Worship God in Spirit and in Truth - Part 1

Worship is engrained in the heart of every person, so much so that when given no opportunity to know the truth, people from every culture and age of human existence have focused our worship on something. Flying serpents, multi-limbed demons, golden calves, and even insects and housecats have been the object of adoration and worship by the ancient cultures. Much like the Greeks, our contemporaries worship science, knowledge, the arts, sports, and even humanity and independence. Yes, even those who claim to believe in no higher powers, grand architects, or in the afterlife worship something, and that is their own percieved intellect, insisting that their refusal to believe in something else is proof of their higher power of intelligence.

What sets Christians apart from everyone else is our worship of the One true God. He goes by many names that speak of His attributes. El Shaddai: Almighty God. El Elyon: Most High God. El Olam: The Everlasting God. Jehovah-Rohi: The Lord our Shepherd. The one name He self-declared is “Yahweh: The Self-Existent One” or I AM. He warned Moses and His chosen nation Israel to never make an image of Him to worship, because no image is worthy of the image of God. He has allowed no man to see Him, because His very holiness is enough to strike us down in instant death should we behold it. God is not a man (Numbers 23:19), although He often does and allows us to give Him anthropomorphic attributes so that we may somewhat understand the acts and presence of the Almighty God.

If all Christians worship Him, would it be safe to assume we all understand how to worship Him? To take it a step further, do we all worship Him properly and according to His decree? As much as I wish the answer to both questions were a resounding “YES!,” I’m afraid it may not be so. One does not have to look much further than pop culture to see Christians imitating the world and calling it worship, and this is done to the detriment of the church, and I think the biggest reason is because we don’t even realize we’re doing it wrong. But it’s not enough for me to say we’re doing it wrong; we need to look at the Scripture and see what it says so we will know that we are worshipping Him correctly. We will see some examples of those who worshipped Him incorrectly, and those who did not. Their stories turn out very different, and serve as a warning and a blueprint for us.

READ THE TEXT

God is a Spirit

The word “spirit” is the Greek pneuma from which we get the English words “pneumatic” and “pneumonia,” which refer to air.

The context is referred to by Thayer in his Greek lexicon as “a simple essence, devoid of all or at least all grosser matter, and possessed of the power of knowing, desiring, deciding, and acting;”

In other words, the spirit is not made up of matter, but does possess the ability to make decisions and to act upon them

For those of us who have to see and feel to believe, this is a difficult concept to grapple with, because it is not tangible.

Yet we know this is the essence of God because scripture teaches us this over and over.

In our text, it says simply “God is a Spirit”

Other translations say “God is spirit”

Essentially, God is THE spirit, and all others come from Him

Because God is spirit, that is why He has forbidden us from making images of Him, because He is image-less. Anything, whether something we see or something we imagine, that depicts God is a false depiction. We should not believe anything about God that is false

Any teaching that presents God in a false way is blasphemy, and any image that depicts God is idolatry, even if it is done ignorantly or well-intentioned

In Exodus 32, when Aaron made for the Hebrews a golden calf, he said “‘This is your God who brought you up out of Egypt,'”

He was telling them to worship the idol as Yahweh because he was depicting Yahweh as this golden calf. This was, of course, idolatry in it’s simplest form

It is very important for us to remember this when we see God depicted in cartoons, television shows, and even art: to create an image of God is to tread dangerously on the 2nd Commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image

Worship Him in spirit

When God created man, Genesis 2:7 tells us He breathed into man the “breath of life.” This is a spirit, and it is something every man possesses from the moment of creation, i.e. conception

Even though He had created all of the animals, including the air-breathing land creatures, it is never said God personally breathed into them the breath of life

Only man was given this spirit, and it was for a specific purpose: to be able to commune with God and to live in the presence of God

Because a spirit is formless and intangible, it cannot die like the body does, but it will die apart from the power of God sustaining it

We are given this command to worship God in spirit, but what does it mean?

Intangible

Our worship is not reliant on things we can see and hold

Rituals, relics, lightshows, dancing, smoke, loud music, and other outward displays of showmanship are not pleasing to the Lord, nor are they evidence of a spiritual worship.

In the Old Covenant, God gave a blueprint to Moses on how He should be worshipped

Sacrifices

Incenses

Purification

Spotlessness

Perfection

This is because the Spirit of God was not present in all of the worshippers…in fact, He was not present IN any of them. The Spirit was present in the Holy of Holies, and occasionally would move upon certain men for the purpose of revelation, but God commanded men to worship Him and gave them very specific guidelines because if they were to go off of what we are prone to do, it would have quickly become idolatry

The context of our text today is Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well.

The Jews and Samaritans had many disputes, not the least of which was where was the acceptable place to worship God

The Jews maintained that location was the temple in Jerusalem whereas the Samaritans insisted Mount Gerazim was appropriate

Jesus steps in to tell the Samaritan woman that the location and the rituals are no longer appropriate, but that we worship in Spirit and in Truth, wherever we are

Internal

True, spirit-filled worship comes from within ourselves

This is not because we come up with it on our own

But because the Spirit of God dwells in the heart of the believer and gives our spirit the understanding and life that is necessary to worship him

It is not man-centered, but is merely uttered from our own spirits and offered up to the Holy Spirit

We cannot worship what we do not know

In Jeremiah 31:33, God promises to put His law on the hearts of His people, so they will know how to worship and obey Him

We are able to worship Him in spirit because our spirits now connected with Him through Jesus’ atonement

In chapter 2 of his book, Joel prophesied God’s words that He would pour out His spirit on His people in the last days, and Peter declared in Acts chapter 2 that this has been fulfilled

So because the Spirit and the Law have been given to us, we are able to worship Him in Spirit

We must love God if we are to worship Him

“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” - Matthew 6:24 (ESV)

We have to love God and Him alone

It is not acceptable to divide our love between Him and ANYTHING else

Our worship is tied to our love: if we love God part-time, we will worship Him part-time, which means we do not worship Him at all

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” - Matthew 22:37 (ESV)

We have to love God entirely; He demands full, undivided love for Him

This does not mean we cannot love others

We are actually commanded to love others

Enemies

Neighbors

Brothers and sisters

Parents

But we are to love God above all others

If we love the Lord entirely and undivided, our spirit will be in tune with His Spirit, and only then can we worship Him in Spirit

Until this happens, we are worshipping Him to the best of our knowledge and ability, which is sadly insufficient

To see an example of this is to look back in Genesis 4 at Cain

We know he offered a sacrifice that was not accepted

What we do not know is why it was not accepted

But what we also do know is that his spirit was not in communion with the Lord

The Lord did not find favor with Cain or his sacrifice

The issue seems to be two-fold: Cain’s spirit was wrong and his method was wrong

We have looked at the first part of worship, in spirit and next week we will focus on the second part, in truth. The reason both of these are mentioned by Jesus is because while we must commune and worship Him in our spirit and by His Spirit, there are still practical truthful actions and applications that we should utilize when we worship.

In closing, I want to share this word of wisdom from Charles Spurgeon. “The best worship that we ever render to God is far from perfect. Our praises, how faint and feeble they are! Our prayers, how wandering, how wavering they are! When we get nearest to God, how far off we are! When we are most like Him, how greatly unlike Him we are!”

Although it is important that we worship Him in truth, we must start by worshipping Him in spirit, however imperfect it may be. If our spirit - our heart, as it commonly is called - is coming before Him in the right attitude, that is to say, humbly and reverently, He will be patient to teach us how to worship in truth.

“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” - Micah 6:8