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.

Balance for 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 4:21)

This statement from Jesus came in contrast to the next statement where He pointed out to this woman that the Jews were in fact the right “church” in comparison to the religion that her people endorsed. However, this fact did not mean that the Jews were practicing the truth as God designed for them to do. And given the next words that Jesus spoke on this subject it seems very clear that what the Jews were missing was not more truth but was a right spirit in their relationship with God.

The spirit of the Jews about God, their view of God, their perceptions about how God related to sinners and to those outside their “denomination” was so warped and bigoted that God was forced to accept their tacit rejection of Him in their spirit and open up a whole new way for people to be connected to God and experience His salvation. The Jews had had hundreds of years and repeated opportunities to align themselves with God by learning to reflect His spirit in relation to other people who did not know God like they could. But instead of practicing humility and allowing God to transform their nation into a model of what He wanted to do for everyone on earth, they selfishly supposed that God wanted them to be exclusive and prejudiced against those who were not part of “God's chosen”.

"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. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth." (John 4:23-24)

What I am now noticing in this conversation is that Jesus is not only awakening in this woman her spirit and drawing her into real worship even as they spoke, but He also was correcting her intellectual theological truth so that she could worship in truth as well as in the right spirit. Jesus stated twice very plainly the importance of genuine worship that must be done simultaneously in both spirit and truth. This is something that is so easy to get out of balance and I am sure that is because Satan knows how dangerous true worship will be for his spell over our lives if we enter into this kind of worship.

I grew up in a religion where nearly all the emphasis was on the truth side of these statements. Consequently whenever I read this passage the spirit part of it tended to leave me baffled and wondering just what Jesus was really talking about here. I am aware that many other people participate in religions where the opposite side is emphasized, the spirit is focused on to the marginalization of truth when it seems too uncomfortable for them. This attitude in turn gives fuel for the “truth-based” groups to see too much danger in getting very involved in worship with their spirit and that in turn gives the “spirit-focused” people reason to discount the importance of truth. Thus both sides allow the imbalance of others to be their excuse for not entering into the authentic worship experience that Jesus was actually talking about here. Yet both sides insist that they are the ones who are in fact following these instructions.

Jesus did not hesitate to point out to this woman that her religion was a dead-end street that could not provide her with the salvation that God was offering for humanity. But it is extremely important to note that the spirit with which He spoke to her was so compassionate, caring and loving that the correction was very easy for her to accept. And as I have pointed out previously, I believe that she had already been harboring serious doubts about her religion for some time and Jesus simply confirmed what her own conscience had been telling her. She was ripe, more than most people at that point in time, to embrace the genuine kind of worship that the Father is eagerly looking for people to encounter. She was privileged to become one of the very first people that was entrusted with a clearer revelation of the kind of salvation and relationship with God that Jesus came to this world to reveal. This new light was designed to expose the myriads of lies about God that had come to grip the whole world in deep darkness about God, both in the spirits of people and in their teachings and beliefs about Him.

As I see it, the spirit is connected much more to the right brain side of our makeup, the part of us that is closely connected with our emotions, though it should not be controlled by them. This is the part of us that actually harbors our gut-level beliefs that largely reside in our subconscious most of the time but that controls our actions and reactions far more powerfully than our intellectual beliefs do no matter how firmly we may think they guide us.

The truth part of this equation I believe, describes more the intellectual, left brain side of our makeup where we store the information that we receive and the beliefs that are formed by analysis, study and sifting through knowledge that we acquire. These beliefs can easily become deeply entrenched as bigotry if we are not careful for our pride tends to act like a protective shield over our deeply held opinions that distinguish us from what other people believe who are not part of our group. We usually defend these kinds of beliefs with arguments and philosophy and even convoluted logic many times in our attempt to cover up any inconsistencies.

Of course, the problem occurs when either our gut-level right brain beliefs harbor mistaken notions about God (which all of us have) or our acquired knowledge about spiritual things is incorrect (which all of us also experience). Both of these sides of our being can cause us great difficulties and create inner tension when they do not agree with each other (that is what is felt as guilt). Therefore, what a person really needs to enter into the kind of true worship that really comes deep into God's transforming presence is both an increased knowledge of what is really true from God's viewpoint in their intellectual ideas about God and reality, as well as a transformation in their spirit, their attitudes, their feelings about God that constitute their inner picture of God emotionally. To neglect either of these areas of misinformation about reality and God is to fail to be able to worship God in the way He wants us to and that will bring us into the intimacy with Him that is necessary to prepare us to spend eternity with Him.

This woman of Sychar accepted the truth about her religion from Jesus and allowed Him to share with her truth that would prepare her to be a true worshiper. She also was coming under the softening influence of the spirit that she was experiencing from Him and allowed that spirit to synchronize her own spirit with God's. Because she did not resist in either of these sides of her makeup, she was able to begin to taste the kind of worship that most people have yet to really know. She very quickly entered into a state of belief in God that turned her immediately into a most effective witness to the power of God to transform anyone who is willing to submit both sides of their being to His kind of truth.

It did not matter what her background was. Her live-in relationship with a man and her history of broken relationships did not prevent her in the slightest from entering into real worship as many might be tempted to think. Neither did her upbringing in a counterfeit religion prevent her from moving directly into genuine and transforming worship. She was not required to first go through an extensive retraining period to correct her false theology before she could be trusted to spread the gospel to others. No, this most unlikely candidate was immediately empowered to become one of the most effective missionaries seen in the story of Jesus up to this point. She was unstoppable and so full of genuine joy and enthusiasm that she became an immediate contagious witness for Jesus.

And this is in stark contrast to the careful, cautious, prejudiced attitudes of Jesus disciples who were even then on their way back from town with lunch. Jesus' designated witnesses who spent all of their time with Him had accomplished absolutely nothing for Him in town except to cautiously negotiate some deals so they could buy some food without emotionally interacting with these “outsiders” and feeling contaminated. In only a few minutes one woman with a rather bad reputation accomplished far more for Jesus and the gospel in this town than a whole group of trained men who could not see any potential anywhere in this place.

I want to be transformed away from thinking like these typical disciples tended to think more into seeing reality the way this woman suddenly saw it. I want to be freed from the narrow box that I have been trapped in for so long in religion and to catch a glimpse God that will light me up and set me on fire for Him like what happened to this woman. I am actually jealous of her enthusiasm and her passion to share the good news with others, no matter what they might think. I want to be energized by the spirit that took hold of her and obliterated all fear and inhibitions. I want to become a real worshiper like what Jesus described in these verses. I want to live in the presence of God continually and to experience my whole life as an expression of authentic and invigorating worship that will transform me into the effective witness that He desires for me to be.

Call Your Husband

He said to her, "Go, call your husband and come here." (John 4:16)

I never noticed this before. I had seen several things in this verse like Jesus' desire for this woman to enter into community as she received living water or His intention to bring conviction into sharp focus by letting her know that He knew all about her secrets. But something else just came to my attention as I read this again.

Jesus set an example for all His followers who might find themselves in a similar situation in the future. He was a single man who happened to have an encounter with a woman alone with no one else around. Does this raise any issues in anyone's mind today? It is not enough to just dismiss this because we are talking about Jesus and He was different than any other man. That may be true, but it did not exempt Him from living the kind of life that was to be an example for every other person to follow. Jesus did not take exceptions to the guidelines that God wants all of us to live under and follow. This arrangement had the potential to look bad, the potential for a vulnerable woman to be exploited, so Jesus did what He would want any other man to do; He immediately asked the woman to invite her husband to join her before they went any further in their conversation.

It does not matter what the outcome of this request was so much as the fact that He made it at this point in their encounter. It is true that she did not do what He requested, but it is also true that He did not spend a great deal more time with her alone before she did go and bring back a whole lot more people to get involved with her in this exciting relationship with Jesus. But Jesus set the perfect example of what all of His disciples should do when they are sharing the gospel with a single person from the opposite gender.

But I also notice that Jesus did not go to the other extreme either as many people might insist should be done. He did not hold back from entering into a conversation with this woman. He did not even suddenly disconnect from the conversation when it became obvious what her marital status was and that she really was quite vulnerable. Instead, He carefully drew out her heart toward God and shared with her that the real desire of her heart that she had been trying to satisfy in relationships with other men could only be met by drinking from the unfailing resource of God's passionate love for her personally.

Jesus neither cut off His conversation with her or avoided even the moral issues of her life. And while He allowed her to change the subject when things felt too uncomfortable for her without pressuring her to feel too exposed, He directed His focus toward helping her realize what was really going on inside herself that she had never been able to understand or appreciate all of her life. Jesus brought into her mind the light of truth both about herself but more importantly about how God viewed her so that she could readily respond to the love and grace and presence that God was waiting and eager to share with her. Jesus conveyed to her in His own words and demeanor a taste of what God felt about her.

Of course she could have gone home and brought back the man she was living with and just not mentioned the fact that he was not her husband. And it would have been very interesting and instructive to us to know how Jesus would have handled that as well. But one thing is very certain, Jesus would have been just as gracious, kind and caring for this other man as He was for this woman. He would not have used a guilt trip or condemnation to expose them and shame them as too many Christians today seem compelled to do. He would have ministered to the hearts of both of them and let the Holy Spirit do all the convicting in His own time and way.

This is the example of how Jesus wants me to treat people. In fact, as I allow Jesus to dwell inside of me He Himself will give me the wisdom to act and proceed with the mind of Christ and will prompt me to know just what to do and say to have the most drawing effect to attract hearts into knowing God better. Because the bottom line always is that everyone of us need to have our picture of God seriously upgraded before we are ever going to want to come to Him for salvation and experience His transforming love in our souls.

Rude Bluntness or Authentic Conviction

You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. (John 4:22)

I have been pondering and praying over this verse for several days. This is Jesus' response to this woman's inquiry about the right place to worship highlighting the differences between her “denomination” and His. The abruptness of this answer has caught my attention and I have been searching for the real reason He said these words to her in this context for some time now.

As I came back again today and thought about it some more, it suddenly dawned on me what one of the biggest reasons likely was for His making this statement to her. It seems rather rude to just bluntly tell someone that they are wrong and I am right because they belong to a different church than I do. And it certainly does not ring consistent with the spirit that I have seen in the way Jesus related to people most of the time, which is why I have been disturbed for so long about why these words are spoken here.

But I remembered the beginning of this story and it all is coming together much more clearly now. First of all, I have sensed early on that this woman already may well have been harboring doubts about the validity of her own people's religion. But because there was no way she could ever change the fact of her being a Samaritan woman, she may have felt permanently stuck, forced to accept the religion that identified her people and isolated them from the Jewish system of beliefs. She seemed to be branded with the form of religion that had been passed down to her through her hereditary based on the choices of people who had lived many generations before her.

But that still did not prevent her from feeling uncomfortable with the truthfulness of what she had been taught all of her life. Somehow I believe that she had entertained increasing misgivings about her religion but had not been able to freely discuss any of these without stirring up intense animosity and hostility from people in her own culture. Any thought of questioning her religious heritage was considered openly unpatriotic and would bring her scorn and shame. So she had been forced to hide these questions deep inside her as she wondered how these deep tensions could ever be resolved. She had decided long ago that the only hope there was for bringing about real change in her world was for the true Messiah to finally show up and show them the truth.

Of course, the whole idea of a Messiah originated largely in the Jewish religion. But that was not totally the case, for indicators and messages of a coming Messiah pre-dated the existence of Jews themselves. The first promise of a Messiah to come, a deliverer to save lost sinners, was given just after Adam and Eve sinned and the first lamb was killed as a sin offering. God told Eve that in her seed would be born a child that would finally bring about the demise of the serpent who had entrapped them into the slavery of sin. And repeatedly throughout history the promises had been accumulating of a coming Deliverer who was to come and save His people from the stranglehold of sin.

Evidently the Samaritans also clung to a belief in a coming Messiah that would bring about deliverance. I find this fascinating given the strident views of the work and nature of the Messiah as taught by the Jews of that day. The Jews had come to believe that when the Messiah came He would come as a conquerer to make the Jews the strongest nation on earth so they could dominate and control with violent force every other people, especially the ones they hated the most. And Samaritans were certainly very near the top of the list of people the Jews hoped the Messiah was going to prosecute when He came to honor and elevate the Jews to their “rightful” place in the world.

Yet I see this woman, a Samaritan no less, looking forward to the Messiah as her hope for clearing up the confusion in her heart about the real truth about religious issues that troubled her. From this perspective it seems to me that she had a much clearer concept of the true nature of the coming Messiah than most of the Jews believed. This woman somehow had come to realize that the Messiah would be much more oriented to clarifying issues regarding God and religion than He would be in elevating the Jews politically.

Yet there must have been conflicts in her mind about what this coming Messiah was going to look like. She was familiar with the commonly held opinions of the Jews about a Messiah that would feel the same scorn for Samaritans as they cherished. Obviously she did not believe all those lies, which actually made her more mature spiritually than most other people. She also cherished doubts about the accuracy of her own people's religion which is one of the main reasons why I believe Jesus had rendezvoused with her in the first place. Jesus had been alerted to the condition of her heart by the Holy Spirit that always lead Him in every event throughout His life and He knew that this woman was the most open and receptive person in this whole region. God had set up this encounter for just this outcome because in the life of a true believer there is no such thing as a coincidence.

But why did Jesus speak such blunt words highlighting the difference between the religion of the Jews and that of the Samaritans if he always related to people with the utmost kindness and tact? This certainly doesn't seem at first to be a very tactful way to approach this subject.

But as I look more closely I realize that God knew her heart and that these words were not going to be overly offensive to her. She had already been feeling the conviction of God in her heart for some time that her religion was not as valid as that of the Jews, no matter how badly Jewish leaders had distorted and abused the truth they had received from their ancestors. Just because the Jews of her day were so extremely prejudiced did not detract in the slightest from the fact that God had still ordained the Jewish people to be the channel through which the Messiah was to come to save people from the darkness of ignorance and sin.

Jesus, I believe, was very possibly reinforcing some of her convictions about religion that she had already pondered for some time as well as her convictions about the true nature of the coming Messiah. She was actually advanced ahead of what most Jews and Samaritans believed, both in her ideas about religion and in her openness to accept and embrace the true Messiah. Because of the spiritual orientation of her heart, in spite of the obvious immortality of her life and present circumstances, she was actually much more ready to receive and appreciate the true Messiah than nearly anyone else in the whole surrounding country, both Jewish and Samaritan.

So it was necessary for Jesus to affirm to her that her secret belief that the Messiah just might have to come through the Jews was indeed correct. She had already identified Him as a Jew at the very beginning of their conversation together. Jesus was now building on this fact and reaffirming it so that she would move more easily into a state of full belief in Him when He revealed Himself to be the very Messiah she wanted to encounter. These longings for a coming Messiah had been placed in her heart by God Himself and now were being drawn out to experience for herself what the true Messiah had come to do – to preach the gospel to the poor, to release the captives, to open the eyes of the blind (both physically and internally), to heal the brokenhearted and best of all to reveal the favor of God in the world. This was the very kind of news that she longed to know the most and was the very nature of the Messiah that God was sending to people just like her.

So to validate the authenticity of His identity as the true Messiah, it was necessary to correct and affirm in her mind any questions causing confusion about where the Messiah would come from as far as race and ethnicity. He confirmed the fact that the Jewish religion in fact was still the religion that had the most truth left on the earth. This was despite the fact that the Jews themselves had so badly distorted God's reputation, His character and personality to the point where He could hardly be seen at all in the way they treated people or even in their popular teachings. Jesus also pointed out that her religion was in fact lacking in sufficient truth to be reliable to lead her to real salvation. Jesus simply affirmed what I believe she was already suspecting – that the Jews had the best religious information around and that the Samaritan religion really was a counterfeit of that true religion.

It was important to get this better settled in her mind before He revealed Himself as the Messiah. This was because He wanted to eliminate every doubt ahead of time that might prevent her from fully embracing Him as her own Savior when she realized who He really was. He was effectively dealing with her ethnic prejudice against Him as a Jew so that she could embrace her own convictions of truth that had been stirring inside her for some time and now act on them. She was ripe to embrace the fact that her own religion really was inferior to the core Jewish religion. It was largely the prejudices of the Jews against her that made it difficult to justify that conviction in the face of fierce opposition by her own cultural heritage.

And from this perspective it is now also easier to see that she could accept His statement that her religion could not give her all the answers that she was looking for to satisfy the deepest longings of her heart. God had provided through the Jews the channel through which the Messiah was going to come to bless the whole world without any more prejudices of religion, ethnicity, gender or any other kind. The Messiah was in fact going to be far better than even she had ever been able to imagine. And she was about to find that out for herself.