Worship 101

"Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship." Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father." (John 4:20-21)

I notice something interesting in the emphasis in these two statements. The woman's statement about worship focuses on the proper place to worship. This is so reflective of almost all religions, a focus on the externals or on formulas or ceremonies etc. Religion for all too many people is not much more than a prescription to follow or a list of rules or even something along the line of incantations to invoke some sort of supernatural benefits. Pagans explored these kinds of things at great length and Christianity brought much of that kind of reasoning and thinking into the culture of the church not too many years after Jesus lived on earth.

But Jesus here puts the focus back on the only real issue in true worship. And if we learn what true worship actually is then we will begin to experience the effects of real worship far more effectively in our lives. For true worship cannot be separated from an encounter with the living, loving God of the universe. Anything short of this is a counterfeit of worship which abounds everywhere, even in the name of the worship of God.

I attended an all-day seminar a number of years ago on the topic of worship. I was offered the chance to attend only the night before and felt an overwhelming desire to go, for my heart was just beginning to learn the real truth about worship and I longed to know much more. The details for me to be able to go were so dramatically and miraculously worked out almost immediately that I sensed that this was very much a God thing for my life. I arrived early in the morning at the seminar filled with anticipation of what God was going to reveal to me that day about worship that I had never seen before.

And did it ever happen! That day marked one of the most dramatic enlightenment points of my whole life. The things I heard that whole day were thrilling, enticing and deeply informative but at the same time saddening, for I realized how far most of us have strayed from experiencing true worship of God. The seminar presenters were not focusing on denominational ideas or even worship styles which I greatly appreciated. In fact, the attendees came from many different denominational backgrounds but all of them seemed to deeply appreciate the narrow focus of the presenters on what it really means to worship God even in very different styles or contexts.

I just now went back to glance at my notes from that seminar and felt my heart warming immediately once again. The main definition of worship that they shared with us and that I realized was so true was that authentic worship is simply the response of a heart when it encounters the true presence of the God of heaven. The closer we come into His presence the more our heart is going to worship spontaneously if we allow it to.

I, like most people, have grown up in a culture where the word worship was simply the term used to describe what happened at church each week, particularly during the “divine worship hour”. I have found it so true for many religious words that our assumed definitions of them come more from the meanings we have assigned to them by default rather than from careful searching in the Bible to see what God intended for them to mean. As a result we have cultivated religions of various colors and flavors all based on our own private dictionaries so to speak of what the religious terms mean for us and our particular group. They may all be the same words and verses quoted from the same Bible but they mean something different depending on which denomination or subculture you belong to.

But there really is a master document that can be used to reliably discover the true meanings of the religious terms we use so loosely. But only those who are willing to first doubt their own assumptions and take the time to open their minds to seek deeper truth will be able to discern the far more incredible realm of true spirituality and experience the amazing encounters with our Creator that true religion must involve. And real worship lies at the very heart of all of this activity. If we do not pay attention to learning how to truly worship God in the way He has revealed in His Word, then we will be content to remain in self-deception insisting that our form of worship is what God intended for us.

I am interested in tracing again the progression in this story that led to the most profound revelations about real worship that Jesus shared with this woman. My mind is always seeking to understand where I came from and how I got here partly in order to be able to ingrain that sequence of logic into my own psyche to help correct my own faulty assumptions assimilated elsewhere.

Jesus initiated a relationship with this woman by asking her for a kindness in spite of the fact that all social norms pressured both of them to remain distant and disconnected from each other. When responding to her amazement at His lack of prejudice, He moves the conversation quickly into the much deeper waters of her relationship to God and His attitude of kindness towards her. Jesus offers to share with her a wonderful gift called living water if she is willing to ask for it.

She then brings up the issue of identity and value for both of them. Jesus completely skirts the issues that divide them or that would produce emotions of prejudice and instead expands on His offer to her by describing this new kind of water more enticingly. She accepts the bait and asks for it but with still a focus on the externals.

Jesus' first response to her brought up the subject of God and the gift He wanted to give her. The woman's response to that was to point to their common ancestor that had been part of the lineage chosen by God to represent His character to the world. So the issue of worship was already starting to emerge, especially since unbeknown to her she was already talking to God directly face to face herself. Jesus was actually drawing her into worship as they spoke together without her even knowing what was going on.

Since worship is a response of the heart to an encounter with the real truth about God in His presence, then this woman was a prime candidate for experiencing authentic worship right then and there. She was observing how God treated the marginalized without any prejudice but with deep compassion and care for their heart. As she continued to experience and respond to this encounter with the One who was the only true representation of the Father, her own heart was quickly waking up and coming to life and stirring with emotion to connect more deeply with this most unusual love. Her heart was already entering into true worship even before she consciously realized what was happening.

When Jesus asked her to go get her husband and come back to receive His living water, I don't believe He was only saying that to set her up in a sting operation to expose her. And while He did use that to bring to her attention the most painful and vulnerable parts of her life, He was not doing it to shame or hurt her deeper but was doing it to help her and all of us realize that worship will always involve opening up areas of the heart that we are trying to hide from others. Genuine worship will always involve facing the inner pain, the shame, the fears and all the other things deep inside that skew our picture of God and hide His face from us. When we encounter the true God that has been largely obscured by religion and our own fears of Him for most of our life, we will come to realize that He is eager to bring healing and wholeness to the most painful, messed up areas deep within us and fill us with overwhelming love, hope and joy.

Instead of responding immediately to Jesus' offer to talk about her painful past, she instead moved over to talking about worship not realizing that the issue of her painful relationships with men was actually her opportunity to interact with God in the healing experience of worship. Like so many of us today, she believed that worship was just something you did when you went to a religiously designated place and performed certain routines that others have defined as being religiously required. But worship goes far deeper and is far broader than simply performing religious incantations or singing some songs, praying and listening to a sermon.

All of these things can be performed endlessly and yet true worship of the Father may never actually take place. What I have observed over the years is that very often we indeed do worship in church but far too much of the time we are actually worshiping our own routines and traditions, or even our emotions, our music and our sermons but without ever actually experiencing true worship of the Father. This trap is so subtle that it is very difficult to unmask in religion, but it is very pervasive and is something that all of us must face if we really desire to encounter the transforming kind of worship that this woman experienced.

She was used to thinking of worship as a place just like we do most of the time. Jesus viewed worship in a radically different way, for in His life worship was all about a loving heavenly Father that Jesus spent much time communicating with on a daily basis. In fact, the secret of Jesus' perfect life on earth did not come from the fact that He was inherently divine, giving Him an advantage over all the rest of us. He had completely laid that aside and steadfastly resisted ever using His own power for Himself while living here as a human. He came to demonstrate that any human being could live in such close connection with God experiencing authentic, life-giving worship that they could come to perfectly reflect the character of God in the life just as Jesus did simply by focusing on the heart of the Father. That is the essence of real worship.

The Issue of Arguing

"Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship." Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews." (John 4:20-22)

Again, I am seeing the unusual way that Jesus treats someone who is used to relating to religion primarily with arguments. Religion is full of people that believe that truth must be advanced through the use of arguing and even force when necessary. But man's ways are not God's ways and Jesus demonstrated here the best way.

One thing that is becoming clear to me in this story is Jesus' consistent way of seeking common connections before dealing with differences. He is not ducking the tough issues, but because His primary strategy is to form heart bonds before addressing external or doctrinal differences, He uses affirmations and highlights the positive things before moving on to explain the more delicate misunderstandings. When the woman reacts emotionally after the subject of her marriage status is brought up and denies that she is married at all, instead of laying a guilt trip on her Jesus twice affirms her honesty in the way she chose to answer. That is shocking to many of us.

Now she brings up yet another point of deep division between her people the Samaritans and His people the Jews. She refers to the core issues that have caused deep hostilities between the two groups for centuries with deep curiosity as to how He is going to respond to this most provocative subject. Instead of continuing a discussion about her private life that has caused her the most emotional pain, she wants to see how He is going to handle the most intransigent deadlock in religion that has stymied resolution for the greatest theologians of the time. In her mind, if this man is really as connected with God as she is beginning to think He might be, then maybe, just maybe, He will be able to provide insights and answers that seem beyond the ability of all the religious leaders to discover.

But the way that she broaches this subject is through the typical way that most people would approach it – through the angle of argument. If this question were to be posed to anyone else from either side of the deep divide that it had created, she already knew what their reaction would be. They would immediately launch into the stock answers and intense defense of their position based on which side they happened to be born on. It seemed that this prejudice was unsolvable and the differences impossible to heal. But this man seemed different and she was keen to find out if just maybe He might unveil the most elusive answers that had never been found by anyone else.

Her hunch was actually very accurate. This man was indeed very close to God – and much closer than she had ever imagined up to this point in their encounter. He was not only very close to God but was in reality God in human form. She was experiencing the privilege of not only being able to talk with someone who might be able to hear insights from God to pass them on to others but was given the privilege of talking directly to God herself without even realizing it yet. In effect, she was being given the opportunity of becoming a prophet herself without even realizing it.

One of the evidences that this was God and not just a human religious man well-versed in Scripture was the way in which He handled such questions. Instead of reacting defensively to a confrontation inviting an argument, He instead keeps moving inexorably closer to capturing her affections, her devotion, her appreciation of His kindness and love for her. In every detail of His demeanor and every word of His interactions with her He was expressing the passionate love that God had for her that she had craved for all of her life. She was already tasting the living water and it was already having its effect inside of her even before she realized what was going on. Because she was willing to receive that water of life and was yielding to its influence in her spirit she was already beginning to tingle with the excitement and joy and this water always produces in any heart that is willing to drink of it.

In Jesus' response to her query about the deep religious tensions between His race and her people, He once again avoided talking first about the tensions that divided them. Instead He went straight to the resolution of this very problem that He Himself had come to this world to provide; He had come to bring the two groups along with all humanity into full unity in Himself, both Jews and Gentiles of every stripe. The Jews had made the reputation of God stink in the world with their exclusivity, their arrogance and pride and their perversions of the true meaning of the Word of God. They had become so self-centered and exclusive in their opinions about religion that they had almost totally obscured the light of truth about how God feels towards sinners. But Jesus came to explode all those myths and to reveal to the world the real truth about God's desires and plans to save everyone who would believe.

But the fact still remained that God had indeed originally chosen the Jews as His special people to reveal His character to the rest of the world. It was true that they had largely failed in this assignment and were soon to finalize their divorce from Him as a nation by killing His Son and then rejecting and killing His messengers that would come after Him. But it was still a valid truth that the Jews were indeed the repositories of the facts of truth; they were the race from which most of the prophets of God came from and they were the ones entrusted with the written messages of God down through the ages. They had been given the most accurate truth even though they had failed repeatedly to live their lives in harmony with it but had allowed their spirit to take on the opposite characteristics from that which inspired these sacred writings in the first place.

On the other hand, the Samaritans were in fact counterfeits of the religion of the Jews. Their motive for building a temple elsewhere from the one in Jerusalem was because they had been so offended by the harsh way in which they were treated by the pure-blooded Jews in Ezra's day. This offense had hardened into a parallel religion invented by the Samaritans as an alternative to that of the Jews partly because the Jews refused to accept them in the way God had intended and partly because the Samaritans themselves had hardened their hearts in defensiveness to justify their own religious preferences. There was certainly plenty of blame to around, but as Jesus pointed out to this woman, the real truth of God really was entrusted to the Jews no matter how badly they had mangled it.

But before making that point, Jesus wanted to let this woman know that all of that was about to become irrelevant as far as God was concerned. Jesus had come to dissolve all the walls of artificial separation that religions had constructed over the centuries and was here on earth to offer a completely new way of connecting with God. He had come to bring to light the very salvation that all of those symbols and shadows built into the Old Testament religious services pointed forward to. When the reality was fully exposed the symbols would become totally obsolete and everyone would then come to God directly without any reference to race, gender or any other discriminations. This was the exciting announement that Jesus gave to this woman before He said anything about who was technically right and wrong in the long-standing feud between the Jews and the Samaritans.

I am still open to hearing what God has to share with me about what Jesus meant in His words about worshiping what we know or don't know. I want to get beyond the stock answers for this and really hear from the Spirit the deeper significance of these words and how they surely affect all of us today.

Perceiving a Prophet

The woman said to Him, "Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet." (John 4:19)

What induced this woman to make this statement?

First of all, it can easily be assumed that this was part of her diversionary move to change the subject away from talking about her live-in situation and her multiple marriages that held so much pain from her past.

But I believe by this point she was already beginning to feel stirrings of faith, a response in her heart to the way she was being treated by Jesus, by God quite literally. Jesus had just suddenly stated quite matter of factly very personal things about her private life that she would never expect a total stranger to be able to know, especially a Jew. Her town was rather small and likely only the people from there would have known much about her situation. His ability to easily discern so many details about her private business certainly was a very compelling clue that maybe this was a prophet that she needed to recognize and respect.

She was quite familiar with the idea of prophets. In her day people were much closer in history to the many Old Testament prophets and being a descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob she also considered herself not completely outside the circle of being one of God's people despite all the Jew's protestations to the contrary. And if she was one of God's children then she would also need to be willing to submit to any messages of God's prophets if one happened to come her way.

She may well have been familiar with some of the stories about Elijah, Elisha and some of the other prophets who sometimes appeared in very unusual places to very unexpected people. Prophets did not always stick to dealing only with God's chosen nation after all as seen clearly in the life of Elijah. And this woman's heart was actually much more spiritual, in my opinion, than many around her who laid high claims to being piously religious. So she was likely much more open to being sensitive to a prophet of God if she were ever to encounter one.

Beyond the fact that Jesus had so abruptly exposed things about her personal life she never expected Him to be able to know, it was also compelling to her the way in which He had done it. Instead of condemning her, reproaching her or heaping shame on her like most religious people were so quick to do, He had only affirmed her honesty, twice in fact, and had simply stated these facts without any negative connotations attached in the tone of His voice.

At the very beginning of their conversation Jesus had begun talking about God, about God's gift and about something that He wanted to give her that would enrich and benefit her life. At that point she had mentioned the question of His importance and status, comparing Him with Jacob and asking if He thought He was better than her ancestor that obviously had proven himself capable of looking out for his very large family. Implicit in that statement may well have also been some sadness or bitterness over the fact that she had never been able to find such a capable and caring man in her own life. With this background she well may have been starting to distrust all men and was ready to challenge any man who might come along making big claims about what he could do for a woman.

But instead of reacting defensively like most men would likely have done, Jesus only continued to increase her curiosity about the gift that He was so eager to share with her. She had not been able to detect the slightest animosity or prejudice in either the words or the demeanor of Jesus and this did not go unnoticed by her. In fact, this man was so strikingly different than any man she had ever met in her life that the conviction was starting to grow quickly inside of her that this just might be the most unusual encounter she ever had with a man. She couldn't figure Him out yet but something resonated very strongly in her heart that she needed to find out more about this most fascinating man who refused to treat her with anything but utmost respect and care and kindness.

With all of this as the context, I believe it is easy to see that her assertion that Jesus was a prophet was spontaneous and genuine. But the next thing I question is my reaction to her statement. What is my gut reaction to these words by this woman? Is it one of agreement? Do I share her amazement at the gentleness, kindness and compassion that I am seeing more clearly in the heart of God as seen in this story? Or does my religious mind and life-long training urge me to dispute her claim and dwell on the fact that Jesus was really the Messiah, not just a prophet?

As I think about it, I realize that to disagree with her is to place myself squarely in a place of unbelief myself. For the real definition of a prophet fits Jesus perfectly well. A prophet is really a person who listens to God's words and messages sent to them for others and then passes them on. We have developed the notion that prophets have to be people who foretell the future and if they don't fit this criteria then they must not be a prophet. But many prophets spent most of their time simply pleading with people to reconsider their disposition and attitudes towards God and to embrace the truth about God that they were resisting. From that perspective Jesus is the greatest prophet of all time. This woman could not have been more accurate in her evaluation of what she saw in Jesus. And that is amazing given that she had so little information to base it on.

Yes, it is true that Jesus quickly led her on to see Him clearly as much more than a prophet. But I do not want to miss the impact of this confession she made based on only what she had seen and heard and felt from Jesus at this point in their interaction. Obviously she did not have near the resistance that a lifetime of religious training too often builds into a mind and that tends to harden the heart against ready belief. Again, I find myself envious of this woman's ability and willingness to so quickly move into an attitude of belief when I spend so much time trying to unbuckle the many straps of logic, arguments and religious baggage that get in my way and prevents my heart from freely jumping to respond to God's revelations of love for me.

This woman like many others that Jesus freely associated with was considered by their society to be totally unworthy of the attentions and favors that Jesus was so ready to give them. He was repeatedly criticized and condemned for hanging out with tax-collectors, harlots and sinners. And yet He stated quite plainly that these were the kind of people who found it much easier to enter into the real kingdom of God than most of those who claimed to already know everything about that kingdom. Jesus had the most difficult time reaching the hearts of the overtly religious and the highly educated. It was those on the margins that He had the most success connecting with and teaching, for it was those who most often were more honest and real about what they were feeling inside as opposed to the religious leaders who would seldom allow themselves to confess the truth Jesus came to reveal about God.

In Jesus' response to her next question He invited her into an attitude of fuller belief. He knew that her heart was ripe to take this step and all she needed was an invitation. She was ready to embrace Him as her own Messiah. So the first words He said were, “Woman, believe me...” and obviously that is exactly what she chose to do. She was ready and eager to respond to God's revelation of love for her heart.

And I choose to do the same as I feel God's presence giving me the same invitation.

Father, I believe. Rid me of all unbelief.