[To the Woman at the well] Jesus declared, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.” (John 4:21-24)
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Worshipping In Spirit and In Truth
We Christians sometimes tend to use the term “worship” very cavalierly and in an offhand manner as being synonymous with our attendance at Sunday Services.
Scripturally, as Jesus indicated to the Samaritan woman, “worship” is more than just being present at a particular ritual, ceremony, or religious event. True Worship demands that we draw close to God in a particular attitude of heart so that we are present to HIM “in the spirit”. This requires an attitude of heart that comprises of a complete yielding of our hearts and minds to a spiritual awareness of who God IS and who we are not.
True and authentic Worship, then, is an act of faith whereby we demonstrate this heartfelt attitude by prostrating ourselves spiritually before him in total humility and submission as an acknowledgement of our total dependence on HIM and HIM alone!
It is in this inner attitude, then, that we come before Him in “Spirit and in Truth” to Worship, not just out of obligation, or duty or tradition but out of a spiritual reverence and awe of the Person of God, the Holiness of His Name and of the Majesty of His Being.
That being said, it must be understood that the particular ritual, ceremony, or religious event to which we are drawn is there to incite us to move us from the physical and mental attitudes that are driven by our earthly concerns to the spiritual and inner awareness we need to enter into God’s presence. It is up to us to respond to the Spirit’s leading and enter into the truly Spiritual Worship which the Father desires.
The Apostle John was not kneeling in some ancient cathedral when, as a prisoner in some cave on the Isle of Patmos, he wrote: “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day..”. It was as He was worshipping alone in the austere environment of his captivity that, through the Spirit, He received a vision from Heaven, which detailed the truly awesome Worship that surrounds the Heavenly Throne (cf. Rev.4:1-11).
So we see that the gift of Spiritual Worship is not dependent so much on time, or place but on our yielding to the Spirit of the Living God who alone has the power to transcend our human circumstances and move us into His Spiritual Domain.
Even though we Christians are somewhat divided in our theological views on Worship, all of us have within us a spiritual need to express that true worship that the Holy Spirit has placed within us at baptism. The sub-pages that follow present a Catholic viewpoint and an Evangelical viewpoint so that all of us regardless of our theological world view might draw closer and closer to one another in a renewed understanding of worship.
– Bartimaeus
This page has the following sub pages.
