Genuine Worship

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So I read an article this week that was talking about how to tell if a diamond is genuine or not. And I want to say off the bat, don’t try any of this at home. If you try any of these tests, neither I nor Central Baptist Church are responsible for the outcome.

I’m just going by what some guy on the internet said, right? And we know you can always trust guys on the internet. But this article said if you want to tell if your diamond is genuine, there are some tests that you can do.

They said, you know, you can take it with you into a foggy bathroom or you can try to breathe on it because they said a diamond won’t fog as easily as some other stones or some other costume jewelry items will. They won’t fog as easily. It says they disperse heat so they don’t heat up very easily.

So you can try to heat up your diamond and if it’s resistant to heat, they say there’s a good chance that it’s genuine. They said they reflect light. So when you try to look through them, and they showed pictures of this, you try to set diamond on newsprint and you can’t read through it, where if it’s some other different kinds of stones or imitation diamonds, you may be able to read some of the newsprint.

They said they sparkle and they reflect gray instead of rainbow. I never thought about that. You know, you always think about sparkly diamonds showing off this rainbow light.

They said it’s shades of gray in the reflection. They said, I thought this was a fun test. They said diamonds don’t shatter easily. So if you want to test your diamond, you can hold it up under a lighter, I guess with some kind of long tweezers or something so you don’t burn yourself.

But you hold it up under a lighter and you heat it up really good, really well, excuse me, and then you drop it immediately into ice-cold water, and if it doesn’t shatter, it’s real. And I’m reading this article and going, number one, somebody has a lot of time on their hands to figure this out by trial and error. Somebody really got chewed out for experimenting with their wife’s diamond to know this, because what would have happened if it had shattered? Number three, just go see a jeweler if you’re that curious.

Or just live in blissful ignorance. It doesn’t matter. But there are these tests, and they did get into that.

You know, you can take it to a jeweler. There’s tests they can run with these electronic, I don’t know. I kind of lost interest after the lighter thing.

There are tests you can do. There are these tests to tell if a diamond is genuine. But those tests only illustrate what it is that makes the diamond genuine.

There’s something about the structure of a diamond that is different from imitation diamonds, from costume jewelry. There’s something about the structure, the carbon structure of the diamond. The atoms and the molecules are arranged in such a way that it makes it just this incredibly strong substance.

And that’s what makes it resistant to the shattering. That’s what makes it resistant to the melting, if you’re doing the lighter trick. that makes it reflect.

I keep wanting to mix those two words up, refract and reflect, into the word reflect. Anyway, it makes it do those particular things with the light. It comes down to the molecular structure, and that shows up in these outward tests.

Last week, I talked to you about what the Bible says about imitation worship, and there are ways to tell if worship is imitation, if it’s fake, if it’s phony, if it’s surface deep. But on the other side of that, there’s genuine worship. There’s real worship.

And the Bible speaks to what makes worship genuine. Now, of course, it can be a little difficult to tell somebody else’s worship if they’re worshiping genuinely, but it gives us a test into our own hearts to see what’s there and if it reflects that it’s genuine worship or not. Jesus met a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, and he taught her what it means to worship God genuinely.

That’s what I want us to look at this morning as we finish this series on worship and next week go into talking a little bit more about the Christmas story. I want us to end here in John chapter 4, looking at this interaction between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. So we’re going to be in John chapter 4.

The story is longer than what we’re going to look at today. I’m going to hit the highlights of the story, but as far as the text, we’re really going to focus in on about eight verses here, and I encourage you to go look at the rest of the story yourself, if you haven’t already looked at it. We’re going to be in John chapter 4, and once you find it, if you would stand with me as we read from God’s Word.

If you don’t have your Bible or can’t find it, it’ll be on the screen for you as well. But we’re going to start in verse 19, already well into the story, where the woman says to him, Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet, speaking to Jesus. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.

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.

But the hour is coming, and now is, when the 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.

The woman said to Him, I know that Messiah is coming, who is called Christ. When He comes, He will tell us all things. Jesus said to her, I who speak to you am He. And you may be seated.

So to get us to where we are in the text, where this story starts, Jesus comes up to this woman at the well, and he asks her for a drink way back in verse 7, but in verse 9, she questions why somebody like him would even be talking to somebody like her, because he’s, first of all, he’s Jewish, and she’s Samaritan. Those groups did not like each other. They did not mix.

He’s a man. She’s a woman, he’s a rabbi, and she has a bad reputation. And so there are all sorts of reasons why she questions why he’s even associating with her, why he’s even bothering to talk to her.

And he tells her in response to this in verse 10 that if she understood who he is, she would ask him for a drink of living water. He’s come to her asking for a drink of physical water. She says, why are you talking to me, why would you bother with me?

And he says, oh, if you knew who I was, you’d be asking me for a drink. You’d be asking me for the living water. But she questions, she doesn’t understand.

She questions how he plans to get water out of the well because he doesn’t have anything to draw with, which is why he asked her for a drink to begin with. She still thinks he’s talking about physical water. But he tells her in verses 13 and 14 that he offers water that is better than the water that comes from that well because his water gives eternal life.

It should be clear to us at this point, if it wasn’t already, that he is not talking about physical water. He’s talking about something spiritual. So when she asks for the water in verse 15, she says, I want that water. He tells her, call your husband.

Now his reason for bringing up her husband is not to embarrass or shame her, but it is to point out where most glaringly in her life she has fallen short so that she will understand her need for him and for the living water. She says in verse 17, I have no husband. He says, go call your husband.

She says, I don’t have a husband. And then we see in verses 17 and 18, he reveals her entire past. He says, no, that’s right. You don’t have a husband.

You’ve had five husbands and the man you’re living with now is not your husband. And I’m sure this shocked her that he would know this. Or maybe she thought her reputation in the community had gotten back to him.

But his reason for doing this is to help her see her need, that she has fallen short of God’s design of things, but also for her to get a glimpse of who he is. Because he can see into her heart, he can see into her past, and it gives a glimpse of him being the Messiah he later on tells her he is. And by the way, the same thing is true of us.

Jesus sees past all the facades we put up. He sees past all appearances. And he sees and can diagnose what’s in the heart.

This makes her a little uncomfortable. It would me too. Conviction usually is uncomfortable.

So she deflects with a theological question about worship. And that’s where we picked up in verse 15. When she says, Sir, I perceive you’re a prophet.

She said, Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship. So the Jews worshipped at the temple in Jerusalem, and the Samaritans worshipped on Mount Gerizim. And there was a big theological to-do over who was correct.

Is it right to worship God in Jerusalem? Is it right to worship God on Mount Gerizim? And I think she thought, by getting him off into the weeds on this subject, she could sidestep the whole uncomfortable issue of her past and just focus on this.

and maybe they could fight about something, and she could just be done with the conversation. But he stayed focused, and he used her question to come back around to what he was talking about, and to make his intended point. And what you and I need to understand out of all of this is that the point of this for us is that Jesus Christ is the basis of genuine worship.

He is the basis for genuine worship. We cannot fully and truly worship God in the way that He designed us to apart from Jesus Christ. Now we can, even if we don’t know Jesus Christ, we can praise God. There’s a difference between praise and worship.

Praise is just telling how great He is. And the Bible talks about how even creation declares the glory of God. Even a person who doesn’t know Jesus Christ can give glory to God.

But as we’ve seen over the last several weeks, worship is more than that worship is doing that with our lives. Worship is living for the purpose of bringing Him glory. And Jesus even says in order to do that, you need Him.

He said it, not me. And we’re going to get into that this morning, what that means. Throughout the conversation, Jesus’ whole intention is to show this woman that she needed to receive Him as her Messiah in order to be in a right relationship with the Father.

And it’s easy to miss, but if you go back through the verses that we didn’t read this morning, you can see that all throughout this conversation, he’s talking about himself. And he described himself to her in a few different ways. In verse 10, he called himself the gift of God.

Now, we’ve probably all met somebody who thought they were God’s gift to others, but Jesus actually was. It’s not bragging if it’s true, right? Verse 10, he refers to himself as the gift of God.

Also in verse 10, he calls himself the source of living water. In verse 13, he identifies himself as the giver of everlasting life. And then at the end of what we read this morning in verses 25 and 26, he tells her flat out, point blank, that he is the Messiah.

The whole purpose of this is not to call her out for her past. The whole purpose of this is not to win a theological debate. The whole time he’s talking to her, he’s doing so with the intention of telling her about himself and who he is so that she will know and turn to him. now in contrast she focuses on matters of debate there’s about three things that she tries to debate with Jesus throughout this passage and I don’t know that she means to be argumentative but these are things that people would have debated about in his day and she keeps bringing them up back in verse 9 when she says why are why are you talking to me why are you what she says how is it that you being a Jew ask a drink from me a Samaritan woman so in here is the implied debate of this is not the are usually done.

You ever heard that in a discussion about worship? We’ve never done it this way before. That’s what she’s saying to Jesus.

Now she doesn’t know they’re talking about worship, but already she’s a little bit on the defensive. This is not how things usually go. And in the midst of that is the debate Jew versus Samaritan.

She comes back to that in verse 11, are you greater than our father Jacob? As they’re talking about the well and his water being better, she says, are you greater than our father Jacob who gave us the well? Now the Jews and the Samaritans both claim descent from Jacob, but now she’s saying he’s ours.

We’re the rightful heirs of God’s promises to Jacob. Still, she’s wanting to get in an ethnic or theological dispute. It could be both.

And then in verse 20, our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship. In there is the, maybe a question, but really the implied statement, we worship in the correct way. I picture her as Stephen Crowder sitting behind the table saying, prove me wrong, if you’ve seen those pictures on the internet.

No, change my mind. That’s what it is. Change my mind.

We worship the right way. Change my mind. But through it all, Jesus repeatedly points her not to this side of a theological debate, not to this aspect of history.

He keeps pointing her back to himself. And this fact is key to understanding what Jesus said to her about worship. Because I know here we’re talking about worship, but we’re taking a long time getting into it.

But we’ve got to lay the groundwork to understand what it is Jesus is telling her about worship when he gets down to it in verses 23 and 24. Because he says to her, 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. So unless we understand this key fact that Jesus through this whole conversation is pointing her back to himself, it is easy to get off into the ditches on either side about what he’s saying about worshiping in spirit and truth, what that means. And there’s a lot of confusion about what that means, and I’ve heard a lot of things taught, and I don’t pretend I’ve come up with some new doctrine, I don’t think I’m the first one that’s ever seen this, but I just spent a lot of time really digging into the context instead of what I’ve always heard.

What does the context point to that he’s saying here, what does it mean to worship in spirit and truth? And one of the most common explanations I’ve heard is that spirit talks about just doing it with exuberance, and really we shouldn’t want our worship to be boring. There should be joy involved in worshiping God.

And so I’ve heard that explanation of spirit that it should be alive and it should be lively, and then and then truth, but you can’t just, it can’t be just chaotic and anything goes. It’s got to be grounded in the truth of God’s Word. And I think those are very close.

I think those are close to what he’s talking about, but I don’t think that’s exactly right. It’s correct. All of that is correct.

I just don’t think that’s what he’s talking about here, right? It’s sort of like one of my children a while back told me the story of a friend who thought the earth was flat because their parents told him that. And my child said, we know the earth is round.

We know it is. And I said, oh, how do you know it is? And they said, because there are 50 states.

And if the earth was flat, there’s no way you could fit all 50 states on there. So close. Okay, everything you said is, I mean, you got to the right conclusion, but that’s not the right argument to get you there.

Okay? So all of that about worship being exuberant and being in the Spirit, and also being bounded by doctrinal truth and not charismatic and not all that, that’s all true, but I don’t think that’s what he’s talking about here. Does that make sense?

Something can be true and also not be part of the context of the verse. So here’s what I think he’s talking about, because he sets the stage for it in the earlier verses. When he’s talking about spirit.

I believe that tells us that genuine worship comes from our inward connection with God. Because look back at what he says in verse 21. Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem worship the Father.

She was very hung up on a place and a way and a method of worship. She was very hung up on these external attributes of what she thought worship was. And by the way, not just her, everybody in their society was that way.

And a good number in our society are hung up on that as well. He said there’s going to come a time when they would understand worship is not determined by their physical circumstances. Now he’s not saying that they, when he says you will not worship on this mountain, on Mount Gerizim or in Jerusalem, he’s not saying that we would be forbidden to worship in those places.

What he’s saying here is that our worship would not be tied to those places. Under Old Testament law, they were required to go to Jerusalem for certain acts of worship. And yet Jesus said, there’s coming a day when that will not be.

There will come a day when you are no longer tied to that place. And so there’s going to come a time when they would understand, when we would understand that worship is not determined by our physical circumstances. It’s not determined by what we do, where we do it, or when.

Because they were convinced that worship required being in a certain place at a certain time doing certain things in a certain way. But he said, it’s not going to be this physical determination of what is worship. That you have to be in this room at 1045 on Sunday morning and you have to be wearing just the right things.

And you have to hit just the right notes in your singing. And you have to be carrying just the right Bible and you have to. .

. It is not determined by those physical things. If we’ve seen anything over the last several weeks, worship is something we do with our entire lives.

Now, don’t take from that, well, I don’t have to go to church anymore. No, it’s good for us. God designed us to do the Christian life in community and in fellowship.

It just about killed me to not be out there with y’all and be in here with y’all before church. And that’s just one service. Hey, don’t try to do this on your own.

We’re meant to do this together. But as far as our worship, we are not tied to a particular place. Our worship, our connection with God does not come from our physical existence in a particular spot at a particular time.

Our connection with God comes through the spirit, through the relationship that we have that Jesus Christ has given us. That’s why in Ephesians we’re told we have boldness and access with confidence through faith in Him. We’re told that we can come right into the presence of God any time because of Jesus Christ. We don’t have to go specifically to the temple.

Because Jesus is our high priest, Hebrews chapter 4 tells us, let us come boldly to the throne of grace. All of this is possible because when Jesus Christ died on the cross at that moment when he laid down his life, the Bible says that the veil in the temple, the massive curtain that separated the holy of holies, the dwelling place of God from where the common people were, that veil was torn in two from top to bottom. And we were given access to God through Jesus Christ. And so each of us has this spirit within us, this part of us that lives forever and is designed to connect with God.

And if we’re worshiping in spirit, it means we’re living out of this connection that we have with him through Jesus Christ that does not depend on where we are physically. You can worship God and have a relationship with him in this church. You can worship God and have a relationship with him out on a tractor.

You can have a relationship with God and worship him from a prison cell. Our worship is not limited by physical time and space because it becomes a matter of a spiritual connection with God. Not one that we built, but because of Jesus Christ. And so when he says that we’re to worship in spirit, I believe he’s talking about in context of verse 21 here, how he has opened the door for us to worship from this inward connection we have rather than through external rituals.

And again, rituals aren’t bad in and of themselves if they point in the right direction. I come to church not, well, not just because I’m the pastor. I did this before I was the pastor.

I come to church not because God takes attendance or because this is the only place I can worship him, But because I do worship him, I want to worship him together with brothers and sisters the way he designed us to. But it’s even more important that the other 167 hours of the week that I worship him outside this place. And then when it comes to truth, again, I said what we typically look at as the explanation of spirit and truth, I don’t think are far off.

But when he’s talking about truth, I believe that tells us that genuine worship relies on our accurate recognition of God. We need to have an accurate understanding of who God is. Now that doesn’t mean we have to know everything about God or we can’t worship.

None of us knows everything about God. What we can know about God is what He has revealed about Himself. He’s revealed some things through nature.

He’s revealed some things through conscience. He’s revealed far more through His Son and through His Word. But even that is not everything about God.

But there are some things that we just can’t know. But when it comes to what we can know about God, our worship relies on an accurate recognition of Him. And I take this from verse 22, where He tells her, you worship what you do not know.

We know what we worship for salvation is of the Jews. Just before He tells her that she must worship in truth, He tells her, you don’t really know what you’re worshiping. You’re worshiping in ignorance.

And most people in that day worshiped in ignorance. Worship something in ignorance. in Acts chapter 17 there’s the story of Paul going to Athens and he says you have an altar here that says to the unknown God they didn’t want to miss anybody in their pantheon of God so they put up an altar that said to the unknown God just in case they missed one and he said you did miss one there is a God you don’t know and I’ve come to tell you about him most people at that time had no idea who the God of Israel was and here’s the kicker even the the Jews of Jesus day Jesus said they knew God and in spite of knowing God, he’s right.

I mean, he’s Jesus. He’s always right. But in spite of the fact that they knew who they worshiped, they still missed key truths about who he was.

And in many cases when they knew, they rejected it. I mean, he’s equally clear that he’s God the Son and he claimed to be that and they rejected him. They knew and they choose to reject him anyway.

But for us looking back on this, having the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Jesus is, as Hebrews chapter 1 says the brightness of God’s glory and the express image of his person. John chapter 1 tells us no one has seen God at any time. I believe that means the Father.

Nobody has seen the fullness of the Father’s glory. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him. Jesus Christ, who is closer to the Father than anyone could ever be, has shown us exactly what the Father is like.

And that’s why Jesus said later in John chapter 14, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also.

And from now on, you know him and have seen him. God is not just whatever we want him to be. I’ve heard it said for years, and I’ve repeated it for years, that God made man in his image, and man has been trying to return the favor ever since.

We try to, and when I say we, I don’t mean, I’m not necessarily saying you, but we as humans tend to want to remake God in our image and make Him who we want Him to be and who we want to worship, but it doesn’t work that way. We can’t abandon all biblical truth and all biblical clarity about who God is and what His nature and His character is and about what His will is and then just worship that and call it true worship. We either worship Him for who He has revealed Himself to be or not at all.

But we can’t make an idol a false god in our own imagination and call it the God of the Bible. And just to be very clear, because you may think, who’s doing that? Who’s making idols?

If we’re looking at what God says about himself, well, he says he’s revealed himself in his son, Jesus Christ. You know, and some people will say, I’m good with God, but all the Jesus talk, that makes people uncomfortable. Well, no, I’m sorry, you either take him as the God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or it’s not the God of the Bible. Or God says, be holy, for I am holy.

And we make in our minds a God who says, no, what you want to do is fine. I’ll take whatever. That’s not the God of the Bible.

And so our worship has to reflect an accurate recognition of who he is. It can’t just be God as we want him to be. It means we worship God for who he has said he is.

and Jesus opened the door for us to worship a God we know. By the way, a God who has taken all the steps necessary for us to know him, he could have just hidden and left us to our fate, but he chose to make himself knowable and chose to make himself known. And Jesus has opened the door for us to see that, to see a fuller picture of who he is and to worship him, to worship a God we know rather than a mystery, rather than a caricature that we’ve made in our own minds.

So genuine worship requires a spiritual connection with God rather than a physical list of things to do. And it requires an accurate understanding of who God is, rather than just what we choose to believe. And here’s what we need to know.

Both of those things are available through Jesus Christ. We have both of those things through Jesus Christ and through Him alone. Again, that’s not my opinion. I didn’t make that up.

Jesus is the one telling us that. You don’t have to believe him. You don’t have to agree with him.

But when somebody dies on the cross and comes back to life after he told us he’s going to, I’m going to trust what that guy says. I’m weird that way, but that’s just me. I know lots of people in the world will look at that and say, so what?

So what if Jesus said that? But I’m just telling you, that’s not what I’m saying. That’s what he said.

Genuine worship requires us to approach God through Jesus Christ. And that’s really the key to all of this. Everything that we’ve talked about the last six weeks, everything we’ve looked at the last six weeks, genuine worship requires us to have a real and growing relationship with Jesus Christ. That that’s how we approach God. Because you and I, we are separated from God because of our sin.

God is completely holy. God is completely sinless. We cannot even understand fully the holiness of God.

We can have a glimpse of it because of what the Bible’s told us. But I think if we truly understood the holiness of God, we would shake in our boots like the prophet Isaiah did in Isaiah 6 when he saw a vision of God in his holiness. And he fell to pieces, not literally, but he lost it.

And in comparison to his holiness, we see who we are. We see our sin. We see the ways we fall short.

And we recognize we can’t get close to a God like that. We don’t deserve a relationship with a God like that. We are not worthy even to worship a God like that.

And yet we have access to Him through Jesus Christ. Because Jesus Christ, the sinless Son of God, came to earth and took responsibility for my sin. And He took responsibility for your sin. Everything wrong that you’ve ever done, said, or thought, or felt, the things you wish He didn’t know about, He came and took responsibility for that.

And He was nailed to the cross and He shed His blood and He died to pay for it so that that sin could be forgiven. God looks at us and our sin and because of Jesus Christ sees what’s been paid for. The slate’s been wiped clean.

God chose, not that God became forgetful, but he chose to remember our sins no more because Jesus paid for it on the cross and rose again to prove it. And all that is left for us to do then is to recognize what he’s done for us and ask God to forgive us, not because of anything good we’ve done to earn or deserve that forgiveness, but because Jesus paid for it.