Worship in Spirit and in Truth

 

 Pastor Fred continued our series on worship by preaching out of John 4:19-42. A brief synopsis is that Jesus has a back and forth with the Samaritan woman at the well. The essence of the conversation is where is the appropriate place to worship because the Jews and the Samaritans had two different places where they thought the appropriate place of worship was.  It’s because they had a dislike or borderline hatred towards each other dating back to the Old Testament. The other part of the conversation is how do we worship. In the worship wars, have we ever thought of asking Gods how we should worship instead of doing it our preferred method of worship?

  So my first observation is what does it mean to worship God in Spirit and in truth? This phrase has always perplexed me because what does it mean to worship in spirit and truth. My first observation is that God is Spirit and He is to be worshipped in spirit. We can accomplish this is because we are spirit too a because we are made in His image. The wonderful thing about God being spirit is than He can be every where at one and yet in one place all at the same time. We don’t have to worry about God not showing up because He is already there, we just need to realize it and embrace it. 

   Worshipping God not only means that we are learning more about God, but also putting it into practice. This is when knowledge becomes wisdom. This comes down to realizing that all goodness and truth comes from God and can not be found anywhere else. How we do this is more than singing a few songs, but spending time in prayer, studying the Bible and pushing each other to grow. What is the point of knowing something if we don’t use it. 

  Worship is also about submitting to God and His ways. Submission can create some raw and bad emotions. We can wither submit to sin and destruction or we can submit to God and His ways, and be set free. Submitting to God takes humility and a realization that we can not do it and it is allowing God to and giving Him all glory and praise for doing it. We all submit to something and what are we willing to submit to?

  Worship is about sacrifice and giving our all to God. The Apostle Paul in Romans 12 writes that we are to become living sacrifices and when we do this, we get on Gods altar allowing Him to do as He wishes. But here is the problem with being a living sacrifice, we tend to want to get off that altar when things get to uncomfortable or hot. True worship is submitting to God when we don’t want to or when we think it is too hard or we don’t want to. I was living in Oklahoma at the time and I developed a relationship with a guy who needed a lot of grace in my book and I even thought he didn’t deserve it most of the time. I remember God telling me to go to his place to connect with him and I told God that He was crazy. After arguing with God, I did it and he wasn’t home. I was glad but then God kick my butt, and I had to repent. I know this idea is a whole blog by itself, but true worship is an act of obedience to God. Through out the whole Bible, God tells His people to either leave their gifts at altar to go make things right with other people or that God doesn’t want gifts, but He desires a pure heart and right relationships and at the end of the day, this is a big part of worship. 

  To close out we are all created to worship something, whether it is God, ourselves, others or a particular way of doing things, we only have room for one thing on our throne and I pray it’s God. Also it is not a one and done thing because it is something we need to to on a continuous basis

Grace and Peace

Tom Boustead