Worship in Spirit and Truth (John 4:19–42) — A Sermon by R.C. Sproul

1:47 said to her, I who speak to you am He. Now at this point His disciples came and they marveled that He talked with a woman, and yet no one said, What do you seek? Or, Why are you talking with her? The woman then left her water pot, went her way into the city, said to the men, Come and see a man who told me all things that I ever did? Could this be the Christ? Then they went out to the city and came to him. And in the meantime, his disciples urged him, saying, Rabbi, eat. But he said, I have food to eat of which you do not know.

2:37 So the disciples said to one another, has anyone brought him anything to eat? Jesus said to them, may rejoice together. For in this the saying is true, one sows and another reaps. I sent you to reap for that which you have not labored, others have labored, and now you have entered into their labors. Many of the Samaritans of that city believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified, he told me all that I ever did. And so when the Samaritans had come to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days, and many more believed because of his own word. And then they said to the woman, now we believe not because of what you said, but we ourselves have heard him, and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world.

4:10 Let us pray. We plead with thee, O Father, to give us ears to hear that which we have just read. give us understanding that we may understand what that woman understood and what through her testimony and their encounter with Jesus himself, what those of Samaria came to understand as well. For we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Last week we saw that Jesus shocked the Samaritan woman by calling to her attention her checkered past in terms of her marital and extramarital relationships, and she was astonished that Jesus knew her, and presumably to change the subject she mentioned that He must be a prophet, and so she put to the prophet a theological question, a question that had been debated for many years between the Jews and the Samaritans, and that was the question on where was the proper central sanctuary where the Lord would receive worship.

5:34 The Jews had their temple in Jerusalem. Mount Zion was their holy place where the Samaritans, who rejected everything past the Pentateuch and the Old Testament, had their central sanctuary there at Mount Gerizim. Now, sometimes when we read this story, we get the impression that when she said, where's the proper place, Jerusalem or Samaria, you almost get the idea that Jesus is saying, it really doesn't matter whether you come to the Father according to the ways of the Samaritans, or if you come to Him according to the ways of the Jews. And the reason that inference is drawn from the text is because Jesus does say, the hour is coming, in fact it's already here, that the true worshiper will neither worship in Samaria or in Jerusalem, for God is a spirit, and those that worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth. And so because Jesus pronounces the end of Jerusalem as the central sanctuary for Samaria, and cryptically pronounces the end of Jerusalem, anticipating its destruction in just a few years thence.

7:06 Some say, well, okay, it doesn't matter, except that He declared that this woman was an agnostic. What is an agnostic? The word agnostic comes from the Greek agonosis and its corresponding Latin term you may be familiar with. And if you know no other Latin, I'm sure you've heard the word ignoramus in your life, because those who are agonosis are ignorant, that is, they are without knowledge. And so Jesus said, you worship what you don't know, being a Samaritan. It is your worship is a worship that is done in ignorance. But we know what we worship for salvation is of the Jews.

8:08 Now, that's important that Jesus does not say, hey, it doesn't matter whether we come the Samaritan way or the Jewish way. He answers that question. He said, it's the Jewish way that is the correct way. That is the way that God has ordained. And we must always remember that salvation is of the Jews, that we are the wild olive branches that have been grafted on to the original root, and we have an everlasting indebtedness to the Jewish nation because it is through the Jews that our redemption has come now to us. What's really important, I think, here is when Jesus says, what the Father wants is worship that is in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. A couple of things about this portion of the text I want to comment on.

9:09 First of all, as Christians in the 21st century, there is a tendency among us to have a woe woeful ignorance of the Old Testament. It's one of the reasons, by the way, we're having an adult Sunday school class every Sunday morning, having an overview of the Old Testament so that our people can become familiar with Old Testament redemptive history. And one of the most important problems that follows with an ignorance of the Old Testament is a profound ignorance of the character of God the Father. It's a Unitarianism of the second person of the Trinity that all of our religion centers around Jesus. Now, obviously, we are called to honor, to exalt, and to worship Christ. But remember that Christ came in the first place to reconcile us to the Father. And there's a certain sense in which the supreme focus of our worship on Sunday morning is to the Father. Again, of course it's to the entire triune God, but we need to have the majesty of the Father in all of His greatness in our minds as we worship.

10:36 And so Jesus, the second person in the Trinity, is telling this lady what His Father wants. He said, My Father is searching for people who will worship Him in spirit and in truth. What does that mean? Quite simply, what Jesus is saying here is not that people are supposed to be Holy Spirit devotees and to worship Him according to the Holy Spirit. We are supposed to do that as well, but that's not what he's saying here. What he's saying when he talks about God wanting people to worship Him in spirit and in truth is, in the first instance, that the worship that we offer is to come from the depth of our souls, from our inner spirit, the human spirit that defines the very core of our being. Remember Mary in her Magnificat when she cries out, my soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. That's true worship. And the Scriptures repeatedly show the opposite of true worship. The worship that Jeremiah exposed at his famous temple speech in the Old Testament when he went to the temple and he said, you people come to church, you come to the temple and you say, this is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.

12:09 But you trust in lying words, words that cannot profit. This temple is going to be destroyed. If you want to see what it's going to look like, go to Shiloh, because at that point Shiloh, which had been a central sanctuary, was now in ruins. That is to say, Jeremiah, under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, was giving a message to the people of Israel that their worship had become dead, outward, external formalism. They were going through the motions. They were reciting the prayers. They were singing the hymns. but their hearts weren't in it.

12:50 And in the same way, Jesus elsewhere in the New Testament says, this people honors Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me. See, God doesn't want that kind of worship. That's religion. That's not authentic faith. We are to come with our hearts filled with a sense of awe and reverence and adoration, and the worship that we offer is a sacrifice of our praise to His name that we bring with joy. And also we are told it is to be according to truth. I don't think there's ever been a time in Christian history where the church has been exposed to more of what is called experimental worship.

13:53 And so often the experiments are driven by Gallup or Barna poles. And the idea is like a marketing survey, we say, what do people want on Sunday morning? Do they want sermons that will give them popular psychology? Do they want warm, fuzzy feelings where their felt needs are met? if that's the case, then we need to tailor worship according to the felt needs of the people. And if we don't do that, our churches will be empty because people will be bored and they will see church as irrelevant. People want to get something out of Sunday morning worship. But you see, when Jesus says what the Father wants are people who will worship Him according to what He wants.

14:58 As I told you before, the most important worship service in the history of the world that completely was designed to minister to the felt needs of the people was the worship that took place at the bottom of Mount Sinai in the worship of the golden calf. It was an exercise not in true worship, but an exercise in idolatry. That's why we have to keep a close watch constantly in that session on what we do in worship, asking ourselves is this according to the truth of God in His Word? Because that's what Christ is saying to this woman. The hour is coming and now is where the true worshiper worships from the heart according to the truth of the word of God.

15:56 Now the woman says, I know the Messiah is coming. She's gone from you were a prophet to thoughts about the Messiah, and when He comes He will tell us all things. And Jesus says to her, and you notice how reluctant Jesus is to reveal His Messianic vocation throughout the pages of Scripture. adhere to a despised Samaritan, to a despised woman, Jesus reveals Himself. I, who am speaking to you, am He. The disciples come, and they're upset that He's speaking to her. At this point, she leaves. She's so excited, she leaves her water pot. We have no record that she ever even filled it. She just left it there. The whole reason for her being there in the first place was to get that water pot filled with water so she could meet her daily needs and provisions.

16:57 And now after she meets the Messiah, she leaves the water pot, and she can't wait to get into town to go to that very city where she's an outcast, where she's despised and where she's hated, and she's bubbling up. She goes into the town and she says, you won't believe it. I just met a man out there by the well who told me everything about myself. He's the Messiah. Come and see. I just got a tremendous children's book written by Max Lucado, and I heard him read it aloud a couple of weeks ago in California. Brought it home for my grandchildren. And the title of the book, get it, parents, for your kids, is, If I Only Had a Green Nose. And it's about these people in this kingdom that have been created by their Maker who are satisfied with what they need and what they are, and so they want to be with it.

18:03 And there's this guy in town named Willie Withit who decrees what's really with it and what's in. And he decrees that if you really want to be with it, you've got to have a green nose. But then it changes. Next thing you know, they have to have a yellow nose, and so they've got to get that green one painted and then the red one to get that one painted, and it's just one fad after another in order to be with it until finally somebody comes along to Willie with it and said, ìWho made you the thing picker?î And the story is great how it ends, but my point in the story is I've often wondered if people look at me and say, ìWho made you the preacher? What right do you have to stand up in the pulpit and tell people how to worship or what we ought to do? And anybody who's a Christian and who's tried to bear witness to somebody has heard that charge.

19:02 Who do you think you are? The greatest answer to that I've ever heard is the old answer, I'm just one beggar telling other beggars where they can find bread. Because that really is all I am, and that's all any of us are, and that's what this woman was. She said, I didn't all of a sudden become a righteous woman, a paragon of virtue where I can say to the community, follow me. No. She met the Messiah. She met the Christ. She knew that she had been redeemed by that encounter, and she wanted everyone in town to know it.

19:56 First time in her life she was not an ignoramus. She suddenly understood the things of God. Now the disciples are still concerned about Jesus' hunger and tell Him to eat. And He has this little discourse. He said, I have food which you don't know of. And they said, who brought you food? And He said, wait a minute. My meat is what? To do the will of my Father. That was who Jesus was. His meat and his drink, his zeal, his passion, was to do everything that the Father sent him to do. And even though that was his passion, he deliberately took time out to minister to these people in Samaria, to offer them the same water that wells up to eternal life that he had offered the thirsty woman of Sychar.

21:08 This is the Jesus we come to meet this morning. This is the Jesus who has set His table for us. This is the Jesus who comes as our host to meet Him, to meet with us. At St. Andrews, we believe and affirm the real presence of Christ in this sacrament. We believe that this sacrament is a true means of grace by which Christ, by His Spirit, is truly present here to minister to us in our weakness. This Christ who knows everything about us, everything that we've ever done, invites those who come in humility to His table, they will receive a fresh experience of His forgiveness. If you're a Christian and your mind is burdened by unresolved guilt, you come to the table.

22:11 If you're a Christian who's frightened by what lies before you in the days ahead and needs strength for your soul and strength and food of the grace of God, come to the table. If you want to meet the living Christ in His grace, in His mercy, and in His power, come to the table. For I declare to you what the Apostle Paul reminded the church, that on the night in which Jesus was betrayed, He took bread, and when He had blessed it, He broke it, and He said to His disciples, this is My body broken for you. And in like manner, after they had supped, He took the cup, which was part of the ritual of the Old Testament Passover, changed the significance of it, saying, this is now.

23:09 My blood shed for the remission of your sins, shed for making a new covenant, drink ye all of it. And since that day, the church and every generation has come to the Lord's table to be nurtured by him.