To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God. To feed the mind with the truth of God. To open the heart to the love of God and to devote the will to the purpose of God. It is all of us in response to all of Him.
It is all that we are reacting rightly to all that He is. It's been said that true worship doesn't depend on the preacher or the place, but on the attitude of the heart. Question is, how do you cultivate the right heart attitude? And what's the pattern?
What are the steps to follow? Find out with John MacArthur today on Grace To You. He'll return to his study called True Worship in just a few moments. But, John, before we get to the lesson, I know that one way we can worship God is by giving Him praise. And you have a letter in front of you from a man who was overflowing with praise and thanksgiving to God, and I found this letter very encouraging. I think our listeners will, too, so would you read that for us? Oh, I'd be glad to, Phil. This letter comes from a man named Corey, and he writes, I first heard your preaching a little over seven years ago while commuting to work.
I was at the lowest point in my life. I came across the Grace To You radio broadcast on a local station that services where I live in a rural county. I will admit I was a nominal Christian, and I thought I was saved for many years. Once tuned in, I realized quickly that I had never heard anyone preach and teach the Word of God so carefully and thoroughly like you do. I knew I was hearing God speak from His Word. After several weeks of listening to your broadcast, I actually understood what the gospel really was, and by God's grace came to understand the saving power of Jesus Christ, and my life has been forever changed.
I thought that period was the worst experience I could possibly bear, but in hindsight it was absolutely the best thing that could ever have happened to me. He goes on, through your faithful service to the church, you've equipped me and built me up to effectively minister to others, and I have experienced the indescribable joy of leading my wife, my children, my father, and my friends to Christ. In the last eight months, the Lord has called me to go even deeper and follow Jesus into the ministry.
My home church is very supportive of my calling, and my pastor has given me the opportunity of pastoring our church's youth ministry where I'm learning and gaining experience in ministry. In this regard, you have been a major influence and role model to me personally. What's the point of all this? To say thank you and show you the personal impact that your obedience to His call has had on my life. I can't begin to even thank you enough for everything that I've learned from you. May the Lord continue to bless you, keep you, make His face shine upon you, and be gracious to you. He signs your brother in the Lord, Corey. That is why we do what we do, because God's Word accomplishes His divine miracle of salvation.
Thank you, Corey. Yes, that letter is a great example of how God's Word can transform a person's life. And, friend, if you'd like to help bring life-changing truth to people in your community and beyond, you can do that today.
More details after the lesson. But right now, stay here as John continues his series, True Worship. Again, if you will, I'd like to ask you to open your Bible to the fourth chapter of John, the Gospel of John chapter 4, and our text, verses 20 through 24. Jesus here is in conversation with the woman of Samaria, the woman that He met at the well. And in the middle of their conversation, the matter of worship comes up. She desires to worship God rightly. She has had her sin exposed. The Lord has unmasked her many adulteries. And I believe that in the perception that He is a prophet from God and later on that He even may be the Messiah, she feels a great sense of sinfulness and desires to worship God, desires to come before God and set her life right.
And the question that comes into her mind is where does she go to do that? As a Samaritan, she has worshiped God on Mount Gerizim. As a Jew, they worship God in Jerusalem. And because she wants to do it right, she seeks an answer as to which is the proper place and so she speaks in verse 20. Our fathers worshiped in this mountain and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.
Jesus saith unto her woman, believe me, the hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem worship the Father. Ye worship ye know not what. We know what we worship for salvation is of the Jews but the hour cometh and now is when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For the Father seeketh such to worship Him. God is a spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.
This is the heart of the text. In verse 21, Jesus says the time is going to come when it won't be at Gerizim and it won't be at Jerusalem and we've already discussed that, the abolishing of the ceremonial system and the fact that we are called upon to worship God everywhere and at all times and so forth and particularly in the assembly of His redeemed people. But then in verse 22, the Lord becomes very specific in defining the nature of worship, the nature of worship, the essence, what worship really is at its very heart. William Temple years ago defined worship this way, to worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God and to devote the will to the purpose of God. It is all of us in response to all of Him.
It is all that we are reacting rightly to all that He is. Now we've talked about the importance of worship, haven't we? We've said that the Father seeks true worshipers, verse 23, and that makes worship very important.
That is the end of God's redemptive plan. God seeks people to worship Him. That's why you're saved to worship God.
That's why it's the most important. More important than service, more important than ministry is worship. And we've tried to see the importance of worship as God sees it. Worship is not what we receive, but it's what we give. Evelyn Underhill writing in 1928 to a conference of clergy in the Church of England said this, We are drifting toward a religion which consciously or unconsciously keeps its eye on humanity rather than deity.
It's a great statement. We are drifting toward a religion which consciously or unconsciously keeps its eye on humanity rather than deity. Even the Church of Jesus Christ, even the evangelical church finds itself prone to be man-centered. We are such a consumptive society, such a pragmatic society, such a man-centered society that we tend to turn everything on ourselves. We talk of men. We talk of the needs of men, the problems of men.
We think and talk about our own needs and our own problems. We talk about the programs of men, the methods of men, the efforts of men, the sermons of men, the songs of men, the books of men, the churches of men, the organizations of men. And somehow in all of that talk we very often lose sight of the fact that we are to be conscious of God far more than of men. And so we talked about how important it is that we worship as a way of life.
We talked about the source of worship, didn't we? And we said the source of worship is salvation, the seeking of the Father in verse 23 is efficacious. In other words, He seeks and redeems those He seeks and He seeks and redeems them to worship so that when you were redeemed you became a worshiper.
As one writer said, you awakened from your moral slumber in the morning of your regeneration to begin to worship God. And that's what a Christian is, Philippians 3, 3, a worshiper of God. We talked about the object of worship, the fact that when we come together it is to focus on God and to worship Him and Him alone. And He is to be worshiped as Spirit and as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, right? We worship God then in His Trinitarian fullness. We do not evaluate worship on the basis of what it does for us. We do not come to get a blessing.
We do not come to receive something. We do not come asking how is it going to lift me up? How is it going to meet my need? How is it going to give me a good feeling? How is it going to inspire me? How is it going to bless me?
To do that is to substitute subjective affection for objective trust. We come to give to God, to worship Him. He's the object. And now I want to talk today about the sphere of worship just for a brief moment.
We just need to clear this up in our minds as a brief review. The sphere of worship, Jesus indicated, it's not going to be in Jerusalem. It's not going to be in Mount Gerizim.
And then in verse 24 He says, God is a Spirit. Therefore, worship is not restricted to any location, but it is to be done where? Everywhere. Everywhere. And yet we said, there is still a temple where God meets His people.
And what is it? It's the corporate assembly of the living church, right? So while we worship God everywhere and at all times, there is still the uniqueness of the living stones that come together to be inhabitation for the Spirit.
And that's why in 1 Corinthians 11, 20, Paul says they met together in one place. That's for that latruo, that liturgeo, that special unified formal worship when God's redeemed people come together. You need to worship God everywhere and at all times, but also in the corporate assembly of His redeemed people and forsake not that assembling of yourselves together. Now, let's look at the nature of worship. The nature of worship.
And it's simply stated in this passage. Verse 22, let's start there. Ye worship, ye know not what.
Now what does He mean by that? He says to a Samaritan woman, you don't know what you worship. Now first of all, it is acknowledging that she worships, right? You worship, you just don't know what you're worshiping. And that is characteristic of the Samaritans.
Why? Listen now, because they only accepted the first five books of the Old Testament. That's all. They only accepted the Pentateuch as from God. And so their knowledge was limited. So the Lord says to them, you don't know what you worship. I mean you have the Pentateuch and that tells you some things about God, but not enough to have the full salvation revelation, right? So you really don't know the fullness of what you're worshiping.
And here's what we have with the Samaritans. We have enthusiastic worship without proper information. You have the aggressive, enthusiastic, excited, faithful worship of these people, but they don't necessarily have the right content. So we would say to begin with that they worship in spirit, that they're into it, right? In fact, here we are several thousand years later and would you like to know the Samaritans will be up on Mount Gerizim doing their thing?
They dipped down to about 170 of them a couple years ago and now they've started reproducing again. And if you were to go to Mount Gerizim on their holy days, you would see them slicing up animals just exactly as in the Mosaic economy. They're still at it. And they will not give it up.
They are enthusiastic about it. But they don't have the right information. They're very limited in terms of what they understand. Limited to the first five books of the Old Testament and that leaves them 61 books they haven't considered. In the Bible. Now they do have enough information to know about the Messiah because He appears in Genesis, doesn't He? The seed of the woman, the scepter. So they have some information but it isn't enough and so the Lord says to them, you worship in spirit but you lack the truth, right?
You lack the information or the content that's necessary. Look back at verse 22. Now speaking of the Jews, we know what we worship for salvation is of the Jews. Now the Jews had the very opposite situation. They accepted all of the Old Testament books, all 39 books. They accepted all of the revelation of God. They had the truth but lacked what?
The Spirit. I mean you read Matthew 6 and it says that when the Pharisees prayed and when they gave alms and when they fasted, their hearts weren't in it. Jesus says you are hypocrites, you are phonies, your hearts aren't involved in it. How many times did Jesus say to the people what was an Old Testament truth?
You follow after Me with the forms but your hearts aren't in it. What did Paul say? You have left out the basic truths and you're going through religious motions. He indicted the Jews again and again for that. Now there were some Jews who had a zeal for God. There were some Jews who really were zealous inside. But the basic existing religion of Jerusalem, the stuff that was going on up there on Moriah was truth based on what the Bible said but the hearts were empty.
They had even pumped it full of the traditions of men. So the Lord says Jerusalem has the truth but not the Spirit. Gerizim has the Spirit but not the truth. Now here are the two poles of worship. On the one hand you have Mount Gerizim which is enthusiastic heresy. On the other hand you have Jerusalem which is barren, lifeless orthodoxy.
And that's what Jesus sees as He talks to the woman and may I add that that's what we see today. You can see those same two extremes in the church today. On the one hand you've got over here the sort of charismatic, Pentecostal people who are just really going at it. I mean they worship maybe for hours, maybe all night long. They're holding hands and swaying back and forth and singing songs and speaking in ecstatic language and doing whatever they're doing. And we look at them and we say, oh, oh, heresy, heresy. But we can't mock their enthusiasm. I mean some of them are even falling over and rolling around and all kinds of things, singing songs. On the other hand we've got barren orthodoxy which is closer to where we are.
We've got all of the truth in the right compartments. We just can't get turned on about it. We just don't get that excited about it. In fact we get bored in about 30 minutes during the service and we're looking at our watch or counting the E's in the bulletin or that's what I used to do when I was little.
Or checking out the spots on our dress or looking at our husband and saying, I've been with a guy for 20 years and he still doesn't polish his shoes. You know, I mean there's so many, so many, many distractions. And we've got all of the content and we don't know how to turn loose the heart.
Those are the two poles. Truth is the balance. And so he says, look, the hour is coming when the true worshipers are going to worship God in both ways, in spirit and in truth, right? With the truth and the heart.
That's what he's after. The Jews had all the accurate data and no heart. They killed the Messiah. The Samaritans had all the data, I mean all the heart and none of the data, didn't know the Messiah. The truth and the spirit both must be there. The two enemies of true worship are Gerizim and Jerusalem.
You can't have one without the other or there's imbalance. Sincerity, that's great. Enthusiasm, that's great. Aggressive worship, that's great. But it must be based on truth. Truth, that's great. But if it doesn't issue in an eager, anxious, thrilled and filled heart, it's missing.
You so often have light without heat or heat without light. Jesus says the Father seeks both, both. There's a pastor on the East Coast by the name of Al Martin. He has a good statement. I think it speaks to my heart and I'm sure to yours. He said this, men have worshiped with open Bibles and with the name of Christ and the Bible on their lips. While whole congregations before them have been held in the grip of barrenness and lifelessness and powerlessness. Where it has been weeks and months and years since hearts have been ravished with the sight of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Years since any hymn has been sung with abandonment. Years since a tear has trickled down the face of a worshiper. Years since a hallelujah flowed out of a bursting heart. End quote.
He's right. And we are guilty on that barren orthodox sigh of sitting here with our Bibles open with all of the theology known and indifferent to the spirit of worship. Let's talk about spirit. In verse 23 and 24 it says we must worship the Father in spirit. Now, if Jesus says we need to do this, then we need to do it.
And if we're going to do it, we need to know what it means. How do you worship the Lord in spirit? But what does it mean to worship in spirit? This refers to the human spirit. It basically refers to the inner person. You are to worship from the inside out. From the inside out. It is not a matter of being some place in the right place and the right time, the right words, the right demeanor, the right clothes, the right formalities, the right activity, the right music, the right mood.
No. It is the inside, the spirit. In Romans 1, 9, Paul says a very important statement. He says, God is my witness, now listen to this, whom I worship with my spirit.
La Truo. He worships God with his spirit. And I love Psalm 103.
You know it well. It says, Bless the Lord, O my what? Soul. And all that is where? Within me. Bless his holy name. That's what it's talking about. It's talking about glorifying God from within. From within. Now let me give you what I think is a very beautiful illustration of this in the 51st Psalm.
You can just listen to it. Write it down for reference. In Psalm 51, David comes with what I'll call a worship of repentance. But he says in verse 15, and I just think this is so wonderful, O Lord, open thou my lips, and my mouth will shew forth thy praise. For thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it. Thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. David says, I know you don't want the external stuff.
I know that's not the issue. That was just a symbol of the fact that you want the heart. And so I ask you this, open my lips, and my mouth will shew forth thy praise. Now you know what that says to me? That pictures to me a man whose heart is filled with praise, and all he needs is to get his mouth open and it'll come out. And that's the worship of the Spirit.
That's when it's inside. And David says, my circumstances are such that I just don't have the strength to open my mouth. If you'll just open my mouth, it'll all come out.
What a great picture. That's what it means to worship in spirit. To have a heart that is literally overflowing, Psalm 45, 1, bubbling over with a good thing.
And when the mouth is pried open, it just gushes out. Worship in praise. Now I want to get practical. How can we do this? How can we have that in us and how can we let it out of us so that we worship in spirit? So that we're not like the Jews who have all the facts and all the data and cold hearts, bored, indifferent. How can we do that?
Here it comes. Number one, and I'll give you several principles. First of all, you must possess the Holy Spirit. You must possess the Holy Spirit. Before you can worship God in your spirit, the Holy Spirit has to be there to prompt that. For no man, 1 Corinthians 2 says, knoweth the things of God except the Spirit of God. And if you don't have the Spirit of God within you, prompting your heart, motivating your heart, cleansing your heart, instructing your heart, it is not going to happen. You cannot worship God without God energizing in his spirit that worship. And that's just basic.
That's the bottom line, obviously. You have to be redeemed. You have to be saved. And when you're saved, the Holy Spirit comes to live in your heart. And the Holy Spirit points you to God, points you to God, prods you, pokes you, pushes you, instructs you, purges you so that you may worship.
That's his ministry. So it all begins then with the resident Holy Spirit. In fact, in Philippians 3, where it says we worship God in the spirit, some of the manuscripts indicate we worship God in the Holy Spirit.
You could either, you could go either way. We worship God in the human spirit because we are prompted by the Holy Spirit. You see, no one can say Jesus is Lord, 1 Corinthians 12, except by what? The Spirit of God. You can't affirm the lordship of Christ. You can't worship him as sovereign except prodded by the Holy Spirit. And you receive the Holy Spirit upon the reception of Jesus Christ the Savior and Lord.
So you begin there. Look at your heart. If you have trouble worshiping, maybe you're not saved.
I mean, maybe the reason you get bored in church and maybe the reason you're ready to leave in a half an hour, maybe the reason you just miss church altogether is because you just can't get into the thing, and the reason you can't get into it is because the Holy Spirit isn't in you prompting your heart. It's a fair question, isn't it? And you need to ask it of yourself.
Let's go to a second one. The second principle, and I think this is so important, is that thoughts must be centered on God. That's very simple, but it's a very profound thing. Worship is an overflow of a mind renewed by the truth of God. Contemplating God is the trigger that sets off worship.
It's the motor that turns the flywheel that energizes the emotion. You must be thinking thoughts of God. Now, I can translate that into a very familiar word, and that's the word meditation. True worship comes forth out of meditation. Meditation. Now, forget everything you ever heard from the world about meditation, transcendental or any other kind. Let me tell you what meditation means.
You ready for this? Focusing your whole mind on one subject. That's basically it. Focusing your whole mind on one subject.
That's a MacArthur definition, but I think it works. To meditate is to focus your whole mind on one subject. Now, if you find that hard, it's fairly normal. It's hard to do that, isn't it? Boy, we live in a distracted world. A distracted world. You know, we have today, just because of our exposure to media and everything, more stuff in our brain than I think any civilization ever had. I mean, we are exposed to so much stuff that the thing is so cluttered up that our attention span is very limited.
Very limited. But to meditate is to concentrate your whole mind on one subject. And let me tell you something. That is the key to effective worship. Without question, your reason, your imagination, your emotion are all concentrating on one reality. So it all begins with thoughts centered on God, which come out of prayer and Bible study and discovery. And out of that discovery comes meditation. And out of that meditation, worship.
And may I make it very simple, no discovery, no meditation, no meditation, no worship. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur. Thanks for being with us. John calls this study true worship, and it's really one of our classic studies. And before the lesson, John read a letter from a listener named Corey who was filled with thankfulness because this radio program helped him understand the Gospel for the first time. And friend, it's because of the support of people like you that we are able to connect with God's people in biblical truth. If you'd like to help us reach people in your community and beyond, express your support today. Our toll-free number here, 855-GRACE, or make a donation at our website, gty.org. There you can also set up a convenient recurring gift, and our regular mailing address is Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412.
Thank you for all that you do to support Verse by Verse teaching. Again, to partner with us, speak to a member of our staff at 800-55-GRACE, or go to our website, gty.org. And when you visit gty.org, make sure to take advantage of the thousands of free resources that are available there, including Grace Stream. That's a continuous loop of John MacArthur's sermons from Matthew through the book of Revelation, and it takes a couple of months to get through all of them. But then the sermons repeat, so whether you have 15 minutes to listen or a couple of hours, jump into the Grace Stream today and anytime for Verse by Verse encouragement from the New Testament. You'll find Grace Stream at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, inviting you back for tomorrow's lesson. It's an important look at what produces true worship and what stifles it. Be here for another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.
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