Daily Archive

John 4, in the encounter with the woman at the well, Jesus says to her in verse 23, “An hour is coming and now is when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. For such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is spirit and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”

Now it sounds simple, it’s not really. Some people are confused by it. What does it mean to worship in spirit and truth? And by the way, the first thing I want to point out is if you ever hear somebody talking about a seeker -sensitive worship service, we’re not the ones seeking. The Bible’s clear on that. We aren’t the seekers. God is. He’s the one who’s seeking. If you want to craft a worship service to cater to the seekers, then God should be the entire focus of the whole thing. Imagine that. God tells us there’s none who seek. There’s none who do good. No, not one. But Jesus has come to seek and to save the lost. And He says here, “for such people the Father seeks to be His worshippers.”

Do you realize God came looking for you today that you might come to worship Him? You’re not here by chance. And if you worry about the people who aren’t here, Spurgeon said don’t focus on the seats that are empty. It doesn’t do any good. Focus on the seats that are full. Because this is who God wanted here this morning. How do I know that? If God didn’t want you here, you wouldn’t be here. He sought you to bring you here to worship and exalt His name with His people this morning. That is our blood -bought privilege. To come into worship in spirit and truth.

Why do we worship in spirit and truth? What does it mean, worship in spirit and truth? First, we worship in spirit because God is spirit. And when we come to Him, we are to commune with Him. Now we love Him with all that we are, right? Heart, soul, mind and strength. Everything we are, we worship God with. But ultimately, worship is a spiritual exercise. It is our spirit communing with His spirit.

There are those who would say that they come and they sing and they do all of this and they feel the presence of God. I want to let you know, you’re in the presence of God whether you feel it or not. Now, if you do feel it, hallelujah. Glory to God. But don’t let your feelings dictate the reality of the fact that we are here gathered in the presence of God with the spirit in our midst, with the angels looking in as we exalt God. That makes this a lot more than just getting up to go to church, doesn’t it? To be as ministers in the audience, the congregation of the saints and the angels to exalt God, to worship Him in the spirit and in truth.

In John 8, when we talk about the truth, John 8, 31 and 32, so Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, if you abide in my word, then you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free. Now, what is the truth that we are to know? What is it to worship God in spirit and in truth? And by the way, it’s in spirit and truth. It’s not in spirit without the truth, or not in the spirit but with the truth. The preposition modifies both, in spirit and truth. That means you can’t have one without the other. When you come to worship God, it has to be in spirit and truth, both, not one or the other. Paul explains this in Philippians 3:3, “For we are the circumcision, who worship in the Spirit of God and boast in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh.”

To worship in spirit then means enabled to worship by the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit’s ministry? As He testifies of Christ, how does Jesus explain the Holy Spirit? In John 14:17, “He is the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it does not see Him or know Him. You know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.” This means the world can’t worship God. They can’t. They try. They think they worship God. They don’t. They can’t. It’s impossible. If you do not have the Spirit of God in you, you cannot worship God because you don’t even know who He is.

In John 15, verse 26, “When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth, who proceeds from the Father, He will bear witness about Me. “

And John 16:13, “But when He, the Spirit of Truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth. For He will not speak from Himself, but whatever He hears He will speak, and He will disclose to you what is to come.” This is to be enabled by the Holy Spirit.

Then to worship in truth means that we have one Mediator. There is only one Way to the throne of God to worship Him, and that is through Jesus. He tells us that in John 14:6, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Me.” Now there are some that think, well, that means you can’t get saved unless you come through Jesus. Oh, it means a whole lot more than that. It means our only access to the Father ever is through Jesus. We come through Him because of Him. Because He is the Way to the Father. He is the Truth. He is the Life.

That means to worship in Spirit and truth requires three things. And actually these all, by the way, Jesus says, all of these are a must in the Scripture. Three things you must do. The first in John 3:3, “Jesus answered and said to Him, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” If you’re not born of the Spirit of God, you can’t see the Kingdom of God. You can’t understand the Kingdom of God. You can’t worship God. Your prayer is an abomination. The prayer of the wicked is an abomination.

You want to know how God relates to the world. Yes, there is general love for the world and care for the world, but when God looks at the world, He is angry with the wicked every day. We don’t need to be witnessing telling people, Jesus loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. We need to be telling people to flee the wrath to come and then show them the way, and that is Jesus. Jesus said this in verse 7 of John 3, “Do not marvel that I said to you, you must be born again.”

To worship in spirit and truth, first there has to have been regeneration. You have to have been brought from death to life by the Spirit of God through the preaching and the reading of the gospel, because “the gospel is the power of God to salvation to everyone who believes.”

The second must is also in John 3 in verse 14, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” To worship God in spirit and truth, first you have to be regenerated by the Spirit of God. So if you have been regenerated by the power of God you are coming through Jesus, who is our Redeemer, He’s brought our redemption, “He must be lifted up.”

And as He’s lifted up, He says He will draw all men to Himself. So the Spirit regenerates us and we come through Jesus. That opens the door for the third must. And that’s back in our text in John 4:24. First you must be born again. Second, Jesus must be lifted up so that we come through Him. Then, God is Spirit and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. This means you have to know Him to worship Him.

Now Paul tells us, there will be those who come in who don’t know and who aren’t saved. And they may hear the gospel and be saved while the church is meeting. But you understand, the primary function of worship is not to bring your lost friends in to let the preacher evangelize them.

The preaching ministry is to equip you to go be salt and light on the mission field out there where God has called you to serve Him. We in the body help. We strategize. We plan. We educate. We make disciples in the church so that we can go make disciples from the world.

As we do that, we’re bringing people to be born again by the power of the gospel, to be redeemed by the blood of Jesus, and to come worship God as He tells us to worship Him. That means we do what God’s Word tells us to do when it comes to the worship of God. We don’t just do what we want to do. Too much worship today really is coming to God with a mindset of a consumer. “I’m going to go to church and get something from God for me to get me through this week to come.” Now, if you’re coming and doing what you want to do, wasn’t that the problem with Cain? All the way back at the beginning, God said, offer this to me as a sacrifice. And Abel said, good to go. And God was pleased. And Cain said, nah, I’ve got something better. And Cain brought what he wanted to bring, what he thought was important. And he was cursed as a result of it.

The jealousy of that encounter led him to kill Abel, to murder the first murder in the history of the world, resulted from wrong worship. When we come to God for what we can get, when we come as a consumer, you understand who we’re actually worshiping? Ourselves. You see churches that will have traditional service and contemporary service and blended service and young service and old service and old people and no kids and kids and no old people and they take the body of Christ and God says, don’t cause division in my body and they divide His body up into a million pieces and give everybody what they want. That’s not the church. The church is the covenant community of God gathering from young to old to praise and to worship God knowing that the only way we can even praise Him is coming by the power of the Spirit through Jesus our Savior.

And through Him we come and here’s the glory of worship. The focus of the glory, and I know people say well Jesus is God so we worship Jesus. We worship God and the focus actually is paternal because when we gather to worship guess what Jesus and the Spirit are doing? Interceding on our behalf before the throne of grace before the Father. So we are joining with the Spirit and the Son at the throne of the Father to exalt God. That’s worship. We need to do it God’s way. To come and to be compelled to worship Him. To not be able to stand it if He’s not being worshiped.


When you realize that the word worship, in Old English it would have been expressed worth -ship. It’s to come and proclaim the worthiness of God. Now you know why it’s going to take us forever to do that. Because, we won’t even have scratched the surface of how worthy our God is. To worship God’s way means it’s all about God. We are a kingdom of priests and our ministry is to Him. The ministry of the Levite priest was a ministry to God before the people. That’s why it’s not about celebrity preachers and it’s not about eloquent preachers. It’s about men who fear God and who stand in the pulpit and preach His word unashamedly. It’s about people who want to hear that word because in that word Jesus is revealed to them and becomes even much more sweeter today than He was yesterday.

It is to come and praise God for who He is, to thank Him for what He’s done and then to know we’re going to get a lot out of that because the Word in the hands of the Spirit is going to conform us. It’s going to change. If you come and you worship and you leave here and you’re not changed, wake up. God’s Word changes us. We’re sanctified by it as we sit under the preaching of the Word. As God’s Word is put into practice then, as we obey it, this is to turn to Him, not away from Him. We worship Him as He desires.