Wanted: Worshipers

¹⁶ Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” ¹⁷ The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; ¹⁸ for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” ¹⁹ The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. ²⁰ Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” ²¹ Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. ²² You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. ²³ But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. ²⁴ God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” ²⁵ 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.” ²⁶ Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”

If I’d been through five marriages and one day found myself under the hot noontide sun gathering water for livestock…I wonder if I’d be talking about worship!?!  If I were thinking of anything connected with God I might be using words like “healing” or “spiritual journey.”  That is, I, myself…Colin would be the at the center of my thoughts.  Yet this Samaritan woman – with all her problems and difficulties, is speaking of worship – how God is to be approached – and Jesus takes up her topic and runs with it.  

The Father is seeking true worshipers, Jesus tells us.  That’s the big picture of what God is doing.  Seeking true worshipers.  

What does it mean to worship?  At its essence, to worship is to pay attention.  

And why you’re paying attention is that you’ve figured out that this something/someone is valuable.  Eventually you’re ranking it higher than anything else.  

An analogy: If you’re into motorcycles, you’ll develop an eye for what makes for a good bike, and over time you can pick out the best motorcycle when you enter a shop.  This is the stuff of worship: noticing and ranking.  Noticing and ranking.

When we worship the Father we’ve noticed His excellence.  And then we’ve appraised him as being great.  He not only excels some things; He rises above everything..  

This word appraising can be shortened to “praise.”  Which suggests that not only do we notice and rank… we also express our ranking.  We say that God is great.

Worship: notice, rank, express.  

Because we sense and want to say God is great, but we don’t want to limit our expression of God’s greatness to only rational analysis, we’ll do a few funny, supra-rational things: we’ll sing to and about God, we’ll raise our hands toward Heaven where He dwells, we’ll bow our knees before God.  So, this appraisal isn’t just a rational one, it’s rational +++.  

Of course, God isn’t a motorcycle.  He’s not simply an object that we see and notice His great features.  He is a Speaker.  

So, worshiping God involves hearing and remembering what we heard from him.  Part of our attention to Him is hearing what God said.  We turn down the volume on other noises to attend more closely to what He’s said.  We rate His word above other words, including the sentiments of popular culture, including the lessons of our experience, including our inner voices.  

Some of what God speaks are commandments and instruction.  Commandments are simple orders.  I’m using “instruction” to refer to God’s stated expectations for us that we’ll require some additional moves on our part.  For instance, God never commands for us to get around a pool of water… but He does command us to be baptized which will require us to get around a pool of water.    

And so, as part of our worship, paying attention to God, we observe His commandments and instruction.  That is, we don’t just register that He’s spoken these commandments and instruction, we obey the specific commands (e.g., sex only within marriage) and align ourselves to His instructions (e.g., the local church is God’s plan A and there’s no plan B). 

Review: The big picture thing that’s God is up to is He’s seeking true worshipers.  Worship involves paying attention (which means mindless worship is an oxymoron), ranking, expressing highest regard for the great God… including in ways that build upon yet go beyond the rational.  Because God is a speaking God a lot of our worship has to do with paying attention to his words, trusting his word above other words, especially observing His imperatives.  All this is the stuff of worship. 

There are so many implications we could take out of this sketch of worship.  I’ll mention one: worship happens (or doesn’t) not only on Sunday but every day of the week.  And in every hour: yes, in every hour we’re paying attention to God, valuing Him and His word above all else…or not.  

Jesus adds one other phrase: God is seeking true worshipers who worship him in spirit and in truth.  A common, mistaken interpretation hears this as ‘when we as a church gets together our singing should be enthusiastic’ (there’s the ‘spirit’ part); b) ‘but make sure that what you’re excited about is actually legit’ (and there’s the ‘truth’ part).  And while this is good stuff, this isn’t what Jesus is saying.

Almost all the time in John, when the Greek word pneuma is used, it is in reference to God’s Holy Spirit.  And that is the case here.  The Father is seeking true worshipers who will worship in…by means of God’s Holy Spirit. 

And in the truth…or capitol ‘T’ Truth.  A few chapters later in this gospel we’ll hear Jesus claim “I am the Truth.”  That is, at the heart of how God created, maintained, redeems and re-creates the world is the God-Man Jesus.  He is the Truth of all that is…you cannot understand anything sufficiently without reference to Jesus Christ. 

So, to worship God in the Spirit and Truth means:

• My paying attention to what Being the Father is should come via the Spirit produced Scripture… and focus on the Jesus presented in the Scripture who was sent into the world to exegete the Father.  
• My expression of worship to the Father should conform to the Spirit produced Scripture alongside the Spirit produced community and be especially reflecting the person and work of Jesus Christ.  

We don’t know who the Father is apart from the Son.  We don’t know who the Son is apart from the Spirit.  Our observation of God has to be Trinitarian.  

Our worship of the Father 365 days a year.  Our worship not dictated by our spiritual urges or religious flights of fancy but by the Spirit Word heard and interpreted among the Spirit Community.  And the focus of our worship – the One whom the Spirit presents and the One who discloses to us the Father: JESUS CHRIST, THE TRUTH BEHIND ALL THAT THERE IS.  He’s the One that will tell us all things.

Why am I a proponent of Christian education?  Not because at non-Christian schools students are being fed complete intellectual poison.  Of course not.  2+2=4 is taught at Somers Public School and at Somers Christian School.  The problem is what doesn’t show up in the syllabus at SPS. Namely, God.  

How complete can our learning be when the One in whom we live and move and have our being is never referred to?  The other day Brian and I were talking about this and he asked, how would the teaching of physics be altered if it were taught from a Christian perspective?  And, while not able to answer him in any detail, the famous sentence of Galileo the Astronomer did cross my mind:   “Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.”  Surely believing that sentence can transform physics students into physics student-worshipers!  And surely such worship fits squarely into these students’ human calling of bearing the image of God!  

What I’m also a proponent of is Christian outreach at state schools.  Just like Jesus went through Samaria – a region whose understanding was an admixture of truth and superstition – and brought living water…so ministers of the gospel head into schools and colleges and universities that are teaching some truth to present Christ in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.  Presenting the fullness of Christ is education that will lead away from the thickest darkness and grow people up into their full humanity, that is, will teach humans how to worship!  

Worship requiring Christian or Christian-izing education…now let’s take one final step…and pivot a little bit.  In Nick’s last prayer letter, he included a couple of general prayer requests that when I read I amen’ed under my breath.  He prays for:

• Local churches to welcome this new generation into their church families and walk alongside them—not outsourcing spiritual growth to events or programs.
• Cru and local churches in Maine to raise up mature, faith-filled, Spirit-led disciples of Jesus.

I appreciate Nick’s emphasis on the local church and may his tribe increase.  Many times, young image bearers begin worshiping God while in college through a campus program.  But the goal must be to get these new worshipers plugged into a local church as soon as possible.  This, for practical reasons: they won’t be in college for that long and they’ll need to find a spiritual community that outlasts college.  And for the big theoretical reason: the local church is God’s plan A…and there is no plan B.  

I don’t want to spend time discussing how to move them from the exciting, hip, young adult tailored world of campus ministry into the much less glamorous local church.  What I want to quickly go over: how will this local church teach newly converted college students… but really all people… to observe all that Christ commands?  That is, how do we – filled with God’s Spirit – form new worshipers into better worshipers?  

• We need to commit ourselves to every newly baptized person entering a 1-1 mentorship with a godly Chrisitan of the same gender.  Weekly meetings for anywhere from 3 months to a year in which the four goals are: a) reckoning with the big fact that the worshiper is “in Christ”; b) learning to read the Bible with profit; c) learning foundational spiritual disciplines such as confession, financial stewardship, life in the church; 4) preparing them to mentor others into better worship.

Let me hover over that “life in the church” piece.  A lot of times new worshipers have a really wrong view of the church.  They approach the Bride of Christ as consumers.  They’re here to get the Ted Talk and get the religious emotions fired up.  Of, if they think of serving the Church it’s in dramatic terms.  But getting to know the names of the kids and young adults, contributing at church work days to spruce up the building, joining a congregational meeting?  It’ll require some explanation and likely persuasion for people to connect the dots between worshiping the Triune God, loving the Christ who reveals the Triune God, loving His Bride the Church, and polishing the pews for the Bride to sit in…  

For mentoring to happen, we need mentors.  Training to become mentors.  Oversight. We’re tackling this in 2026.  

• Worshipers need theology.  I tell new believers all the time: don’t waste time with books like “Let God Unleash the Tiger in Your Life” but rather buy a systematic theology.  Brothers and sisters, our faith needs an intellectual framework so that it won’t de-construct or so that it won’t become sentimentalized…and so prove to be ineffective and non-transferrable.  

Worshipers need facts, understanding.  To learn all that the Bible says about, for instance, the Day of the Lord.  We need to learn how each book of the Bible contributes to God’s complete disclosure of what He’s up to.  And worshipers need to learn the sequence and timeline and explanation regarding how God moved things along from Creation to New Creation.  We need the big picture of the Big Story of the Bible…and we need to drill down into topics.  Again, that’s what makes faith sturdy and able to be handed down.  Not just slogans but developed concepts.  

Related to this is church history.  

At this church, currently our primary vehicle for this more rigorous, academic stuff is Sunday school.  During Sunday School you should expect to be intellectually challenged, you should expect some ideas to go over your head as you’re being introduced to them for the first time, your confidence should be shaken as you discover all what you don’t know.  

I’ll make a quick pitch for SS: you’re getting things here you’re not getting anywhere else – sometimes it’s the opposite of glamorous, even tedious… but so is framing a house!

• While worship happens 24/7/365, our 52x/year gatherings of formal worship are special. At these high occasions the angels put on their festal garments and gather among us.  The atmosphere is thick with the Spirit – Heaven and earth overlap like no other times.  There is powerful spiritual activity that is hard to trace, harder to express, and yet it’s so.  

Sunday morning at 10:30 worship happens, but it also contains great worship lessons that will carry into the rest of the week.  An analogy: in the Old Covenant the occasional visits to the Tabernacle and Temple – at least thrice/year – would reside in the minds and spirits of Israel once they returned home: engrained in their memory was the carved lampstand casting light but also a reminder of the beauty of Eden, the majesty of mystery, the cleansing basins, the bread of survival, the centrality of the mercy seat, the images of cherubim, the opulence of priestly clothes, the precious stones that were there for beauty – all of this made a lasting impression and was intended to.  The formal worship fed the informal worship.

Oh, brothers and sisters, gather weekly with the Church.  Even when you’re away, attend another congregation.  Make it like clockwork, take every weekly opportunity to be formed by the Holy Presence.  The Father is seeking worshipers and One of His chief ways of forming them is through reverent gatherings where majesty, beauty, mystery, music, Word, holy ones, gospel, sacrament drench you and you’re not quite dry of it until late Saturday night. 

• Worshiping God is attending to him, obeying him, but also experiencing him.  And I don’t mean necessarily having the hair on your arms standing up, I mean experiencing him as a provider, as a problem-solver, as the one who fights for you, who exacts revenge on wrongdoers.  Getting to my point – praying to God is a key means of worshiping him, experiencing him in real time as a God who hears and answers.  

Church, our corporate gatherings for prayer are a means of corporate worship.  We’re not mainly praising him at these times; rather we’re providing ourselves with more evidences of God’s greatness through Him doing what we can’t do… in response to our prayers.  

I’ve thought about doing this but just didn’t have funds for it…if anyone wanted to fund it, please see me… but I wanted to mail each SBCer the book, “Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire,” by Jim Cymbala, the pastor of the Brooklyn Tabernacle, detailing how he and that church came to understand that the weekly gathering for prayer was the beating heart of their worship and congregational life.  

• Finally, in detailing the ways we are formally training worshipers into better worshipers, I’ll just mention occasional training in specifics: age and gender specific gatherings, classes on child-rearing, Christian family, finances, courses on overcoming bad habits –  – all toward the end of noticing, ranking, expressing, obeying the Triune God.

In conclusion, I want you to notice something: we don’t do that much in this church.  When SBC gathers we don’t accomplish much.  We hardly address societal problems, nor do we do things to make life easier or better for people (at least directly), nor scheme politically, nor do much to help the poor (although we do a little).  We are primarily – actually, overwhelmingly – gathering to teach the Word.  And pray.  And express our praise to God.  We’re a worshiping community.

But also, by the word, and prayer, and expressing praise – in the power of the Spirit – we are attempting to train worshipers of God.   When we gather we’re focused on learning to become better worshipers.

Not doing stuff.  But worshiping and training to become worshipers.  But not because doing isn’t important!  When SBC gathers the focus is on becoming worshipers.  Then when SBC scatters it’s about doing – building, cleaning, educating, trading, investing, correcting, creating, organizing, politicizing… but in all these things the worship continues.  And whether you eat or drink or whatever you’re doing, you’re doing all to the glory of God.  In all of these activities you’re exercising and applying what you’ve learned from the gatherings in front of the Word: trained in everything to notice the presence of God, to rank Him as the highest, to express in your work the power and justice and wisdom of God.  

Having long gathered with the congregation to learn to worship through the Word of God, you have what it takes to do 24/7 worship.  

First, becoming.  Being…then doing.  A worshiper who glorifies God in all that he does.  May God help us at SBC to form worshipers because God is seeking true worshipers.