Spirit and Truth: Where You Worship Matters

Religion is something that can unite us or divide us. It can be a common cause or a cause for contention. This has been the case throughout history, and it was no different among the first-century Semitic people who worshipped the God Yahweh. Among those people were many different sects of Judaism: the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, and possibly more we have yet to discover in the annals of archaeology. There were a few common beliefs among them, chiefly their belief in Yahweh and in Torah, the law of Yahweh. They also all had a perception of proper worship in the temple. They may have disagreed in many ways on how to worship, but not where to worship.

Enter the Samaritans. These were, like the Jews, descendants of Israel, but they were born by relationships with the Assyrians who once conquered them. The Jews looked on them with disgust because of the impurity of both their bloodline and their religion. The Samaritans had a sacrificial system similar to that of the Jews, but the primary distinction was about location. Rather than Jerusalem, they worshipped on Mount Gerizim.

The woman at the well makes mention of this difference in worship. After Jesus revealed some things to her about her life, she said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship” (John 4:19-20).

One of Jesus’ more famous sayings follows her statement: “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 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. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:21-24).

Location Matters

Reading my heading to this section may be confusing if you have followed my blog for any amount of time. We have gone through several different ways in which Christ in John’s gospel points us to the new temple, the people of the church, being the context in which New-Covenant worship is conducted. And this is all still true. But as I have said before, English translations can sometimes lose their clarity of meaning when they are trying to maintain readability. It sounds odd to the English speaker to say “on spirit and truth,” but these are the same articles in Greek as are used for “on this mountain” and “in Jerusalem.”

Many people teach from this passage as though “spirit and truth” are tied to our methods, expression, theological camp, or other outward factors. But Jesus is actually comparing these physical locations, the tangible mountains of Moriah (in Jerusalem) and Gerizim (in Samaria), to the metaphorical mountains of spirit and truth. Phillip T. Morrow, in his article, What Does It Mean to Worship in ‘Spirit and in Truth’?, says that “to hold up Jesus’ parallel language to holy mountains here, we can’t think of ‘Spirit and Truth’ as the things that we bring to the table. They aren’t our offerings to God; they’re more like the (metaphoric) ‘grounds’ on which we meet Him.”

Spirit as Location

The word “spirit” is used 24 times in the gospel of John. Once, it is used for when Jesus “gave up his spirit,” when we crucified (John 19:30). Two times, it refers to Jesus’ emotions being affected (11:33; 13:21). One speaks of the nature of the Christian after they are born again (3:6) and another describes the nature of Jesus’ teaching as being spiritual (6:63). With three occurrences in the passage we are looking at here, the remaining 16 are all about the one we call the Holy Spirit, one of the Persons of the Trinity, God himself.

So what does it mean to worship “in spirit”? We begin to answer this by looking at one of Jesus’ statements and John’s passing explanation in ‭‭John‬ ‭7. Jesus said to a crowd, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water'” (verses 37-38). John follows up in verse 39, saying, “Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive.”

This may sound unrelated at first glance, but remember, before talking about worship, Jesus was offering the Samaritan woman at the well the same “living water” we now know is the Holy Spirit. So after offering this to her, Jesus says true worshippers will worship in (or on) this same Spirit.

But that is only part of a double-meaning. See, this connection is clear to us because it fits thematically within the gospel John compiled for us. And we could certainly point to other passages in Scripture that speak about the Spirit’s role in giving us access to the Father. But the Samaritan woman would have had no reason to think of worshipping God by receiving the Holy Spirit. All she had to go on was what Jesus was saying directly.

In this teaching, Jesus makes the observation that “God is spirit.” To say something “is spirit” is to say it is immaterial, as opposed to that which is physical, or “flesh” (John 3:6, 6:63). Spirit, then, refers to that which is not physical.

Jesus says that God is immaterial, and he uses this as the basis for the next thought, that God must be worshipped in spirit. In other words, God’s nature is not physical, so neither should our worship be bound to the physical. Of course, there are physical things we do when we worship, but remember that this is about location, not action. We worship in spirit.

What spirit? Our own spirits.

Worship is now required of us in all places and at all times in our spirit. This is made possible because of our having been born of the Spirit (John 3:3-6) and because we drink of the Spirit, who is our living water that satisfies our spirit (John 4:13-14; 7:37-39). Because “we [all] have access in one Spirit to the Father” (Ephesians 2:18), we are now connected in our spirits to the spiritual temple of worship that is the Church.

Truth as Location

Now we turn to the question of truth. The sad reality is that many people in the church world hold to the immaterial aspect of worship, yet they take that to also mean that what worship looks like doesn’t matter. So the question of Pilate to Jesus remains: “What is truth?” (John 18:38). It sounds like it shouldn’t be a question, yet it is for many. The word for “truth” in Greek is alétheia. Although many words can lose meaning when translating into English, this word is pretty straightforward in its literal meaning. It just means truth. We all know truth is a factual idea or piece of information, right? Or is it? That is certainly one use of the word. You might say a detective investigating a criminal case is searching for the truth, the facts about who broke the law and how and why they did it. However, to grasp what Jesus may have meant by the word we need to start, again, with how John shows Jesus using it in the text.

Alétheia occurs 109 times in the New Testament as a whole, 25 of those being in John’s gospel and another 20 in his 3 letters. Meaning that in 4 documents, John uses this word more than all the other 23 books of the New Testament combined. John cares deeply about this word.

In his gospel, 17 uses are clearly pertaining to true teachings, and several others can be understood that way as well. For instance, John 1:14 indicates that Jesus came to the us “full of grace and truth.” Obviously that can be taken one of two ways: We can take it to mean either a true message or an abstract substance of truth, since it is paired with grace as something Jesus is full of. When this fullness is compared with the law of Moses in verses 16-17, we can see that this has something to do with true teaching. We read, “For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” In other words, Moses taught us truth on its own through the law, but Jesus comes full of both grace and truth.

Again, his being full of truth is contrasted later with the devil, about whom he says, “He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me” (John 8:44-45). So we see that what appears somewhat abstract on the surface becomes clearer with context. Jesus is full of truth, and so he tells the truth, and the devil has no truth in him at all, so “he is a liar and the father of lies.”

But notice what else Jesus said there about the devil: He “does not stand in the truth.” In multiple places, Jesus refers to truth as a location. In John 16:13 he tells us that “the Spirit of truth… will guide you into all truth.” “Into” here, is better translated “in”. The Greek word en is a statement of presence, not of process. There is another Greek word, eis, used as into/unto, which describes a process of going from point A to point B, but that is not used here. In other words, the Spirit will guide us who are in truth already. It is a reference to truth as a location or a path that we are on.

So the truth can be in us, and we can be in the truth. Using similar language, Jesus says, “Abide in me, and I in you” (John 15:4). When Jesus uses this kind of language, he is talking about union between two things. He says that he is in the Father and the Father is in him. Again, this is an inseparable union between Father and Son in the being of God. So for us to worship in truth, it means that truth is also in us. It means that we are united inseparably with truth.

Jesus tells us in two ways what truth is. First, he says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Truth is a person. Truth is Jesus Christ. He refers to himself as the way to the Father, the truth about the Father, and the source of life in the Father.

Then later, when praying for those who would believe in him, Jesus says to the Father, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17). So then, the word of God is truth. When we say “word of God,” it is most often a reference to the overall message or testimony of God, as communicated through the words of Scripture. The Bible uses it that way as well. John uses it this way when he says, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32). Christ taught the word of God, and abiding (continuing, or dwelling) in his word is the way to freedom.

But John also uses this concept of “the word” to refer to Jesus himself. John 1:1 tells us that “the Word was with God,” and again in verse 14, he says that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” In other words, just like truth is both a concept and a person, so is the word of God. Jesus embodies both the truth and the word. He says to Pilate before he is crucified, “For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice” (John 18:37). And if you recall from his conversation with Nicodemus, the one who is “of the truth” is also the one who “does what is true,” or “practices the truth” (John 3:21).

Without even touching his letters, we can see that John has a very robust meaning for truth. And when he says that we must worship in truth, it carries all of this meaning behind it. We cannot be true worshippers without Christ, who is the truth. We cannot be true worshippers rejecting his word, which is the truth. And we cannot be true worshippers if we are not practicing the truth. To be in the truth means that we are submitting to who Christ is, listening to what Christ says, and doing what Christ does.

Bringing It All Together

It is easy to get overwhelmed by this proposition, as living the way of Christ is impossible on our own. Worshipping in spirit and truth removes physical boundaries from the equation, but it raises the standard. Rites and rituals and liturgies do not bring us into God’s presence on their own. Now we are brought into his presence by way of Christ himself, through the Holy Spirit. When the Spirit gives us a new birth in our spirit, it is on those grounds that we worship. And that Spirit of truth guides us and empowers us as we strive to practice the truth, as we abide in Christ’s teachings.

In the Church, there is a unity of worship around the world, among those who have all been born from above. Our worship is our way. Our sacrifice is our submission. This can involve shouting and dancing in praise or weeping on our knees in humility. It can be the way that we share our lives in a church community, or the way we share our prosperity with the poor. It can look like Catholics chanting in Latin or charismatics speaking in tongues. It can be embodied in the pastor visiting the sick in the hospital, the successful businesswoman networking to support small businesses while expecting nothing in return, or the man working side hustles to make sure his family’s needs are met.

Worship is less about what we do, and more about the kind of people we are when we do it. We can call Jesus Lord, have all the right prayers, all the right doctrinal statements, all the right liturgies, and we can even do miracles and prophesy in Christ’s name, but on judgment day, none of that will matter if we did it for ourselves. What will matter is that we made to our priority to know Christ and to do the will of the Father (Matthew 7:21).

It all comes down to this: If we are going to call Jesus Lord, we better act like he is our Lord. Take his teachings seriously, and depend on his Spirit to empower us to obey. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:31, “Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” Let this be your perpetual disposition.

Footnotes

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