for suitable aspirin to take to solve my immediate problem, I found something that amazed me. I found that many of my everyday problems I had been confronted with from time to time in both my business and social worlds were discussed and solved in the scriptures.  I labored for long under the false impression that I was in business for myself, but instead I am in the most wonderful partnership that I have ever gotten into.”

Oh, no. Don’t wait for some shaking spiritual or emotional experience to come to you before you come into the church — come now, so every experience of your life and your family’s life will be deepened and heightened and broadened emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually.

“The sense of belonging to such a society transforms life. It is the difference between being a solitary knight tilting single-handed, and often defeated, at whatever enemy one chances to meet on one’s little acre of life, and the feel of belonging to a mighty army marching throughout all time to a certain victory.” (H. Drummond)

Don’t stay out of the church if you’ve had one of these wrong ideas about how to get in. If you love Jesus Christ and want to learn to be like Him, if you feel you’ve fallen short of the best you know and want to ask for some outside help to do better, if you want every experience of life to be made brighter by the wonderful grace of God communicated to human life through the fellowship of His church, come, come now.