Seeking Worshipers

But 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. (John 4:23)

I read a small book a number of years ago about this very text that had a real impact on me. It was a book about worship and what real worship is as opposed to the kinds of worship we most often see in our churches. The author brought out something that I just spent some time researching myself to see how accurate it was. He said that this word translated seeks, the seeking that God is doing looking for true worshipers, is a word containing implications that go beyond just a casual kind of looking around. It implies an elevated priority in the attention of the seeker, an intensity and focus of purpose in the seeking.

As I reviewed many of the other places in the New Testament where this word was used, that is just what I found myself. It is used to refer to Herod intently seeking for the baby Jesus in Bethlehem to kill Him. A number of times this word is used to describe the way the Jewish leaders sought to trap Jesus, to find excuses to kill Him, to discredit Him in any way possible and which ultimately culminated in His death on the cross at their instigation.

Jesus used it many times to talk about how God seeks for the lost to save them. He also says that instead of our seeking to focus on our needs like food and clothing, we need to seek the kingdom of heaven first and all these others things will be taken care of by our Father in heaven. And while this word is not the most intense form of seeking, it certainly implies a focus of desire that makes it more important relative to many other things that normally would take up one's attention.

So to say explicitly that the Father in heaven is seeking individuals and people to worship Him in both spirit and truth is of great importance it seems to me. It also may well indicate the scarcity of such people since it appears that it might be quite difficult for God to easily find such worshipers. These words may likely be designed to rivet our attention to the fact that if we want to be found among those who honestly and truly worship God the way it needs to happen that it is not going to just fall into place naturally for us. Since this kind of worship is likely to be popular or common, we need to spend much more attention and energy doing some seeking of our own to find out personally just what God really is looking for in this kind of real worship.

Since it is becoming very evident to me in the past few years that salvation is much more about a relationship with God than about getting my act together and eliminating sin, then it would also follow that the kind of worship Jesus is talking about here is likely focused much more on coming into right relationship with the Father instead of figuring out just the right external practices or formalities that will supposedly trigger my acceptance with Him. Most religion as practiced by people of every stripe focuses primarily on the externals, on behavior modification or on rituals designed to impress either God or the gods that they are afraid of all their life. Formalism is so pervasive in our thinking in religion that it is very difficult to think of God in any other context. This was part of the very issue raised by this woman – which religion Jesus might recommend as being the correct one.

But in Jesus' answer to her question, He made it very clear that though the line of truth could be traced directly through the history of the Jews, that did not mean that what the Jews were practicing was in harmony with that core of truth given to them originally. What He said was that both the false religion of the Samaritans and the “truth-based” religion of the Jews were by that time both incompetent and ineffective in offering their adherents the opportunities for true worship that God was looking for. God has something far, far greater in mind for those who want to worship Him from the heart. He knows that He created them for much deeper, much more intimate experiences in life and much greater joys than anything they have ever encountered in this world. And because God looks at the heart much more than on the external life, He is constantly searching the hearts of every man, woman and child in the whole world at all times and seeking passionately to draw them into a personal encounter of love and passionate intimacy with His own heart. That is the only kind of worship that will satisfy the deepest cravings in the human soul that was placed there by God Himself.

Anything less than this kind of full-bore, no-holds-barred worship with everything that is in us is a cheap counterfeit not worth messing around with. But this kind of worship is not necessarily a highly emotional form of worship either. That also is a very appealing but distracting counterfeit for many people hungry to experience something better than the empty formalism of typical conservative religions. God has not created us to just experience flights of occasional ecstasy while in church only to return home to live in the “real” world waiting for the next round of emotional highs. Emotional-based religion that does not transform the whole life into mature obedience is also a deceptive counterfeit. But neither does He desire His children to be so afraid of emotion that we will not allow His Spirit to move us and fill us with the joy and gladness that is always present when we encounter His heart.

God designed us with two very different sides to our brain, and He did this for some very important reasons. Satan through deceptions and the effects of sin has taken advantage of this fact to bring about all sorts of confusion about life, about reality and especially about how to rightly relate with our Creator. Satan has introduced millions of alternatives to true worship that claim to satisfy our innate need to worship but that always leave us incomplete and empty in some part of our makeup. He does this to prevent us from entering into the true joy of our Lord that Jesus referred to on occasion. Counterfeit religion is sometimes so apparently similar to what the Bible describes as true religion that it is easy to believe that our religion is the real deal, that there is nothing more we need to know, that our traditions and our people have it right and everyone else is obviously wrong.

While this passage certainly does not fill out all the details about what might be involved in this authentic kind of true worship, it certainly lays the foundation for the only kind of worship that both connects our hearts with God's heart and that will bring real and lasting satisfaction and joy into the deepest part of our soul, the deep places of disturbance where fears inhibit us from coming near to God. It is a worship that is going to necessarily involve both sides of our brain, our intellectual integrity as well as our emotions. An authentic worship relationship with the Father will allow us to experience the ongoing blessing of the Father that is so critical for real growth and maturity in our lives. And true worship will also inescapably bond us to each other as we share the family ties of love and compassion that always flow from the heart of our mutual Father through our hearts in caring for each other.

I would like to end with a powerful quote about worship from Oswald Chambers.

Worship and intercession must go together, the one is impossible without the other. Intercession means that we rouse ourselves up to get the mind of Christ about the one for whom we pray. Too often instead of worshipping God, we construct statements as to how prayer works. Are we worshipping or are we in dispute with God— ‘I don’t see how You are going to do it.’ This is a sure sign that we are not worshipping. When we lose sight of God we become hard and dogmatic. We hurl our own petitions at God’s throne and dictate to Him as to what we wish Him to do. We do not worship God, nor do we seek to form the mind of Christ. If we are hard towards God, we will become hard towards other people.
Are we so worshipping God that we rouse ourselves up to lay hold on Him, that we may be brought into contact with His mind about the ones for whom we pray? Are we living in a holy relationship to God, or are we hard and dogmatic?
‘But there is no one interceding properly’—then be that one yourself, be the one who worships God and who lives in holy relationship to him. (My Utmost for His Highest, March 30)


Father, my heart is stirred as I read and meditate on this subject of true worship. I suppose I have only tasted fleeting glimpses on rare occasions of the kind of worship that Jesus is talking about here in this passage. But those fleeting tastes have inflamed my appetite enormously to experience and be ravished deeply by Your love and passion. Somehow I know this will happen if I enter into the worship You describe here.
This is not something I can figure out on my own through careful study and exegesis. That may help to correct some of the false ideas about worship that have confused me all my life. But I am seeing more clearly that the kind of worship You desire is far deeper and more personal and vulnerable than anything I have ever thought about before. It is a relationship with You that is so transparent and deep and intimate that only You can empower me to enter into this kind of experience with You.
But I can and I do give You full permission to bring me into this kind of worship with You. As You promised me in Ezekiel 33, salvage Your reputation by removing my heart of stone and replacing it with a heart of flesh, a heart that has Your laws written right into it hardwired. Cause me to walk in Your ways and to hate all evil. Cleanse me completely of all resistance to Your love and Your instructions. Bring me fully into harmony with Your perfect character by living inside of me and having Your Spirit causing me to worship You from my deepest being.