Worshipping in Spirit and Truth

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We call what we’re doing here this morning a worship service. this is Sunday morning worship you’ll see on maybe our signs some of our literature about the church Sunday evening worship, Sunday morning worship there’s nothing wrong with calling it a worship service because that is what we’re here to do we’ve come together to worship corporately but we need to make sure that we understand and that we make it clear to others that when we call this worship that we’re not conveying to people the idea that this is all worship is, that this is all there is to worship. This is part of worship, but it’s not the entirety of worship.

And a lot of people totally miss out on the joy of worshiping God because in their minds they have drastically reduced the definition of worship until it’s nothing but a pale shadow of what it’s supposed to be. It sort of makes me think of going to Thanksgiving, seeing a huge Thanksgiving feast laid out on the table and just eating the rolls. I like rolls.

Rolls are good, but there’s all sorts of other good things laid out on the table. There’s the turkey you don’t want to forget about, and the mashed potatoes, and the dressing, and the pies. You don’t want, I mean, as good as they are, who wants to sit and just eat the rolls when there’s all this other stuff, okay?

When there’s all this other stuff to have. And my point in saying this is that our worship together is good. Our times of corporate worship are good.

We should seek those out. We should enjoy those. We should take every opportunity that we have to worship together.

But we shouldn’t act like that’s the whole feast. There’s more to worshiping God than just what we do together in a certain location at a certain time throughout the week. And there was a woman in Jesus’ day, one in particular that he met, who had a lot of spiritual problems. And one of her great spiritual problems was that she misunderstood what it meant to worship God. She misunderstood worship, and so she missed out on truly worshiping God.

And if you’ll turn with me to John chapter 4, verses 19 through 26, we’re going to look at this morning. If you’ll turn with me there, we’ll see how Jesus addressed her misunderstanding of worship. As you’re turning there, Jesus met this Samaritan woman, and he initiated a conversation with her.

She was drawing water from a well, and it was during the heat of the day. Jesus was thirsty, and he asked her to draw him some water. And she was shocked.

You see in verse 9, if you go back and read the beginning parts of the chapter, you’ll see that she was shocked that Jesus would speak to her at all, because she was a Samaritan, and he was a Jew. And it’s hard for us to understand the feud, the 900-year feud, that the Jews and Samaritans found themselves in. You see, and I’ve always taught it that the Samaritans, the Jews didn’t like the Samaritans because the Samaritans were sort of the half-breed people.

They were the descendants of the Jews who had intermarried with the pagan tribes around them. That’s part of it, but there was even more to the hatred than that. You see, they saw 900 years before when the Assyrians had come in and taken over the northern kingdom of Israel, the ten tribes in the northern kingdom, those are the people that had gone off with the Assyrians by force, yes, but they had been resettled and they had assimilated with the people around them.

They had married into these other cultures that they were sort of mixed in with by force. And so I think the people in the south, the people in the kingdom of Judah, saw them sort of as collaborators with the Assyrians and with the pagan tribes around them. So that was already one mark against them, that they would collaborate with the Assyrians.

But also they had intermarried with these people. They had taken on these pagan characteristics. They hadn’t kept their Jewish faith pure.

But they had also set up, even before this, they had set up as the northern kingdom places of pagan worship because they didn’t want the people going down to worship at Jerusalem in the southern kingdom. So they had set up two places of idol worship, public idol worship in the northern kingdom. Well, there’s a third strike against them.

And then when they eventually get resettled and everything, they began to worship God at a place called Mount Gerizim, refusing to come back to Jerusalem. And indeed, the Samaritans had at one point, if I’m reading history correctly, had at one point even come and vandalized the temple at Jerusalem. because they were so convinced that worshiping at Mount Gerizim was the right thing to do.

So you had racial hatred, you had religious hatred, you had political hatred. Going back centuries between these two groups of people, they had no use for each other. And so for Jesus to sit down and speak to this woman, she’s completely taken aback by the fact that he would speak to her.

But he does speak to her, because Jesus came to save initially the Jews, but Jesus came to be the Savior of the whole world. So he sits down and he speaks with this Samaritan woman, and as they’re talking, he tries to talk to her about her relationship to God. But see, every time he addresses something about her relationship to God, she tries to deflect it to something less uncomfortable.

And sometimes you’ll see this when you talk to somebody about their relationship to God, they’ll try to lead you down a spiritual rabbit hole. down these tangents of, oh, I want to talk about something. Well, where did Cain’s wife come from?

How did God allow all the genocide in the Old Testament? And I think there are some answers to those things, but usually it’s not because they really want to know. Let me say it this way.

Many times, it’s not because they really want to know the answers to those questions. Those are smoke screens that they can put up where they can deal with ideas and not have to deal with the condition of their hearts before God. Because this is a lot less uncomfortable to deal with than this.

So she tries to do that, but Jesus is really skillful at navigating around all these obstacles that she throws up. And every time, he’s able to bring it back to her real spiritual need. And where we pick up in verse 19, she’s going to try one last time to lead him off on a theological tangent by posing a question about worship when it comes to Jerusalem and Mount Gerizim.

But Jesus, once and for all, brought it back to her relationship with God. And in this question, we’re going to see that the Samaritan woman thought that worship was tied to a location. She thought that worship was tied to a location.

Let’s look here in verses 19 and 20. It says, The woman said to him, Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. She starts by either genuinely complimenting him or trying to flatter him so that she can more easily throw him off the topic of her spiritual problems. Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.

Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship. And so she’s dealing with, she has a question for Jesus. Whether it’s a sincere question or not, I’ll let you be the judge.

But she has this question for Jesus. And she says, you know, we worship in Mount Gerizim. You worship on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

who’s right. And she probably, even if this was a sincere question, she probably thought as an added bonus she could at least use it to lead him into this minefield where he’s either going to agree with her and say Mount Gerizim, or he’s going to say Jerusalem and she can just write him off as another Jew who clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about as much as the Samaritans knew, because we do tend to, when people don’t share our opinions, we do tend to immediately write them off. That’s a fault of human nature.

She thought she could lead him into this minefield, and she could focus on the location of worship, and that would be a question that they could sit and discuss, and then she could avoid all the other really uncomfortable spiritual stuff he wanted to talk about. But Jesus was focused like a laser on the concept of relationship. And as she was focused on worship being tied to a location, Jesus replied that worship is tied to a relationship.

And we can see this in verses 21 and 22. Jesus said to her, Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem worship the Father. You worship what you do not know.

We know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. So he tells her in verse 21, The hour is coming. And what he’s talking about here is pretty soon, pretty soon it’s coming.

It’s just right around the corner. Pretty soon there’s going to be a time when neither place is really going to mean all that much in worship. And we know that to be true because you and I know that we could go pray on Mount Gerizim and God’s going to hear us.

We know that we can go to the Temple Mount. And by the way, you would have to do it without looking like you’re praying because the Muslims now own the Temple Mount. and that’s the location of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and anybody who’s a non-Muslim who is praying there is promptly thrown off of, not pushed off the mountain, but they’re thrown out.

That’s a better way to say it. But you and I know as Christians, we could go stand on the Temple Mountain, we could look like we’re touring, oh, isn’t that interesting, look at the nice shiny dome up there on the mosque, and what we’re really doing is in our brain, we’re praying and having a conversation with God, we know that he would hear us at either location. We know that if we pray here, he will hear us.

If you pray at home, he will hear you. If you pray in your car, he can hear you. And the same is true of worship.

We can commune with God. We can worship God any place we are. We as believers know that today, 2,000 years later.

But in their day, that was quite a revolutionary statement. That was something they had not grown up understanding. He tells her there’s a time coming when neither of these places are going to be all that important when it comes to true worship.

To use a phrase that we see elsewhere in Scripture, these were types and shadows. The temple was a type and a shadow that I think was fulfilled in Jesus Christ because it was a visible symbol of God’s presence among the people, and there’s no greater symbol, there’s no greater fulfillment of this idea of God’s presence among his people than Jesus Christ who was called Emmanuel, meaning God with us. And so all of these things were just types and shadows that pointed to something greater in the future.

And so he says there’s an hour coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem are you going to worship. Neither of these places are going to be very important. He says you worship what you do not know.

He uses this word know twice in this verse. He says you worship what you don’t know, we worship what we do know. And this word know is the Greek word eido, and it literally means to see something.

Literally means to see something. But here it’s describing a personal knowledge or a personal understanding. And he’s saying they didn’t really know God.

They didn’t really understand God. They didn’t know God experientially. In his classic book, Experiencing God, Henry Blackaby says this, For a Hebrew person like Jesus, knowing something entailed experiencing it.

In fact, you could not truly say that you knew something unless you had dealt with it personally. So it is significant that when Jesus spoke about knowing God, he was speaking as a Hebrew. Yes, it’s recorded in Greek here, but Jesus as a Hebrew was speaking and saying, you worship what you don’t know.

Did the Samaritans maybe have a head understanding about some aspects of God? Yes. But they didn’t know God relationally like the Jews did.

Even when he talks about knowing God, he’s referring back again to the relationship. And he says in verse 22, salvation is of the Jews. Now, this does not mean Jesus was not saying then to her, and he’s not saying now to us that Jews are the only ones who can be saved.

What this phrase means is referring to where salvation sprang up from. God brought salvation through the Jewish people into the world. Jesus Christ was born of the Jews, and he’s the one who brought salvation to the world.

But beyond that, the promises of salvation had been made to the Jews all throughout history. They were the ones who were looking for the Messiah. It wasn’t the Greeks who were looking for the Messiah.

It wasn’T the Romans who were looking for the Messiah. It wasn’t the tribes in Africa and Asia and the Americas that were looking for the Messiah. It was the Jews who had been promised this one who would bring salvation from God to mankind.

They were the ones who understood what God was talking about about sending a Messiah. Now, they misunderstood who the Messiah was going to be, but they weren’t the ones that God had promised salvation to. Excuse me.

They were the ones looking for a Savior. They were the ones that God had maintained this relationship with. Again, we go back to relationship.

God had maintained a relationship with the Jewish people to preserve them and to use them as the vessel through which he would bring salvation into the world. So you look back through the Old Testament and you can see that God had promised that the Messiah was going to come, he was going to be a descendant of Abraham. All the nations of the world would be blessed in Abraham, and through Isaac, and through Jacob.

You can see that Messiah was going to come from the tribe of Judah. He was going to be of the house and lineage of David. God had maintained a relationship with Israel.

God had chosen Israel, and their special role was to be God’s chosen vessel through which he would bring the Savior into the world. And because of this, God had maintained a thousands of year relationship with the Jews. They knew God.

They knew his promises. And so when he tells her, we worship what we know, what we know, and you worship what you don’t know, he’s not calling her, he’s not saying she’s stupid, but he’s saying she doesn’t have the relationship with God that it takes to worship him. And he talks about how God had maintained a relationship with the Jews.

But his explanation of what’s going on here with her question, his explanation challenged both Samaritan ignorance and Jewish legalism. See, even though he sounds like he’s siding with the Jews, he’s really challenging everybody’s ideas here about what worship was supposed to be. Look at verse 23 and 24.

But the hour is coming, and now is, when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such to worship him. God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. Now in verse 23 he says the hour is coming and now is which is kind of an odd turn of phrase.

The hour is coming, it’s on its way and now is, it’s on its way but it’s here. And the only way really for us to understand this is to realize that Jesus is the one who stands in between the two covenants. Jesus is the one who bridges the gap here.

He’s the one who stands at the transition between this old covenant and the new covenant that he’s about to usher in. So in a sense, he’s talking about the new covenant is almost here, and yet you see the new covenant in Jesus Christ. So there’s a new day coming, and it’s just right there because it’s there with Jesus. Okay, so really for me, the only way to understand that phrase, it’s almost here, but it is here, is to understand the role that Jesus plays in fulfilling the old covenant and bringing in the new.

He stands there at the transition. So the hour is coming and now is when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. These true worshipers are people who are going to genuinely worship God.

And we can contrast this with what we saw last week in Matthew chapter 15 where he’s talking about the Pharisees and he says, in vain do they worship me. That vain worship that didn’t come from the heart, that just came from a desire really to glorify themselves with how good they could appear to be. He says they worship me in vain.

That kind of worship is empty. It’s meaningless. That stands in stark contrast to what he’s saying here about true worshipers who aren’t worshiping out of coercion, who aren’t worshiping out of a desire to show how great they can be, but who are worshiping in spirit and truth.

This over here is vain and empty and meaningless. These are true worshipers. This is genuine worship.

He said they’re going to worship in spirit and in truth. And he says at the beginning of verse 24, God is spirit. God is spirit.

And what he’s telling her is that God is not a created physical being. You know, a lot of the countries around them worshipped gods that were created. Many of the Greek gods that they might have been familiar with were created by other gods.

They had a beginning. A lot of these were physical beings. At least the idols were physical beings.

God, in contrast to everybody else that was worshipped in the ancient world, he wasn’t a created being. He has no beginning, and he has no end. He’s eternal, and he’s uncreated.

He’s not a physical being. He’s not subject to imperfections, and he’s not bound by time and space. And for him to say God is a spirit and to explain this to her in a way where she would understand that he’s not bound by the limitations we perceive, is to say God is not stuck in a temple somewhere where we have to go and worship him there.

God is not stuck on Mount Gerizim and can only receive our worship when we go there to worship him. God is not stuck inside the temple in Jerusalem and can only hear us when we go there. What he’s saying when he says God is spirit is that God is unbound by our physical understandings and limitations.

God is all around us. God is everywhere God wants to be. God is omnipresent.

And so when you understand that our God, unlike all these other gods who are worshipped with human hands as though he needed something. As Paul said in Acts 17, our God is not worshipped with human hands as though he needed anything. When you understand that our God in contrast to all these others exists within and outside of time and space, when you understand that he is a being unlike any other, I said the opposite of what I meant to, that he is a being totally unlike any other.

When you understand that, then the questions about where do I need to go worship, does it have to be at this geographic location, or does it have to be at this one, really become irrelevant. Because like David said in Psalm 139, where can I flee from your presence? And he begins to list places.

Everywhere I go, you’re there. If I run as far as I think I can go, you’re still there. If I go as deep down as I think I can get, you’re still there.

God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. This idea of spirit means worship has got to engage the whole heart rather than just the outward appearance. The Pharisees that we talked about last week had the appearance of worshiping, but they weren’t worshiping in spirit.

It wasn’t coming from their spirit. It wasn’t coming from the depths of their being, the part of them that lives forever. It was coming from the part of them that wanted to look good for their religious buddies.

It wasn’t real. It didn’t come from inside them. And when we talk about worshiping and truth, folks, our worship has got to be informed by a personal knowledge of the true God. It matters how we understand God.

I know we live in a day and age where doctrine is talked about like it’s a four-letter word. But if we’re going to worship God, we need to know who we’re worshiping. I’ve heard a few times in ministry, that doctrine doesn’t matter as long as we just love Jesus.

And I think I’ve told you my answer to that is always, which Jesus do you love? That’s a matter of doctrine. Do we worship the Jesus who is God in human flesh, who was born of a virgin, who came and lived a perfect sinless life, who died on the cross as the only acceptable sacrifice for sin and rose again in the same body from the dead three days later and then ascended to the right hand of God the Father and is returning one day in a visible way in power and glory?

Is that the Jesus we love? That’s the Jesus I love. Or do we love the Jesus who is a man who’s working his way toward Godhood, or has worked his way toward Godhood, one of many spirit children of the Heavenly Father, who incidentally was also a man at one point.

Is that the Jesus we love? That’s the Jesus the Mormon church loves. Are we worshiping the Jesus who was created by God the Father, who was created and employed in God’s purposes, but really is no more a deity than you or I.

Is that the Jesus we love? Because that’s the Jesus that the Jehovah’s Witnesses love. Do we worship the Jesus who is a good moral teacher and a servant of God that would never claim to be God himself because that’s the Jesus that the Muslims love?

See, it matters. It matters what the truth is and how we understand it. We could love God with all our hearts and be loving the wrong person if we don’t know the truth about who he is.

So there’s not only has to be this experiential love of God, we love him because we know him. We know him down in our spirit, down in our souls, but folks, there also has to be this experiential knowledge of God where we know him through his word and we know him because we’ve spent time with him and we’ve gotten to know him. There has to be this understanding of the truth when it comes to God.

And what we need to understand in Jesus’ interaction with her and telling her, One day the mountain, one day the temple, it’s not going to matter. One day what’s going to matter is that you worship in spirit and you worship in truth. What he’s pointing out to her, what I think we need to understand this morning, is that worship isn’t something we show up for.

It’s something that shows up in us. Worship is not something that we show up for. Worship is something that shows up in us.

It’s not about a location. It’s about a personal relationship with God. We talked about this a little bit early on in this series, that worship grew out of a covenantal relationship with God.

It’s about a personal relationship where we know God, and our knowledge of Him leads us to burst forth in adoration of Him and who He is. And I came across something new to me. I didn’t make up any new doctrine this week, but something that was new to me this week that I’d never noticed before.

As I started looking at this word that Jesus uses, worship, and the Greek word that Jesus used, the Greek word that’s recorded here, gives, I think, a really clear picture of what our worship of God is supposed to be. There’s a Greek word, proskunea, which is used, and don’t worry, there’s no pronunciation part on the test later. So nine times in five verses, Jesus uses this word.

And if you want to count the word worshiper, then there’s a tenth variation on the word. But he uses this word and it describes the relationship between a dog and its master. I never knew that.

I never knew that. I know I just started studying Greek in the last year or so, but I’ve had a strong concordance all this time, and I never picked up on the fact that I never thought to look up what the word worship meant in the Greek. And Jesus uses this word that describes the relationship between the dog and the master, because that word comes from two different words.

One of them is a preposition that means to or toward, and the other one is dog. Because I read that and I thought, how did I miss that all this time? So I started looking at the roots of it, and sure enough, it meant exactly that.

It’s describing the relationship between the dog and its master. And that gives us a picture of what our appreciation of God is supposed to be like, that we should long to be with him. We should be overjoyed in his presence.

And we should love him for who he is. Many of you have dogs. Some of you are cat people and the rest of us will pray for you, but many of you have dogs.

And you know what that’s like when you come in and they’re so excited to see you. I can be God all day and my kids will be excited to see me when I get home. I can walk outside to push the trash can down to the street and walk back in and our dogs wag their whole bodies like they thought I was never coming back again.

They were so excited. We thought you were dead. Is anybody else ever that happy to see you?

No. Nobody else ever jumps up and wags their whole body when I walk in. Please don’t.

Please don’t. Like when I come in tonight, that’ll just creep me out. Nobody else ever does that.

Nobody else, nobody else ever really has no opinion on what we do. They just want to spend time with me. the dog doesn’t care what we do just want to be near you the dog loves me for who I am the dog has no idea how many faults I really have and I’m not saying that God has faults but I’m just saying the dog isn’t focused on who it thinks I ought to be or who it wishes I was the dog just loves me for who I am and folks that is supposed to be there’s a reason that word is used so many times it’s not by accident that’s supposed to be our relationship to God we should just long to be in his presence.

Just like the dog, we wake up every morning and just want to be with our master. That should be our attitude toward God. The master walks through the door and our heart just explodes with love.

That should be our relationship toward God. And we’re not worried about what he’s going to do for us or what we wish he would be. We just love him for who he is.

That should be, that’s worship, folks. That’s what our relationship to God is supposed to be like. That’s worship.

Your dog worships you. That’s how we’re supposed to worship God. I know some of us or some people would look at that and say, how demeaning that Christianity expects us to relate to God like dogs when we’re human beings.

There are skeptics out there who would look at that word and be off-put by that. But let me read you what the Bible commentator William Barclay wrote. When men worship Jesus Christ, they do not fall at his feet in broken submission, but in wondering love.

A man does not say, I cannot resist a might like that. We don’t give in to God because he’s too powerful and so fine. We’ll just give in.

He says, Love so amazing, so divine, demands my life, my soul, my all. In the words of the old hymn, when I survey the wondrous cross. A man does not say, I am battered into surrender.

He says, I am lost in wonder, love, and praise. We’re not talking about a beaten down old dog here. We’re talking about a dog with a good and loving master.

And that should be our relationship to God. That’s worship. Why was this so tough?

Why was this idea of worship so tough for people? When we see in verse 22, the Samaritans were focused on rituals at Mount Gerizim. They were focused on these rituals, but they didn’t really know God.

At least not experientially. They didn’t really know God. And the Jews, many of them were focused on rituals in Jerusalem, but many of them, as we saw with the Pharisees last week, didn’t actually love God.

We’re called to worship in spirit. That means we’re called to be engaged from the very core of our being, to let worship flow out of us from a genuine love for him, to just spill out naturally because we love him so much down at the core of who we are. And we’re called also to worship in truth, meaning that we have to really know him.

We have to have a relationship with God, not some false concept, not some idea of who we think he might be, but who we know him to be based on experiencing his presence and his word. Worship isn’t something we show up for at a certain time or place. It’s something that shows up in us when our relationship with him is what it ought to be.

And verses 23 and 24 tell us that this is what God wants. Verse 23 says, For the Father is seeking such to worship him. God is seeking people who will worship him in spirit and in truth and we would do well to learn from the conversation that Jesus had with this woman we can go for spirit without truth meaning our worship is just all feelings but no real understanding of who we’re worshiping we can go for truth without spirit like the Pharisees which is kind of a head knowledge of God but no real love for him there that doesn’t sound enjoyable or joyous we can go for a location without a relationship, you can, if you want the sum total of your relationship to God, of your worship to be just showing up here, we’ll worship and you can join in, but I’m not sure how much good it’s going to do you.

You’re missing out on all the worship. And without the relationship, you’re separated from God. You’re just showing up for an experience, but you’re separated from God.

You see, she was separated from God, but Jesus provided the remedy for that. When she said, We’re going to read on a couple more verses here. When she said the Messiah would point her to God, Jesus told her the Messiah was already there.

Let’s look at verses 25 and 26. The woman said to him, I know that Messiah is coming who is called Christ. When he comes, he will tell us all things. So he’s talking to her about spirit and truth.

And she said, oh, yes, I know the Messiah. The Messiah will tell us all about God. The Messiah will lead us into the relationship with God.

When he comes, he will tell us all things. Verse 26, Jesus said to her, I who speak to you am he. I who speak to you am he.

Folks, the only way to worship him in spirit and truth, the only way to have that relationship we’ve talked about this morning, the only way to have him be our master, is through Jesus Christ. The only way to do it is to enter into a relationship with him through Jesus Christ, because you see our sin has separated us from God. Just like this woman, the part before