How Can We Worship in Spirit and in Truth?
What Do You Worship?
Everyone in the world worships something. From the most religious to the most secular, all people value something high enough to build their lives around it. It may be God, or it may be money. But what makes it worship is the driving power of some cherished treasure that shapes our emotions and will and thought and behavior. Into this universal experience of worship Jesus commanded, “Worship [God] in spirit and truth” (John 4:24). In other words, bring your experience of worship into conformity with what is true about God, and let your spirit be authentically awakened and moved by that truth.
The Hour Is Coming and Is Now Here
When he said this, he was talking to a Samaritan woman near her hometown. She had challenged him about the difference between places where Samaritans and Jews worship. She said, “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship” (John 4:20). Jesus responded by turning her attention away from geography to something astonishing that was happening in her very presence. He said, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. . . . The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:21, 23). This is a radical statement—to say that the hour is now here when worship in Jerusalem would cease! What did he mean?
Jesus made the breathtaking claim to be the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus responded, “I who speak to you am he” (John 4:25–26). So when Jesus says that the time “is now here” when we will no longer worship in Jerusalem, he meant that the kingdom of the Messiah has dawned and there is going to be a radical break in the way people worship.
All That Jesus Commanded
John Piper
In this repackaged edition of What Jesus Demands from the World, John Piper walks through Jesus’s commands, explaining their context and meaning to help readers understand Christ’s vision of the Christian life and what he still requires today.
“Destroy This Temple, and in Three Days I Will Raise It Up”
The reason is that Jesus intended to take the place of the temple himself. In other words, the “place” where worship would happen—the “place” where people would meet God from now on—would be Jesus, not the temple in Jerusalem. He communicated this in several ways. For example, he stood in the temple and said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). The people were astonished and said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But the Gospel writer explained, “He was speaking about the temple of his body” (John 2:21). In other words, Jesus meant that when he was raised from the dead, he would be the new “temple”—the new meeting place with God.
Jesus said something almost as startling when he was criticized for letting his disciples pick grain and eat it on the Sabbath. Jesus’s response to this criticism was to point out that David, the king of Israel, had fed his band of men with the bread of God’s house that was only designed for the priests to eat. He made the connection with himself and his band of men by saying, “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here” (Matt. 12:6). In other words, “The Messiah, the son of David, is here, and he himself is going to take the place of the temple.”
Not in This Mountain or in Jerusalem, but in Spirit and in Truth
So when Jesus said to the Samaritan woman, “The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth,” he meant that a whole new approach to God in worship had come with the coming of the Messiah himself. No longer would geography be relevant: “Neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.” Instead, what takes the place of external geographic concerns are internal spiritual concerns: “Those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The external places of Samaria and Jerusalem are replaced with the spiritual realities of “spirit and truth.” What matters now is not where you worship but whether you worship God in accordance with the truth and whether your spirit is authentically awakened and moved by that truth.
All Worship Should Be through Jesus and of Jesus
The key new truth is that worship now happens through Jesus. He is the temple where we encounter God. This is true first because he poured out his blood “for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28) and “gave his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45) and opened the way through his own crucified and risen body for us to be reconciled with God (John 3:16, 36). There is no way that sinners could offer acceptable worship to God without having Jesus’s blood as a go-between with God. It’s true that worship now happens through Jesus because he himself is God. He is not simply the mediator of worship between us and the Father; he is also the one to be worshiped. He made this claim indirectly and directly. He forgave sins, which only God can do (Mark 2:5–11). He accepted worship from his disciples (Matt. 14:33; 28:9). He claimed eternal preexistence with God: “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). He said he was one with the Father: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). So all should “honor the Son, just as they honor the Father” (John 5:23). Therefore, all worship “in truth” will be worship of Jesus and through Jesus. For “whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him” (John 5:23).
Worship in Spirit
What about the phrase “in spirit”? “The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit” (John 4:23). Some interpreters take this to refer to God’s Holy Spirit. I have taken it to refer to our spirit. But probably these two interpretations are not far apart in Jesus’s mind. In John 3:6 Jesus connects God’s Spirit and our spirit in a remarkable way. He says, “That which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” In other words, until the Holy Spirit quickens our spirit with the birth of new life, our spirit is so dead and unresponsive, it does not even qualify as spirit. Only that which is born of the Spirit is (a living) spirit. So when Jesus says that true worshipers worship the Father “in spirit,” he means that true worship comes only from spirits made alive and sensitive by the quickening of the Spirit of God.1
The essence of worship lies in our mind’s true vision of God and our spirit’s authentic affections for God.
This “spirit” is essential in worship. Otherwise worship is dead. Or to use Jesus’s phrase, it is “in vain.” “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me” (Matt. 15:8–9). A heart (and spirit) alive and engaged with God is essential. Jesus is contrasting authentic worship in spirit and truth with external worship that focuses on Samaria and Jerusalem. What makes it authentic is not only that the worshiping mind grasps the truth of Jesus, but also that the worshiping spirit experiences awakening and is moved by the truth that the mind knows. A person who has no affections for God awakened by the truth of Jesus is not worshiping “in spirit and truth.”2 And a person with great affections built on false views of God is not worshiping “in spirit and truth.” Jesus commands both: worship in spirit and in truth.
All of Life Is Worship
One implication of this vision of worship is that it applies to all of life as well as to services of corporate worship. The essence of worship lies in our mind’s true vision of God and our spirit’s authentic affections for God. This means that whenever we display the worth of God by words or actions that flow from a spirit that treasures him as he really is, we are worshiping in spirit and in truth. We may be at work or at home or at church. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we see the glory of God in Jesus (truth), and we treasure him above all else (spirit), and then we overflow by treating others with self-sacrificing love for their good. Few things display the beauty of God more. For followers of Jesus, therefore, all of life should be this kind of worship.
This is powerfully illustrated by the connection Jesus makes between worshiping God and serving God. When Satan tempted Jesus to worship him, Jesus responded, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve’” (Matt. 4:10). Serving was often attached to worshiping as an outward expression of religious ministry in the temple. But now the temple is Jesus. How is the “service” of worship transformed?
You Cannot Serve God and Money
We get a surprising glimpse of what service3 to God means for Jesus in Matthew 6:24. He said, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” The surprising thing here is that serving God is compared to serving money. But how do you serve money? Not by helping money or meeting money’s needs. You serve money by treasuring it so much that you shape your whole life to benefit from what money can do for you.
So it is with God in the way Jesus sees the service of worship. We do not help God or meet God’s needs (“The Son of Man came not to be served,” Mark 10:45). Rather we serve God by treasuring him so much that we shape our whole life so as to benefit from what he can do for us. And, unlike money, what God can do for us above all other treasures is be for us everything we have ever longed for.
The Infinite Worth of God in Jesus
Therefore, all of life is service to God. That is, all of life is shaped by our passion to maximize our experience of the supreme worth of God in Jesus. So we end where we began. All the world worships something. From the most religious to the most secular, all people value something high enough to build their lives around it—even if unconsciously. Jesus commands that every person in the world build his life around the infinite worth of God in Jesus. Consider what you are worshiping. Then ask Jesus to open your eyes to the truth of God’s supreme worth and to awaken your spirit to treasure him above all.
Notes:
- This paragraph is adapted from John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, revised and expanded edition (Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah, 2003), 82.
- See chapter 3, “Worship: The Feast of Christian Hedonism” in Desiring God for a fuller defense of this statement and how it fits with the reality that our feelings are unstable, sometimes high and sometimes low.
- The word for “serve” in Matthew 6:24 (δουλεύω) is not the same as the word for “serve” in Matthew 4:10 (λατρεύω). The latter usually refers to the religious activity in the temple. The former usually refers to what a slave does for a master. My point is that it is precisely the newness of Jesus’s situation that makes plain how even the “slave” kind of service is worship in a new way.
This article is adapted from All That Jesus Commanded: The Christian Life according to the Gospels by John Piper.
