John 4:23

You see, she was weary too, but for different reasons, as we'll see. So Jesus asks her for a drink, proceeds to offer her this great thing called living water, and then he says,

go and call your husband.

Now her conscience is pricked after Jesus reveals to her that not only does she not have a husband, she's had five of them. And not only has she had five husbands, but the man that she's currently living with is not her husband. So, she does what we do when somebody asks a question that gets a little bit too close to home. She changes the subject.

She says,

our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you say that in Jerusalem, this is the place where people ought to worship.

That's verse 20. So between the Samaritan woman and this Jewish man stood centuries of bitter hostility. So the mountain that she referenced was up on the hill overlooking Jacob's well called Mount Gerizim.

And it was there, actually, that upon entering the promised land that Moses delivered the covenant blessings and curses. So it had a history, a rich, deep history. But through the course of time, after Solomon, the nation split in two. The kingdom was divided. and the national rivalry between Israel and Judah led to competing claims about who actually held the holiest ground. So the Samaritans themselves descended from these Israelites who intermarried with foreigners after Assyria came back and resettled the land. They themselves built a rival temple on Mount Gerizim and they even were so bold to edit their own version of the five books of Moses to make it look like Mount Gerizim was the holiest place. But in Jesus' day at this time, the temple was still towering over Jerusalem. It was still the center of faith and worship for those Jews who faithfully followed the words of what we'd now call the Old Testament. So the question is presented to Jesus, which mountain is holy ground?

And according to Jesus, neither. Salvation is from the Jews, and the tabernacle and the temple were places where a holy God could dwell among a sinful people, but they were mere shadows. Now the one that's sitting beside that well is himself the true temple. As John tells us earlier, Jesus is the word who became flesh and dwelt, or literally tabernacled, among us. He's the one who said,

destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.

So the holy ground is no longer a mountain, but it's in the one who was crucified on a mountain for your sin. Listen to the words of Jesus in our text in verses 23 and 24.

But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. For the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

Now, several brothers in this series on worship have excellently demonstrated that everyone worships.

Every heart bows down to someone. The question is who? In his answer, Jesus distinguishes true worship from false worship, living faith from mere dead ritual. His words are like a winnowing fork that separates the wheat from the chaff. So the two points for tonight are pretty simple from the text. Number one, true worshipers worship in spirit. And number two, true worshipers worship in truth. But before we get to those, we can't miss the fact that Jesus tells us a few really important things about whom we worship and why.

We worship the Father

So first we worship the Father. Now Israel knew God as Lord, as Adonai, as Yahweh, as the Great I Am, all these wonderful names of God. But Jesus brings us to worship God as Father. In the spirit of adoption, we come not as strangers or slaves, but as sons and daughters crying, Abba, Father. That is distinctly Christian. That's why we can pray our Father in heaven in a way that the Jews or even the Samaritans never could dream about. So true Christian worship approaches God not merely as creator, not merely as Lord of the universe, but as the one who is near to us as our Father.

Second, the father is seeking worshipers. Now John tells us that Jesus had to pass through Samaria, if you look up in verse 4. But long before that Samaritan woman went looking for water in that dry, hot, noonday heat, the father saw her and sent his son to meet her. God gives what he commands is something we often like to say.

True worshipers worship in spirit

He commands true worship, but he also seeks out the worshipers. And he sends his son and his spirit to make true worshipers out of thirsty sinners. So to our first point, number one, true worshipers worship in spirit. Jesus says God is spirit in verse 24.

And God is not confined then to a body, not to a building or even to a mountain. and we therefore must worship him as he is and not as we imagine him to be or want him to be. So because God is spirit, worship must be spiritual, which means that true worship is not bound by places or things.

So the answer to the woman's question is it's not on Mount Gerizim, it's not at the temple in Jerusalem, and today for us it's not necessarily the sanctuary or the worship center. It's also not in physical representations or images or idols. No true worship comes from that inward, invisible spirit of man. And it's expressed through our external, visible bodies, and it's offered to the infinite, invisible God through the visible God-man, Jesus Christ. So like this woman, our flesh would rather spend time arguing about holy places, holy times, and holy customs than deal with the living God face to face. But Jesus just won't let us hide behind externals.

So the true worshiper needs no altar on a mountaintop because his altar is the cross. And therefore, the temple is the whole earth. So in Christ, the morning is holy, the evening is holy, the church is holy, but so is your home, your school, your workplace. In Christ, worship is not limited to your morning devotional or your morning quiet time. It's living before the face of God all day long.

Worshiping in spirit means that waking in the morning and sitting down to a meal become occasions for that sweet, holy communion with the Triune God. Worship in spirit then must come from within, not from without. It comes from within, from that sincere, loving, and a grateful heart. The worship God accepts through Jesus has an inner life, a vitality that sets it apart from that merely outward, external religion of the natural man. To worship in spirit is the inward faith of the heart.

It gives birth to our prayers, gives us a clean conscience, and allows us to deny ourselves so that we can offer ourselves to God in obedience as holy sacrifices. Paul reminds us similarly that

a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the spirit, not by the letter.

He also calls us to

present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

So spiritual worship is that sacrifice of praise and the offering of obedience.

It comes from a spiritual heart that has been made alive by the Holy Spirit. So this means also that spiritual worship goes beyond public worship in the church on Sundays. It extends to your family, to your household worship around the table, to that private worship that you spend in the secret place, to your all-of-life worship that you offer every day doing whatever it is God called you to do to cultivate and to create in your little slice of creation. The difficulty is that no part of this inward spiritual life is natural in our fallen and sinful state.

So thankfully the Holy Spirit gives it to us. Paul writes in Philippians 3,

for we are the circumcision who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh.

So church, we can rejoice tonight in the fact that the Holy Spirit enables you to worship the Father in spirit, because he is spirit.

True worshipers worship in truth

Number two, true worshipers worship in truth. Jesus is the way and the truth and the life, so we no longer come to God through the blood of bulls and goats, which could never take away sins. We come trusting in the precious blood of Jesus, the Lamb of God who offered himself once for all. So worshiping in truth means that it must conform to scripture. Jesus prayed later in John,

sanctify them in the truth, your word is truth.

So scripture is our immovable standard. True worship is God-centered and therefore it's not governed by our feelings or whims. Though this is contrary to the individualistic spirit of our age, this is actually really, really good news for us. After all, Jeremiah says

our hearts are deceitful above all else. The heart is desperately sick. Who can understand it?

If we were left to ourselves, we would always drift towards idolatry, worshiping created things in the place of our creator. But we know that God despises idolatry. In Isaiah, he says,

I am the Lord, that is my name, my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols.

God cares how we worship him. How do we know this? Because he tells us how to worship him in scripture.

This is where the Samaritans went wrong. In editing the five books of Moses, they abandoned the place that God had appointed for sacrifice, the temple on Mount Zion. Even worse, even more high-handed, they set up a competing rival temple on their own mountain to deceive untold numbers of other people to go and practice their false worship. That rival temple on a different mountain is saying as if God doesn't mind a little change of scenery. They altered the terms of worship without approval and God did not accept them.

So worship that is not regulated by God's word is therefore false worship. To invent our own forms of worship, furthermore, is to actually insult God. He has revealed himself to us, and our response must be in accordance with his revelation. But true worship must be in spirit and truth.

Holding them together

So holding them together. Pastor Keith is fond of saying

good theology requires tension

, and he holds his hand up like that. Jesus joins together, but we too often separate. In spirit speaks of the inward life of faith and the heart's affections in responding to God. When we take it to mean in truth, it speaks of that objective revelation that's coming to us from without. And it's our mind grasping what is true about God so that the heart can respond rightly in spirit. So they are mutually intertwined, they go together.

Nevertheless, holding these together is not easy. Most of us tend to default towards one or the other. It's hard to bring a proud heart low in repentance. Harder still to bring a wandering mind to holy, Godward meditation. The last thing a proud soul wants to do is think deeply and meditate on God. It takes humility because the more you see the beauty of God, the more you behold God, the more ugly your own sin becomes. It also requires patience. Swimming in the depths of the infinite and eternal God takes a lifetime of prayerful, slow study and contemplation.

So true worship comes from people who both feel deeply and love sound doctrine. Strong affections for God on one hand, rooted in truth on the other. Those two together are the heart of biblical worship. Another way to say it is that true worship needs both heat and light. Let the light of truth ignite the heat of passion.

If we don't do this, we end up with one or the other, and truth without spirit leads to a dead, dry, lifeless orthodoxy, which will soon become heterodoxy, which will soon become heresy. And then spirit without truth quite simply leads to idolatry, or most often, the worship of the self. But to tremble humbly before God, to confess your sin to him, to believe in him, and to love him, and to long to know him more deeply, that is true spiritual worship. Charles Spurgeon puts it this way,

true worship lies in your heart paying reverence to him, your soul obeying him, and your inner nature coming into conformity to his own nature by the work of his spirit in your soul.

Three obstacles

So what keeps us from this sort of true worship? Here are three obstacles. The first obstacle is sin itself, the corruption of sin. Because at its root, all sin is idolatry. It's loving something more than God. So to worship God in spirit, you actually must turn from your sin. Your pride must be humbled, your lust must be put to death, and the evil desires of your heart must be cast aside. You cannot cling to your idols with one hand and lift the other hand in praise.

So the first act of true worship then is the prodigal's cry,

Father, I have sinned.

The second is that sweet cry of faith, Lord, I believe in Jesus and I trust in him for my salvation. And the third is, Father, thank you for saving me. Confession, faith, and gratitude are the foundation for all true worship.

The second obstacle is idolatry and ritualism or ceremonialism, which is essentially trading the unseen God for something we can see, taste, touch, hear, or smell. This is the sad history of pretty much all religion. Man will, apart from Christ, forget his God and set up something visible in the place of the invisible. This is why idolatry is the ruling religion of mankind, if we boil it down. From Jewish cleansing rituals to Roman Catholic relics and Eastern Orthodox icons, our default is to worship something tangible, something malleable, something that we can mold into whatever image we want.

But the new covenant, the good news of the gospel, is that that brings us out of those shadows and into the substance of Christ. Brothers and sisters, don't let empty rites and rituals or rote prayers or ceremonies distract you from truly worshiping the invisible God. Don't be tempted by counterfeits. Remember Israel at the foot of Sinai.

Up make us gods who shall go before us.

They wanted a God that they could see, and they could manage, and ultimately that they could tame. But the Lord is not served by human hands. He doesn't need us. We need him. The last obstacle afflicts us all. It's the twin afflictions of distraction and busyness.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.

Prone to leave the God I love,

right? How often do we sing lyrics without paying attention to the truths that they express? Pray while thinking about the next item on our to-do list, or work while thinking about the weekend? Our attention is a precious, limited resource, and one that is wasting away. Every notification and every buzz of modern life trains us to look away. not towards, and we carry those restless minds with us into the presence of God. So we show up, we go through the motions, our lips move and our hands may rise just a little, but our hearts might be somewhere else.

Jesus warns of this very thing in Matthew 15. He says, So slow down, persevere, be still and know that He is God. Take heart and know, on a weary Wednesday night, that the Father who seeks worshipers is patient with distracted and busy and restless hearts. And take advantage to lean into those simple, ordinary means that God has given us, week after week, in the liturgy that shapes our corporate gatherings every week.

This is why we sing the word with music full of scripture and full of heart. I think it was also Spurgeon that said,

if your heart doesn't sing, you've not really sung.

This is why we hear the word read and we receive it as if God himself is speaking to us. This is why we pray the word, we come before him reverently. We remind our restless hearts that they only find their rest in him. As we hear the word preached and we receive it with tenderness, we allow it to awaken our conscience and to respond in faith. We get the light and let the heat of our hearts overflow.

The test of true worship

And lastly, we see the word played out in baptism in the Lord's Supper. Visible proclamations of those inward, invisible spiritual realities. Christ's death, his resurrection, and our ongoing spiritual union with him. So, to conclude, what is the test of true worship?

It is witness. See, if you look a little further, the weary Samaritan woman came for water. She found the Messiah. Jesus says, I am he in John 4, 26. By faith, she found the satisfaction her soul had always longed for. John tells us that she left her water behind and she ran to go tell others about the living water she had found.

That's the biblical pattern. God reveals himself to us in Christ. We respond in faith. Faith overflows in worship, and worship brings us satisfaction in God. And a satisfied soul cannot help but to bear witness. That's exactly what happened in Samaria. In verses 39 and 41, it says, So church, the Father is still seeking worshipers to worship him in spirit and truth. You don't need to climb a mountain. You don't need to find the right building or say the right prayer. The holy ground is Jesus Christ himself. He's your redeemer and you can come to him weary. You can come to him thirsty. Confess your sin to him. Trust his blood for forgiveness and drink deeply of his grace. Let's pray.

Father, thank you so much for your grace to us and your word, sending your word to us to guide us, to give us the standard of truth so that we know we can worship you in truth. And Lord, for giving us your spirit so that we can worship you in spirit and for sending your son to unite the two in himself. I would thank you for making him holy and giving us our sweet union with him so that everywhere we go in Christ is holy ground. Help us have that perspective the rest of our weeks as we leave here and go to bed tonight and wake up and work tomorrow to do whatever it is you've called us to do. Help us worship you in spirit and truth. In your name we pray, amen.