God Is Spirit: Let’s Worship Him in Spirit and in Truth

I want to ask you something before we open our Bibles. Think about where you were the first time you really worshipped God. Not went to church, not sat in a pew, but where you actually, truly, met with the living God. Was it in a building? Was it in a home? Was it somewhere else?

I’ve preached in some of the finest church buildings you have ever seen: stained glass, padded pews, steeples, and pulpits built for the glory of preaching. And I’ve preached on ironing boards in living rooms and on tables in trailers in Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, you name it.

God showed up in both places. For the same reason: not because of what the building looked like, but because of who He is.

That is exactly what Jesus tells a woman at a well in Samaria. What He says to her will challenge every assumption you have about what worship is and what it requires.

Because God is spirit, only those who worship Him from the inside out, in spirit and in truth, worship Him at all. Everything else is going through the motions. The mountain, Jerusalem, the building: none of it matters. What matters is whether the God you say you worship has actually gotten into your heart.

Worship Is Not About a Place

Praise God, Jesus had to pass through Samaria. This Samaritan woman didn’t know it, but she had an appointment with Jesus, and if you are saved today there was a day that you never knew about until the day it happened, but there was no way to avoid it. Jesus had to pass through where you were. The gospel had to be preached. And you were saved.

This woman had an idea of worship, but she was confused. The Jews met in Jerusalem, but her people met in Samaria. The Jews recognized the entirety of the Hebrew canon. The Samaritans, on the other hand, only recognized the Pentateuch, noting that the first place Abraham built an altar to Yahweh was at Shechem, overlooked by Mt. Gerizim. For the Samaritans, a whole lot of importance had been placed in that mountain. The Jews had done the same with Jerusalem.

The Samaritan woman was not so different from the modern American Baptist. She was talking about a mountain and Jerusalem, which is not our problem. Our problem has to do with buildings and pews and locations. Jesus is telling her, and us, that the most important thing is not the mountain, not Jerusalem, not the building.

Indeed, in many churches, if you take away the stained glass, the padded pews, the fancy steeples, the familiar pulpit, most of the members will scatter. They won’t know what to do. My grandfather used to ask the question: “If you found a padlock on the door with a sign that says you cannot worship here any more, what will you do?” Such a question is not hypothetical.

Everybody has an opinion about what the place for worship looks like. In the mountain. In the city. Steeple or no steeple. Padded pews or chairs. Crosses or no. Color of carpet. And on and on we go, without one piece of Scripture to back any of it up. As George Hutcheson, the Puritan commentator from the 1600s, put it: “antiquity and the practice of some is a crooked rule to follow when it contradicts the current of the Scriptures.”

The reality is that for the first two hundred years of church history there is no mention of any church having a dedicated building. The early Christians met in homes and caves and other places. Your prayers are no more heard by God from a church building than if you stand at the wall in Jerusalem. Your baptism is no more valid in the River Jordan than if you were baptized in another place. You are no less a Christian if you meet in a house than if you meet in a building on Lord’s Day. It’s about true worshippers.

Jesus brings her attention to a subject of greater importance than this centuries-old squabble: there is coming a time when the public worship of the Father will not be confined to just one place. Location is not the issue. So if it’s not about the place, then what is it about? The answer depends entirely on who God is.

God Is Spirit

What does Jesus mean when He says that God is spirit? A.H. Strong put it this way: God is not matter, and God is not dependent on matter. He is not only spirit, but pure spirit. He has no necessary connection with the physical or material world.

This means that to worship God properly, we must worship in spirit and in truth. As A.W. Pink observed, these are not two different kinds of worship but two aspects of the same worship. To worship in spirit is to worship spiritually, from the innermost soul. To worship in truth is to worship truly, according to what God has actually revealed about Himself. Only such worship corresponds to His nature.

The reference to “truth” is always Christ-centered, as He is the truth (John 14:6). Worship is not simply external conformity to religious rituals and places. Not traditions of men or of the fathers, as important as they were, but inward worship with the proper heart attitude, consistent with the revealed Scripture and always pointing to Christ.

As we come together as a church, the purpose is worship. Worship is to be Christ-centered always, according to the Bible. In our country, though, it has become centered around man. Solomon wrote: “Trembling before man brings a snare, But he who trusts in Yahweh will be set securely on high” (Proverbs 29:25, LSB). Sometimes it is not in what we say or do. Sometimes it is in what we don’t say or do.

What do we do when we have a visitor? We worry about what the visitor thinks. I wonder what he thinks about the songs? The message. I hope the preacher didn’t offend him! And after the service, we ask him what he thought. We should consider these things. There is a time and place for it. Yet I wonder how often we stop to wonder what God thought.

An invisible God who searches the heart is not impressed by a full room and a good sound system. He is looking for people who, as verse 23 says, worship Him in spirit and truth, and that, says Jesus, is the kind of worshipper the Father is actually seeking.

True Worship Produces True Mission

When Jesus commissioned His church, they had no savings account, no building, and only a small group of people. The Great Commission in Matthew 28:18–20 was given to a church with none of what we often think we need before we can go.

Let us take the Word of God beyond our group. Let us invite others to join us. Let us get beyond our insecurities and realize who God is and what He has done. Because if there’s something holding you back from being obedient to Him now, once that thing is corrected, something else will keep you from it later.

Look at what happened in Samaria. The woman left her water jar and went back into the city. She said: come, see a man who told me all the things I have done. And many believed (vv. 28–30, 39). She had no building. She had no budget. She had no plan. She had a testimony and an urgency. That is the Commission. That is what it looks like when true worship produces true mission. The fields are still white for harvest. The question is whether we are willing to go.

The Living Water

Because God is spirit, the only worship that reaches Him comes from the inside out, in spirit and in truth. Not from a mountain, not from Jerusalem, not from a building. From the heart, through Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Samaritan woman came to that well carrying five failed marriages and a broken life. She didn’t come to find God. She came to draw water. But Jesus was there, and He had something she didn’t know she needed. And by the time she left that well, she had left her water jar behind. She didn’t need it anymore. She had found the living water. That is what true worship does. It changes what you thirst for.

But how do you get that living water? Look at verse 25. The woman says, “I know that Messiah is coming, He who is called Christ.” She was looking for something more. And then Jesus says something He almost never said so plainly: “I who speak to you am He.”

There it is. Right there at the well. The Son of God, the Messiah, the Savior of the world. Not a rumor, not a hope, not a religious system. A Person. Standing right in front of her. Saying: I am He.

That is still the gospel. Not a program, not a church, not a mountain. A Person. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who came into this world to seek the lost, who died on a cross for sinners, and who rose from the dead so that everyone who trusts in Him will never thirst again.

If you have never drunk of that water, I am not talking about joining a church or cleaning up your life. I am talking about coming to Jesus Christ with nothing in your hands, telling Him you are thirsty, and believing that He is exactly who He said He is. The Messiah. The Savior. The living water.

That is available to you today.