Worship in Spirit and Truth | Sermon by Gray Gardner (3.27.22)

Introduction

We’ve been preaching on worship here at Forest Hill over the last several weeks, helping you to understand why we gather together to worship as we do week by week, and what’s happening when we do so.

Today we’re looking at a story from John 4 to talk about what makes our worship powerful.

Here’s the truth: We believe that there is power in our worship.

We see examples throughout Scripture:

Like in 2 Chron 20:1-30 where Israel is led into victory over their enemies after an amazing worship service. They literally sent the worship leaders first to lead them in praise onto the battle field, and the result was victory and peace. Worship is weaponized!

Or like Acts 16:16-34 where Paul and Silas worship aloud while chained up in prison. An earthquake shakes the jail and breaks down the walls so that the prisoners can go free. The jailer is so profoundly moved that he asks Paul and Silas what he must do to be saved. Then he invited them into his house so they could share the gospel with his family, and all of them believed and that night were baptized.

How do we know when worship is powerful? When it actually moves the dial in our lives? In our church? In the unseen realm where spiritual battle is waged?

What transforms singing in any other context — a U2 or Zac Brown concert — into a chorus of heavenly praise that joins up with the songs of angels and makes the gates of hell shake?

It’s hard to measure the power of our worship just by looking at results.

Is worship powerful when someone raises their hands?

When the music is really loud and makes your chest thump?

When it moves people emotionally?

Barring an earthquake or the heavens opening or angels appearing during our worship services, I’m not sure we can really get a reliable read on how effective or powerful our worship actually is. There’s more going on than meets the eye.

We must look at faithfulness to God’s Word instead of the results of our actions in evaluating the power of our worship.

Which leads me to underscore this fundamental point when we consider worship:

The power of our worship is directly related to our ability to worship God the way that He wants.

Illustrate/apply:

When you leave here on a Sunday and you’re eating your chips and queso or whatever you do, chatting about what you thought about the service, how do you determine if it was a good worship service?

Is it how it made you feel, or if we played a song you liked or didn’t like, or if your favorite person preached or not, or if the volume was too loud or too quiet, or how long the service or sermon was?

Imagine if you planned your kid’s birthday party the way many of us approach worship services. What do I want to do? Who do I want to invite? What do I want to eat? What kind of cake do I want?

Okay, Finley, for your third birthday I’ve invited all my old college buddies! Get ready, because we’re going to stuff ourselves on BBQ before going axe throwing! No cake, sorry, I don’t really like it, but we will probably let the adults get drinks at the axe place. Hope you love your big day!

Meanwhile your kid’s like, I thought this was supposed to be about me?

Here’s the thing: I have far too many conversations with people—congregants and staff included—that spend far too much time talking about our wants and our preferences and our desires in worship, and far too little time talking about what God wants.

If there’s one thing you hear from this series and that you hear today, it’s this: Worship is not about you. Worship is about God.

Worship benefits you. It transforms you. It fills you with hope and joy and peace. It inspires you to love God and love others.

But it is not about you.

Worship is about glorifying God, making much of Him.

And if we really want to make much of God in our lives and when we gather together in our worship as a church family, then we have to ask: What does God want?

Scripture Reading

Our Scripture passage today takes us to the one place where Jesus specifically tells us what God wants from those who worship Him.

It comes in John 4, in what’s sort of an odd situation to find Jesus giving clear teaching on worship. If you have a Bible or the app on your phone, go ahead and open up to John 4. We’re going to hang in here a while.

Because it’s a longer passage, and I’ll be stopping to add some commentary along the way, you can stay seated during the reading.

John 4:1–26 (ESV)

1 Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John 2 (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), 3 he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. 4 And he had to pass through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.

Picture the setting. Jesus is exhausted — the text says he’s “wearied” — from his journey. Three days walking through the hot, arid land. It’s the sixth hour, meaning it’s noon. The sun is high, and it’s hot. He finally pulls up to this well where he can get a drink of water.

Imagine the feeling. It’s July. You’ve just come in from cutting the grass or a long walk or run. Your mouth is dry. You’re parched, sweaty, legs are still throbbing when you sit down. All you want is a drink of water and to zone out for a moment.

That’s where Jesus is at physically. But as we’ll see, he doesn’t zone out.

7 A woman from Samaria came to draw water.

Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.)

9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)

Jesus breaks some significant social and religious norms here.

First, he’s a Jewish man, talking to a woman in public. That was strictly forbidden — we see this illustrated in the disciples’ concern later in the chapter. It was AD 30, not AD 2022, so you have to understand there’s a considerable gap in the way culture operated then.

Second, she was a Samaritan. The Samaritans were regarded by the Jews as despised half-breeds, the offspring of the resettlement policies of the cruel Assyrians, who after sacking the Northern Kingdom in 722 B.C. transported large groups of conquered Jews to other conquered sites and repopulated the partially vacated sites with other conquered peoples (2 Kgs 17:5–6, 24). The result was an intermingling of peoples who in the mixing of the races lost much of their former national identities and were thus forced to develop new syncretistic identities (2 Kgs 17:25–41). The Jewish desire for a pure and loyal people of God, particularly after the return from the Babylonian exile, led Ezra to develop a segregation policy that excluded Samaritans and others of mixed backgrounds (Ezra 9–10).

The Samaritans responded to their rejection by making their own Samaritan Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) and promoted a new form of temple worship on Mount Gerizim, antagonizing the Jews who believed in the original Pentateuch and the temple in Jerusalem.

Needless to say, the Jews hated the Samaritans, and the Samaritans hated the Jews. But the Jews actually had laws which forbade them from associating with Samaritans. This is what the woman is referring to.

She cannot believe that a Jewish man would speak to her. But this is no ordinary Jewish man.

10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.”

Clearly, she’s not yet on his wavelength.

13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

By living water, Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit. Later in John he talks about how the Holy Spirit creates in us rivers of life that forever satisfy our souls.

Keep this in mind for later.

She’s at the well to deal with her physical thirst. She’s blind to the fact that there is a person in front of her who can forever satisfy the thirst of her soul for love, belonging, purpose, and meaning.

15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

Still not getting it. So Jesus presses in to the heart.

16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.”

17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.”

Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”

Jesus goes straight for the heart.

He’s surgical with his statements, and goes directly for her pain point, the place where she’s been hurt, the place where she also currently living in sin.

Now we know why the woman is fetching water alone in the hottest part of the day. Usually women in these times would go together to fetch water, in the morning or evenings when the temperature was milder.

But she’s clearly avoiding being around other women.

She had been married five times, and was currently sleeping with a man that was not her husband.

In that culture there would have been significant social consequences for her as a result. Not only would she be ostracized religiously, she would likely carried significant shame everywhere she went. Especially given that she was openly living with a man she wasn’t married to.

Some of you have been through divorce. You know the heartache, the pain, the cost. Others of you have been through the death of a spouse. We don’t know how many of this women’s previous marriages ended in divorce, or how many were the result of her being widowed, but try and imagine the emotional, social, and spiritual toll this must have taken on her.

You can imagine the shock and discomfort she must have felt having this pain exposed by a stranger — by having this shame exposed.

How could he know this about me?

19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”

She quickly changes the subject, likely because she doesn’t want to talk about her relational affairs, and also because there’s probably an element of amazement at Jesus’s insight.

I love the flow of this dialogue because it’s so human.

Rather than discuss her relationship issues with Jesus, she changes the subject to a highly debated question that Jews and Samaritans had been talking about for centuries.

It would be like if someone came to talk to you and said, “Hey I’d like to talk to you about this really secret, private sin you’ve been dealing with.”

And you’re like, “Did you vote for Biden or Trump last election?”

“What’s your opinion on vaccine mandates?”

“Critical race theory — GO!”

“So tell me how you felt about the storming of the capital?”

She moves out of the discomfort of talking about herself to talking about one of the most controversial issues between their people.

As John Piper says in reference to this text, “A trapped animal will gnaw off its own leg.”

She’s trapped.

Jesus sees into her, so she shifts — to a commonly known controversial topic.

But Jesus is not interested in getting abstract.

The question of worship is not theoretical for Jesus. He knows that it is life or death for this woman.

He is not distracted by her discomfort or her change of subject.

Like Jordan locked in ready to hit a game winning shot, Jesus is fixated on bringing her to a place of true worship.

21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.

She was interested — like the Jews and Samaritans before her — in the place of worship.

Jesus blows all that up.

“It’s not about the place anymore,” he essentially says.

He goes on...

23 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. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

Not this mountain versus that mountain. Not this sect versus that sect. True worship isn’t about the place, the “where.”

True worship is about the “who” the “what” and the “how.”

You worship God in Spirit and Truth.

And that’s how Jesus moves a conversation with a female Samaritan adulterer by a well in the heat of midday to the topic of worship that pleases the Father.

Now there’s so much to this story I wish I could teach, but we need to focus in on those last two verses, John 4:23-24. Here, Jesus gives us clear teaching on worship.

Remember how we started earlier.

I said: The power of our worship is directly related to our ability to worship God the way that He wants.

According to Jesus, then, the power of our worship is dependent on us worshiping God in Spirit and in Truth.

Let’s chat about what it means to worship in Spirit and Truth. Let’s start with truth.

Worship in Truth

Worship that pleases God is truthful. In fact, all worship must begin with a true encounter with God.

I see several ways we must worship in truth:

In one sense, we worship God truthfully by being authentic, honest, and transparent with where we’re at.

The woman at the well comes in the middle of her junk.

Jesus meets her right there.

That is the kind of person God is seeking to worship Him, apparently. The person who’s relational life is a wreck, who is living in open sin, who has a past. The person who probably thinks to themselves, “I’m too far gone.”

That’s exactly the person God is seeking to worship Him.

But he’s after anyone who deals truthfully with where they’re at. Who honestly brings their joys and frustrations and struggles into His presence and allows Him to work with them right there.

There should be no masks or facades in worship. Worship that is powerful and honoring to God is worship that comes from the truth of where we’re at.

It deals with the real stuff of life.

Wherever you are this morning — whether you’re acting like everything’s great when in reality it’s falling apart, or if you’re a mess and there’s no way you could possibly cover it up — God is seeking you and initiating with you and wooing you.

God always meets you where you are at. But he refuses to leave you there.

But there are two other ways we worship in Truth that I think are more closely related to what Jesus is saying here.

(1) We worship God truthfully by knowing Him as He is revealed in Scripture.

In order for your worship to please God, you must have a view of God — a knowledge of God — that is directly informed by how He is revealed in Scripture.

The object of your worship must be the real God, the Creator, YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Triune God made known to us through His Word and through the Incarnate Son, Jesus Christ.

Colossians 1:15 “15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.”

Hebrews 1:3 “3 He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.”

This is why you need to dive deep into Scripture so that you can be sure that your view of God is not just a projection of your ideal self. We all need to align our view of God with who He actually is.

Muslims and Mormons are sincere and devout, but their worship is not true worship because it is not worship to the true God.

The object of our worship must be God — God as he truly is, not how we want Him to be.

(2) We worship God truthfully by approaching Him in ways that align with Scripture.

Two weeks ago I preached from Isaiah and I asked you to consider: What does your posture in worship tell you about the worth of the God you worship?

Our posture must align with the truth.

Did you know that your posture in worship actually has an effect on your felt experience of God’s Spirit in your live?

That’s what James tells us in James 4:8: “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.”

When we draw near to God, He comes closer in more pronounced ways, more experiential ways.

But we see through Scripture that we’re not just free to come to God in any way we want. Our posture must reflect the worth of His character.

We can’t draw near in our pride, demanding He meet our needs.

1 Peter 5:5 “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

We can’t draw near on as if it’s just a transaction — I do this worship for you, so that you will bless me — and expect that it blesses God’s heart.

Ps 51:17 “17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

We can’t draw near in Sunday praises and expect Him to be blessed when Monday through Saturday we’re disobedient rebels.

1 Sam 15:22-23 “22 And Samuel said, “Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams. 23 For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king.””

We must inform our approach of God with truth.

So to worship in truth is to have our thoughts and our actions in worship informed by and grounded in Scripture.

Worship in Spirit

Your spirit is the core of who you are as a human person. It is also referred to in Scripture as your heart, or your will. Different words to express the same meaning.

(1) We worship in spirit by having our deepest affections, longings, and loves set ablaze by God’s love.

Worshiping in spirit is an emotional affair. It is not the same as emotionalism, which is all about creating an emotional high void of any substance. This is about having truth that so affects your heart that it causes it to burst with love and desire for God.

(2) We worship in spirit by submitting our wills to God.

This refers not just to your deepest affections, longings, and loves, but also your will — the “choosing mechanism” in your soul.

John Ortberg talks about how the will is always looking to establish a kingdom.

Think of a two year old’s favorite words: “No!” and “Mine!” These are kingdom words which come out as a toddler begins developing their own will.

You can have a strong or weak will, depending on how effective you are at effectively asserting your will.

Both my 5 and 3 year olds happen to have very strong wills!

What do we call strong-willed children?

Spirited!

The will, the heart, the spirit — it’s the core of who you are. More than just meat and matter. You are spirit.

So what does it mean that God is seeking people who worship in spirit?

He is seeking worshipers who worship Him from their core of their being, whose most basic desires and affections are set on Him, who are emotionally affected by His goodness and grace and beauty. Who are drawn up into praise because their hearts burst from the overflow of His love.

He is seeking worshipers who worship Him by submitting their will to God’s, who willingly say no to their own kingdom-building agendas in order to find themselves fully in His.

He is seeking worshipers who worship Him in Spirit and Truth.

Here’s the problem:

Our natural state is one in which our minds are darkened and we do not understand truth, and our spirits are so shriveled and broken by sin that left on their own, they cannot worship God.

Rom 1:21 “21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.”

Eph 4:18 “18 They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.”

Sin so shrivels the human spirit that it can hardly be called alive at all. It is disconnected from its life source, from God itself.

This is why Jesus, in the chapter right before John 4, in John chapter 3, tells Nicodemus that he must be born again.

John 3:5–6 (ESV)

5 Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

To be born of water is just to be born — he’s referring to natural biological life.

To be born of the Spirit, however, is to be born again in the deepest recesses of your spirit.

The theological word for this spiritual birth is regeneration.

The Holy Spirit of God softens our hearts and pours life into our spirits, like a glass of cool water on hot day. He opens our minds to what is true, and he enlivens our spirits by His Spirit.

Except the Holy Spirit doesn’t just pour water and leave. He stays with us and creates a spring of life within us where once there was no life from God.

(3) We worship in spirit when we are filled with the Holy Spirit.

Let’s go back to the Samaritan woman.

John 4:10-13

10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water... [that will become] a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Jesus further clarifies what he means by this later in John’s gospel.

In chapter 7, he says this:

John 7:37–39 (ESV)

38 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’ ” 39 Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.

When you believe in Jesus — when you come to see Him as the Savior of the world, the Son of God, who died for your sins and rose again — the Spirit of God actually takes up residence in your heart, producing a river of living water that constantly satisfies you.

The idea of being “born again” has been hijacked in political discourse to refer to crazy right wing evangelicals who try and enforce their rigid morality on the rest of society. Being “born again” is not a political descriptor of a particular group of Christians. Being “born again” is the definition of anyone who loves and follows Jesus. It is the beautiful truth that Jesus gives us His Spirit to resuscitate our dead spirits and give us life eternal.

Unless you’re born again of God’s Spirit, you cannot see Jesus for who He really is in His glory, in His beauty, which means you cannot be moved to worship Him with the fullness of warmed affections in your heart.

To worship God the way he desires, we must be born again. We must have the Spirit of God living in our hearts and filling us with desires for Him.

Worship in Spirit and Truth: What it means for the church

Worship is powerful when it aligns with what God wants, and what God wants is for us to worship in Spirit and Truth. This means a few things for us as a church as we come together in worship week by week:

It means we ground everything we do in Scripture.

Col 3:16 “16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.”

We read Scripture. We sing Scripture. We pray Scripture. We preach Scripture. Why? Because it is God’s very Word, revealing to us the path of righteousness.

It means we prioritize the Gospel.

Since God is revealed primarily through Jesus, and since our salvation comes through Jesus’s death and resurrection — the gospel message — we focus our hearts and minds on the truth of who Jesus is and what He’s done for us.

It means we aim for your heart in worship.

Our service structure, the songs we choose, the way we set up our music and production, the videos and lighting and instrumentation and melodies and moments that make up a worship service — we’re trying, by God’s grace, to stir up our affections so that we feel in our bones the truth of what we’re reading and singing.

It means we focus on God’s glory rather than our preferences.

Remember, the question of whether our worship is powerful, or if our services are good, is not defined by our felt needs being met.

Our focus is on magnifying the name of Jesus. And when your focus is on that, you will always be satisfied.

John Piper: “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.”

Ironically, by focusing on our own preferences and comforts in worship, we miss the opportunity to actually be satisfied on a soul level. But when we shift focus to glorifying God, making His name famous in our midst, then we find our spirits alive in the Spirit of God, satisfied as by living water.

Worship benefits you. But worship is not about you.

Listen: I love you. Which is why I need to tell you this. Your comfort, expectations, preferences, and felt needs are not the primary guides for how we plan services. Too many Christians bounce around from church to church on the ecclesiastical buffet, getting worship from this place, preaching from this person, youth ministry here, kids ministry there. We are so shaped by consumerism that it’s often difficult to move ourselves out of the center of the story when we enter the sanctuary for worship.

Meeting your consumer needs in worship is way below our calling as pastors and shepherds who love you and want to help you magnify God in your lives.

I’m not giving my life to make you happy. I’m giving my life to make you holy. In so doing, you’ll find more happiness than you could ever imagine. But if you seek first happiness, you’ll get neither happiness nor holiness.

Worship that is powerful, that God wants, is worship in Spirit and Truth.

Fire Illustration

It’s like a fire. You have to have fuel — the logs and kindling. That’s the truth.

The flame is the Holy Spirit’s igniting of that truth so that it is engulfed in love and praise and adoration of the God revealed in that truth.

The heat that comes from that fire is our worship.

And the felt experience of a fire’s heat is warmth.

The felt experience that others experience when we worship in Spirit and Truth is the warmth of the Gospel, a witness to the fact that what we’re singing about is true.

This kind of worship has defeated armies in battle. It’s broken down prison walls. It’s softened hard hearts and made them sensitive to God’s Spirit. It’s waged war in the heavenly places against the powers of darkness that want to keep you trapped in your limited perspective.

Closing

The woman at the well left her watering jar and ran back into town. She wasn’t yet believing that Jesus was the Messiah, but the Spirit was working. The Spirit was changing her heart, pouring life into her arid soul.

The Father was seeking her to worship Him.

The heat of her own heart’s eventual worship resulted in a warmth and commendation of the Gospel that the whole town felt.

Consider how the story ends:

John 4:39–42 (ESV)

39 Many Samaritans from that town believed in [Jesus] because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.”

Your worship can be powerful when it aligns with God’s will in spirit and truth. It can change others’ lives as you bear witness to the truth of the Gospel and a transformed life.

Church: Let’s be such people the Father is seeking. Let’s worship Him in Spirit — full affections, love, adoration — and truth — rich, heart-level knowledge of who He is and what He’s done for us.

PRAY