What I will attempt to do is
simply to give a very brief exposition of several lines of our Lord's
thought in this passage and then apply it in some very practical
ways relative to the whole subject of preparation for the worship
of God. You'll remember the setting now
of John 4. Our Lord is talking with this immoral woman who is
one of those sheep that he has determined to gather to himself
He went out of his way geographically. He went out of his way in terms
of his own personal inclinations. He was weary. The last thing
in the world, humanly speaking, that he would want to do at that
time was to engage in ministry to another needy soul. But here
he is ministering to this woman. And in the course of his conversation
with her, he makes this very profound statement. Verse 21
of John 4. Jesus said unto her, Woman, believe
me, the hour cometh when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem
shall ye worship the Father. Ye worship that which ye know
not, speaking to her as a Samaritan. We, that is, identifying himself
with the Jewish nation, we worship that which we know, for salvation
is from the Jews. But the hour cometh and now is
when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit
and truth, for such doth the Father seek to be his worshipers."
God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him
in spirit and truth. Now this whole play on words,
spirit, truth, you worship on this mountain, our fathers worship
in Jerusalem. This forms the framework of the
entire thrust of our Lord's message to this woman concerning the
whole subject of worship. The Samaritans worshipped in
their own temple. The Samaritans worshipped a God
whose mind and character they felt was significantly and sufficiently
revealed in the Pentateuch. They did not accept the entire
Old Testament. So there was great ignorance
in their worship. On the other hand, the Jews embraced
the entire revelation of the Old Testament. They worshiped
at the right place, Jerusalem, in the right surroundings, in
the temple, with the right framework of worship, the sacrificial system,
etc. But according to our Lord Himself,
their worship had been stripped of its spiritual element. You
remember in Mark 7, He said, You draw near to Me with your
lips, but your hearts are far from Me. So what our Lord is
emphasizing is this. Where Samaritan worship was characterized
by ignorance, the worshipers whom the Father seeks must worship
Him in the realm of truth. They must worship Him in terms
of the totality of the revelation He's made of Himself. And on
the other hand, where the Jew felt as long as he was at Jerusalem,
at the right place at the right time, doing the right things,
God was pleased, he says no. The Father seeks people to worship
Him not only in the realm of truth, but to worship Him in
spirit, which can either be a reference to the energizing power of the
spirit, or spirit as synonymous with internal heart worship opposed
to mere external carnal worship. And so true worshipers, those
worshipers that the Father is in a quest to have, must present
to him a worship that is characterized by the realm of truth and by
the reality of its spiritual nature. And anything else is
an abomination unto God. And if you want one of the most
searching statements concerning abominable worship that can be
carried on in the right place at the right time, doing the
right things excellently, just read Isaiah chapter 1. For in
Isaiah chapter 1, God says, and I'm paraphrasing, I'm sick and
tired of your Sunday morning worship services. I'm sick and
tired of your doxologies, your offerings, your benedictions,
your calls to worship. I could vomit out the whole business. That's what he says to his people
in Isaiah chapter 1. They were in the right place,
the temple, in Jerusalem, at the right time, doing the right
things, but the heart and the soul had gone out of their worship.
began i remind you that this is exactly what our lord says
to the jews of his day in march after seventeen being do you
worship me because you brought me here with your hearts with
your lips and not with your heart so there should be a tremendous
concern in the heart of every christian to know whether or
not he is rendering the kind of worship but the father seeks
to make it even more contemporary About 45 minutes, we will enter
what is called the Sunday morning worship service. Now, what should
be your greatest concern as you anticipate entering that service
of worship? What should be your greatest
concern as you sit in the building that we call the sanctuary? You
see, your greatest concern should be to render the kind of worship
that the Father Himself is seeking. What kind is He seeking? Well,
our Lord tells us in verse 23, He is seeking those who will
worship Him in spirit and in truth, and that positive declaration
infers the negative. He does not want worship that
is characterized by ignorance or by heartlessness. He wants
worship in the realm of truth, worship in the reality of the
Spirit. Now, if we are to bring that
kind of worship to God, what is necessary on our part. And I would like to divide the
thoughts that I'll share in the remaining 20 minutes into a time
sequence. There are things necessary to
render this kind of worship before we actually engage in worship,
during the acts of worship, and then subsequent to the experience
of worship. So we have before, during, and
after. First of all, then, what is necessary
if we're to worship God in spirit and in truth before we ever enter
the place of worship? Before we ever enter that situation,
whether it's a formal church building or whether it's a fellowship
hall, whatever it may be, let me suggest something that's very,
very mundane, but very, very necessary. Before you worship,
there must be the preparation of your body for the acts of
worship by adequate rest. You see, you don't worship God
as the angels do. They worship as disembodied spirits. The scripture says the angels
are sent forth to minister to the heirs of salvation. Angels
can go all Saturday night on the bidding of their God and
still worship him fresh on Sunday morning. But you're not an angel. Nobody knows that more than I
do. Well, I'm not speaking in those terms, but I'm talking
in terms of our humanity. You must worship God in that
body that God has given you. And that body is so tied in with
the activities of the spirit and of the mind that a body inadequately
rested cannot give itself to true worship. So the battle for
worship many times is won or lost Saturday night. This is
one reason why in our congregation we have no Saturday night church
activities. Now we don't go around like some
kind of spiritual Gestapo checking up on everybody to see if they're
all in bed by 9.30 Saturday night, because there are times when
we as elders Wouldn't be a good example, that's the one night
that we can get together weekly as elders to pray for the congregation. Sometimes the needs keep us up
a bit late, but we feel that's not presumptuous because those
later hours are matters of engagement in the work of Christ. But apart
from that, you must learn to discipline your Saturday nights
if you're to win the victory of worship Sunday morning. That's
where the battles won or lost. And perhaps many of you have
unwittingly fallen into this subtle trap of getting yourself
all disturbed that your heart seems so cold and your mind so
unresponsive, and you are looking for deep and profound spiritual
reasons as to the sluggishness of your worship on the Lord's
Day, when the basic problem was you simply did not cut things
off soon enough Saturday night, get home, get your full eight
or nine hours, whatever you need, come fresh to the Lord's Day,
allowing enough time to prepare your heart and come with a rested
body and a fresh mind to engage yourself in the worship of God.
So before worship, if we're to render worship in spirit as well
as in truth, you must prepare your body by adequate rest. Secondly,
you must prepare your mind and heart by serious, lofty thoughts
of the God whom you are going to worship. not only prepare
your body by adequate rest, but prepare your mind and heart by
serious, lofty thoughts of the greatness of that God to whom
you are going to come in your acts of worship. You get to bed
adequate time Saturday night, then there will be time to allot
at least a half an hour each Lord's Day morning to sit quietly
and ask yourself the question, when I gather with God's people
to lift up my voice and my heart with their voices and their hearts
in the worship of God, who is this God to whom we come? Meditate
upon such passages as Isaiah 40. Fill your mind with those
lofty thoughts of God. that Isaiah so eloquently pens
in the 40th chapter of his prophecy. The God before whom the nations
are like grasshoppers. The God before whom all the nations
of the earth are like the drop of a bucket. The God who takes
up the entire earth as a little dust in the palm of his hand. Think serious, lofty thoughts
of the greatness of God. Read some of the Psalms that
speak of His greatness. Fill your mind with them, those
Psalms 94, 95, 97. The Lord reigneth, let the earth
tremble. Thoughts of God that will expand
and stretch the mind. But not only must you fill your
mind and heart with serious, lofty thoughts of the greatness
of God, but prepare your mind and heart by warm thoughts of
the goodness and mercy of God. Read the 103rd Psalm. Bless the
Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless His holy
name, and forget not all His benefits, who forgiveth all thine
iniquities, who healeth all thy diseases. who redeemeth thy life
from destruction, who crowneth thee with loving kindness and
tender mercy, so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle, like
as a father pitieth his children. Read the first chapter of Ephesians. Blessed be the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual
blessings in heavenly places. Fill your mind and heart not
only with lofty thoughts of the greatness of God, so that there
is something of awe in your worship, But fill your mind with thoughts
of His goodness and His mercy, that your heart may run out to
Him in hymns of praise and psalms of adoration that flow from your
present awareness of this God and His goodness to you. Now
you see, if you don't, as it were, prime the pump, if you
don't build the fires of devotion before coming to worship, It's
awfully hard to set the wood and the kindling in the fireplace
and strike the match to it all at once, simply when you're singing
the first hymn. You see, that first hymn should
be, as it were, the opening up of the backlog of previous pressure. You see, you've filled your mind
and heart with great thoughts of God, with thoughts of His
goodness, so when that first hymn is sung, there is the pouring
out of the built-up pressure of the heart and the mind concerning
the greatness and the majesty and the goodness of God. All
right? Then there are certain things that we must engage in
during our acts of worship if our worship is to be characterized
by spirit and by truth. You see, adequate rest helps
us to worship God in terms of spirit, to give our entire inner
being to worship. Thinking about God's greatness
and goodness prepares us to worship Him in truth. We're worshiping
Him in terms of who He is and what He's done. Now, during worship,
what must be done to worship Him in spirit and in truth? Number
one, and everything else flows out from this, give yourself
wholeheartedly to the various aspects of worship. Give yourself
Yourself means your body, your mind, the entirety of your being. Give yourself wholeheartedly
to the various aspects of worship. Let's take them. Singing psalms
and hymns of praise to God, that this is an integral part of worship
is clearly taught both by the Old and the New Testaments. Take
the hundredth psalm. Come before his presence with
what? with singing. Enter into his
gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise. Now,
how are we to praise him? Well, David gives us the example.
He said, with my whole heart will I praise thee. Now, if something
has your heart, it has everything else. i love to watch this when
i get a chance uh... particularly during the fall
to watch a few football games you never get that once you've
been involved in body contact sports i guess it never gets
out of your system and the whole heartedness of the enthusiasm
particularly when you watch some of these games that come over
w a b c old miss playing tennessee or something else where there
are these tremendous rivalries and you see the cameras zeroing
in on the cheer they don't care what kind of donkeys they make
of themselves grown people who ought to know better, carrying
on like a bunch of kids. And when their team loses, they're
not ashamed to weep. I don't care how reserved they
are. And the camera will zoom in on the pretty young cheerleader
sitting there, crying away. It'll zero in on some defensive
tackle, 6'6", 270, sitting on the bench crying. Why? No shame of tears, no shame of
enthusiasm. Why? Because that in which they're
engaged has their heart. And when it's got the heart,
it's got everything else. Should God be thought worthy
of anything less than this? You see, one of the curses of
our Western culture, as it touches the religious life, is that it's
somehow given us the idea that we can get enthusiastically abandoned
to anything, but when we touch spiritual things, somehow we
must be very proper. Well, that's not the mentality
of the Bible. When David got so blessed at
the return of the ark, he danced for joy before the ark! And his
wife saw him and was embarrassed about the whole thing. And he
says, if you think this is bad, I'll dance yet more vehemently
in joy before my God. And the scripture lays upon us
the duty of wholehearted engagement in the praise of God. With my
whole heart will I praise thee. The commands again and again
in the Psalms to praise him with a loud voice, to lift up our
voices. What is that saying? Not that
God is deaf and he can't hear us unless we, as it were, scream
into his ear at 50 decibels. No, no. It's simply underscoring
the fact that the Father seeks worship in spirit. If you saw
a bunch of people who claim that they were wholly committed to
Alabama beating Notre Dame in the postseason bowl game and
they sat there on the Alabama side, go get them. Go get them. I say that's ridiculous! The
fact that the heart is in it is reflected in the face, in
the body, in the hands, in the volume, every part of it. All
right? Is that all negated and cancelled
simply because the object of our hearty concern is the living
God? No! It sanctifies it, elevates
it. There's a sense in which He's
the only one worthy of that kind of involvement. The living and
the true God. And therefore we must give ourselves
wholeheartedly to this aspect of worship, the singing of psalms
and hymns and spiritual songs. What about our giving? Is the
taking up of a collection just sort of a necessary evil to keep
the operation in business? Well, if that's the way you view
it, that's a sub-biblical view of giving. For the Apostle Paul
gives us the biblical philosophy of giving in 2 Corinthians 8
and 9, and he says this, Concerning those poor saints in Macedonia,
he said, they did beyond what we expected, for they gave first
of themselves unto the Lord and unto us. In other words, true
giving is not merely an activity of the hand involving dollars
and cents. It's an activity of the whole
redeemed man or woman, presenting himself afresh to God. As he
gives of his substance, he's saying, Lord, I am your purchased
possession. This money is but a tangible
expression that everything I am is yours. You've redeemed me.
And Lord afresh, I give the entirety of my redeemed personality unto
you with my hand as I present the gift. O Lord, my heart goes
with it and I present myself. That's what worship is. What
about listening to sermons? This is perhaps one of the most
elevated acts of worship, when the creature sits before his
God, the Creator, and submits his mind, his life, his will,
his affections, everything he is, to the authority of the Word
of God. That's the aspect of worship
in listening to sermons. I'm taking the place of a creature.
As God says in His Word, let all the earth keep silence before
Him. God is speaking. And if God is
speaking, I must listen to His voice. And that demands a wholehearted
giving of my mind to what is being preached. As it says of
the Bereans in Acts chapter 17, they receive the word with readiness
of mind. We read in 2 Timothy 2.7, consider
what I say, literally it means think upon these things and the
Lord will give the understanding. We're to love God not only with
the whole heart, but with all the mind, the soul, and what's
the next word? Strength. Strength. That is the entirety of my energies
as a human being. Proper listening to sermons is
a very draining thing. I remember one time preaching
at a conference, and the Lord was unusually present, and I
was conscious of his help, and I think anyone with any discernment
was conscious that God was there. And I'll never forget the remark
of a very discerning young woman who came up afterwards. She said,
Mr. Martin, I feel absolutely exhausted
and exhilarated both at the same time. You see, the measure of
her spiritual exhilaration was in direct proportion to her exhaustion
in that she had given herself to the ministry of the Word of
God. Her mind was active. She was
reflecting upon what the truth said to her. Her heart was active,
where the arrows of conviction were coming. There were direct
dealings with God, confession of sin, the pouring out of aspirations
to God, right while the Word is preached. If we could somehow
visually conceptualize all that goes on in the minds of a congregation
of people when there's true biblical preaching, we'd be amazed at
all of the interplay of the hearts of God's people and their God.
That ought to be the experience. That's what makes preaching and
true listening to preaching a blessed and spiritual experience. What
about praying? When we are led in prayer, the
invocation, the pastoral prayer, again, is this just some kind
of a thing that we bow our heads, shift into neutral, and wait
until we hear the phrase, in Jesus' name, Amen, and then pull
our minds together? No, no. The scripture says of
the early church when they faced that crisis of opposition in
Acts chapter 4, they lifted up their voice with one accord to
God. Say, does that mean they all
prayed at the same time in the same words? No. Someone was the
spokesman, but every other heart was engaged, every other mind
was focused upon the words of the one who was the spokesman,
so that scripture says, with one heart and with one voice,
they lifted up themselves unto God. This is what worshipful
prayer is. Now that demands something of
you. You do not sit passively. You must, during the acts of
worship, give yourself wholeheartedly to all those various aspects. That is to worship God in spirit. And then finally, after worship,
subsequent to the formal acts of worship, if that worship is
not to be, as it were, dubbed as a mere sham, what must be
true of us? And let me suggest just two things.
Seek to fuse the truth to your mind by discussion and reflection. Have you heard the word of God?
Seek to fuse what you heard to your mind by discussion and reflection. Was there some aspect of God's
character that seemed to be particularly in focus during the prayers that
day? Well, seek to fuse that concept
or those concepts to your minds by discussion with your friends
at the family. One of the things we do in our
home is on the way home from church in the morning, we have
about a five-mile ride from the parsonage to the church, we try
to discuss the Sunday morning sermon. When we sit for our Sunday
dinner, we discuss what the children learned in Sunday school and
seek to fuse it to their minds by mutual discussion. But then
secondly, you must seek to fuse the truth to your heart by fervent
prayer. Having heard, now you must have
that truth fused to your heart and to your experience by fervent
prayer. Turn what you hear into fuel
for prayer. and plead with God to make it
applicable to your own life. If the burden of the sermon has
been with reference to the need for laborers in the harvest field,
pray the Lord of the harvest to send them forth. If the thrust
has been some aspect of Christian duty, pray it in. This is how
the truth of God becomes part and parcel of our entire beings. Now, this has been a very cursory,
a very quick, a very surface treatment of this whole great
subject of true worship and what it demands of us, but I hope
it has sufficed to do a couple of things. I hope it has shocked
some of you into realizing that perhaps you've never really worshipped, and that that discovery will
be such as to cause you this morning, perhaps for the first
time, really to experience what worship is. So in the time between
now and the invocation, the opening prayer, the opening hymn, some
fifty yards away or whatever it is in the main sanctuary,
rather than having chit-chat with one another about a number
of things, let's take care of anything that we need to take
care of. Go into that building and sit and reflect upon the
greatness of our God. Sit in that building and prepare
your mind and heart by reading some of these portions so that
when that opening hymn is announced, your heart may run out to God
in fervent praise and in genuine adoration of His being. During
then, the singing of the songs and hymns and the giving of your
substance, the attention to the word of God, you feel yourself
beginning to, as it were, relax. Say, Lord, give me grace to worship
you in spirit. I would not dishonor you by rendering
half-hearted worship. You are too glorious of God to
be worshipped in that way. You will find both the exhaustion
and the exhilaration then of the acts of truth. and biblical
worship. The Father is on a quest this
morning. That quest is not to have buildings called churches
filled with people all singing the same words at the same time.
No, no. Jesus said the Father is seeking
those to worship Him in spirit and in truth. Will He find that
in you? Will He find it in me? God grant that He shall. To His
praise and to our prophet. Let us pray. Our Father, once again your word
has found us and exposed us, and many of us must confess in
this hour the grievous sin of bringing to you unacceptable
worship Forgive us when we have, as it were, thrown into your
face careless, heartless, sluggish worship. O Lord, you are so great
a God, you are so lofty and majestic a being, that you are worthy
of praise from creatures far more fitted to bring it than
we are. And yet you are seeking from
the lost sons of Adam, redeemed in Jesus Christ, You are seeking
worship in spirit and in truth. O Lord, we would bring such worship
to You today and all the days of our lives. Have mercy upon
us, we pray. Quicken us by the Holy Spirit
that our worship today may please and honor You. May we not enter
the sanctuary so much concerned with what blessing we will get,
But oh, may our concern be what we can render to you, great,
living, eternal God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Hear
us in this our prayer, and be pleased to answer us. For Jesus'
sake, amen.