“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.” – John 4:23,24
Jesus says to the Samaritan woman that it is the time in history when true worshipers will be distinguished by one trait: there are those who worship in spirit and in truth and everyone else. Is this how you worship God?
“God is seeking worshipers.” Let that statement sink into you. We can easily slip into careless frames of mind and assume that God is looking for Baptists or Catholics, Reformed Christians, evangelistically minded people, or fiscal/political conservatives. Perhaps God is after a certain look, a certain demographic! No, God is seeking worshipers.
To worship God means, at the least, to attend to Him. The psalmist captures the opposite of worship as he describes the wicked: “God is in none of his thoughts.” That denunciation could be true of Baptists, Catholics and fiscal/political conservatives. In fact, sometimes the scandal of a God-less mind is made tolerable just by means of these religious or demographic identifiers.
The other day I invited someone to Christianity Explored, to investigate the Christ. “I’m a ____________________ “ (insert tribal marker here), he snarled. Behold! Here was someone letting his quasi religious, quasi-ethnic marker stand in for a God-attentiveness.
But not so the worshiper. The worshiper has sanctified God in his thoughts; meaning that there is a well-worn trail between his thoughts on everything else and his thoughts on God. He keeps going back to God. The worshiper has taken some trouble, quite a lot of trouble, to understand Him. He moves when God tells him to move. He admires God and, if that admiration just isn’t coming—he’ll work to get to the place where he admires again. To put it in a pithy phrase, in the worshiper, God’s name is hallowed.
“God is seeking worshipers.” We need to fear the lazy mood that imagines as long as we’re still using the right slogans and finding ourselves in the right group, we’ll be fine. Not so! Truth is not a vessel, where, once on board, we can settle in for the journey. No, we walk in the truth. Attentively. God is seeking worshipers; not ‘those who once worshiped.’
But not just worshiping God. Worshiping Him under certain qualifications, “in spirit and truth.” Not in spirit and in truth, as if these qualities could be separated and owned one at a time (i.e., Spirit? Check. Truth? Check). But how does one worship “in spirit and truth”?
Well, the qualifiers here do not signify that in our worship we must have enthusiasm + orthodox doctrine. Both of these are appropriate but not exactly what Jesus is after here. In fact, Jesus is not giving instructions on how to worship properly, but rather stating how true worship will be rendered from this time forward. Not prescription but description.
He says, God must be, by definition, worshiped this way—“in spirit and truth”—just because “God is spirit.” The quality of God defines the worship; but what is this quality, ‘spirit?’
To say that “God is spirit” entails that He is invisible and omnipresent and thus cannot be tied to a place. He moves freely and will not be administered or contained. He is divine and heavenly and above—far above!—flesh. He is not dependent on others to keep him alive but rather life giving! He moves, but is Himself not able to be moved. He is not out of reach, hidden, until He presents Himself.
So to worship the God Who is spirit means that we cannot worship God on our own, without heaven’s help. To worship the God Who is spirit requires that our worship be spiritually derived: You can’t cart God around and call the scene a religious festival. You can’t confine Him to one place and get by with calling the area ‘sacred.’ You can’t glue Him to a demographic or religious marker.
God is spirit: He is not wringing His hands hoping that the stuff-of-flesh, the earth-bound, will remember to keep Him alive. He is not at our beck and won’t respond to incantation.
God is spirit: He initiates worship!
God is spirit: A statement not only telling us about Him, but also telling us what we need Him for. “Spirit gives birth to spirit.”
Once more: God must present Himself if flesh is to know spirit. And so He has, in the true account of the Word becoming flesh, the One and Only Son revealing the Father whom no one has seen. God has appeared in Jesus. You cannot worship the One God without the knowledge of Jesus. Jesus is what is true about God.
To worship God properly, then, is possible only through a lively gift from heaven that always takes a certain look: a studied attentiveness to Jesus!
… And maybe you’ll be Baptist, too!
To summarize: The worshipers whom God seeks worship him out of the fullness of the supernatural life they enjoy (‘in spirit’), and on the basis of God’s incarnate Self-Expression, Christ Jesus himself, through whom God’s person and will are finally and ultimately disclosed (‘in truth’); and these two characteristics form one matrix, indivisible. – Carson, John 225
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So, if I am understanding this right (I’ve always been a little fuzzy on the phrasing “in spirit and truth” in John), it is because we are in Christ that we can worship in spirit and truth. Placed in Him, we have a spiritual life we did not have before. “Spirit” is no longer alien to us. Christ makes true worship of God possible, then.
But what of Old Testament worshippers who were not clear on this point? When you read Daniel, you get the impression He understood very much that God was Spirit and worshipped in awe. My mind is stretching but not fully comprehending all that this is.
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