When I think about church membership, I think about Jacob. It may seem odd, since his idea of church would have been very different from the Christian's. I think about Jacob because he had such a sense of God's presence in his life—and this is vital to a living church.
You may be familiar with this part of the story of Jacob in the Bible—it's in Genesis, chapters 27 and 28. After cheating his brother, he was forced to flee to relatives because he feared his brother. On the way to these people, he stopped for the night to rest. As he slept, he dreamed that he saw a ladder that stretched from earth to heaven and "the angels of God ascending and descending on it."
When he woke, Jacob declared, "Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.... this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven."Gen. 28:12, 16,17 What an extraordinary discovery—one so totally unexpected in the desert and darkness he was in! Surely this angelic message of God's care was significant. And yet fear for his life and the question of how to feed and clothe himself were of much greater concern to him at that time. Once all that was taken care of, he would gladly return to this place and look into the matter more thoroughly.
