Worship without Understanding Isn’t Worship

Entertainment disguised as worship isn’t worship. It’s idolatry. Ignorant worship is not worship at all. The ultimate authority on worship is Jesus, and He explained Himself very clearly in John 4. Let’s consider it.

Situation

Jesus is in Samaria by choice. The Jews did not have dealings with the Samaritans. The Samaritans were the remaining vestiges of the Israelites who remained in the land of Israel during the Babylonian exile. They had intermarried with the occupying nations and were considered half-breeds and outcasts by the Jews who returned from the exile. They had continued the Samaritan form of worship begun by Jeroboam when he rebelled against Rehoboam after the death of Solomon. One significant aspect of the deviant worship of Jeroboam was the new location of worship. Jesus is next to a historical site. It is Jacob’s well. A well built by the patriarch Jacob, a common ancestor to the Jews and Samaritans.

Jesus waited for the disciples to return from the city with food. While He waited, a woman of the city comes to draw water. This is not a significant issue except that it was midday, the wrong time of day for the women to draw water. She was asocial outcast because of her many sins. When Jesus began to talk with the lady, she was at first startled, then intrigued by His words. He began to reveal Himself to her. The woman then brings up the subject of worship.

Nature of the question

With her question she drew from our Lord one of the most significant statements on worship found in Scripture. Of this passage, Hodges says,

Her expectation was not disappointed. She had raised the subject of worship, and the Savior’s reply was as pregnant a statement on this theme as had ever escaped the lips of man. Indeed, once He had uttered it, it would be impossible thereafter for any man intelligently to ponder this theme without returning to consider those priceless words. As an utterance on worship they were timeless and absolutely definitive (Zane Hodges, The Hungry Inherit, 1980, p. 18).

She brings up a contradiction between the Samaritan teachings on worship and the Jewish teachings. The contradiction is over the proper place of worship. She wants to know which is the proper location for worship, where her fathers told her, here in Samaria, or on the temple mount in Jerusalem. Whether or not her question is sincere is beside the point. It is Jesus’ answer that astounds.

Jesus’ Answer

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:21-24).

True worship is not bound by location. The Old Testament problem of Jeroboam was not one of location, but of rebellion. The Jews worshiped all over the wilderness in a moveable tabernacle. So the argument of here or there does not matter. It is not an issue of location but of heart. But what is worship from the heart? The heresy of the Samaritans was that they selectively incorporated Judaism into their worship.

The heresy of Samaritanism — the practice of picking out what we like to worship and rejecting what we do not like — is widespread. ( A.W. Tozer, Whatever Happened to Worship, 1985 p. 42).

True worship must be intelligent. Jesus said, “Ye worship ye know not what.” (John 4:22) The Jews were right. They understood the true God. The Samaritans had lost the doctrine that provided the foundation for true worship.

The Samaritans worshipped in ignorance, he said. The Samaritans accepted only the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. They rejected all the rest of the Old Testament. They had therefore rejected all the great messages of the prophets and all the supreme devotion of the Psalms. They had a truncated religion because they had a truncated Bible; they had rejected the knowledge that was open to them and that they might have had. Further, the Jewish Rabbis had always accused the Samaritans with a merely superstitious worship of the true God. They always said that the Samaritan worship was founded not on love and knowledge, but on ignorance and fear (W. Barclay, The Gospel According to John, Vol. 1, 1975, p. 159).

They had no concept of who God was or what they were doing when they worshiped. Jesus pointed out that the problem with the Samaritans was that they did not know what they worshiped. Their knowledge of God was poor. This was clear in the Old Testament when Israel fell so quickly into golden calf worship after Jeroboam (I Kings 12:28-33).

Ritual becomes empty without meaning or understanding. One great danger of any worship style is the use of forms without understanding. That is why constant preaching and teaching is an essential part of worship. Church goers sing the same hymn for years, memorize the words after years of repetition, yet have no concept of its meaning. In other forms, the emotional queues of the music, and the catchy phrases of the lyrics produce an shallow response devoid of any true theological impulse.

True worship is spiritual. Jesus said that worshippers must worship “in spirit” (John 4:22-23). God is a spiritual being, not a physical being. Worship is where man seeks to come before God, into His presence. It does not seek to lower God to man’s presence. Worship must be performed with the spiritual part of man. The idea of the word “spirit” in this verse is not the Holy Spirit. It is the spirit of the man that is worshipping. Worship is not simply an outward form or exercise. Martin interprets this verse, ” worship in spirit and reality” (Ralph Martin, The Worship of God, 1983, p. 173). The concept of the word “truth” has to do with genuineness of heart rather than the revealed truth of Scripture. It has been already demonstrated that didactic truth is essential to proper worship, but so is genuineness of heart. Jesus is not saying that worship does not include the physical, but rather, worship that is not in genuineness of spirit, is not worship at all. Bodily actions or words without heart do not count for worship.

True worship must be focused upon God. “True worshippers shall worship the Father. . .” (John 4:23). The nature of worship is dictated by the nature of God. It is not a place or a process that is most important, it is a person. As soon as worship makes celebrities of the worshippers or worship leaders, it ceases to be worship. Jesus takes the emphasis off men and places it upon God. There is then, a danger, even in this study. If a simple process is delineated whereby a church can “improve” its worship, the focus can easily shift to a process of worship. Worship is and must be person oriented, and that person must be God.

God is actively seeking worshippers. “But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him” (John 4:23). This is the prime motivation for evangelism: they become true worshippers of God and finally bring glory to God. Any other reason is a secondary benefit. God is now desiring His children to worship Him, and that they reproduce themselves in others who will worship Him in truth.

True worship is made complete in Christ. “The woman saith unto him, I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things. Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he” (John 4:25-26). The woman could not understand completely. She looked to the Messiah to understand. When Christ revealed Himself as Messiah, she responded with faith. There is a mystery about God that can only be revealed in Jesus. The fact of Christ’s deity allows us to worship Christ and still be worshipping God.

We must return to simple, intelligent, reverent, worship.

The spectacle of worship—whether in the smoke and lights of contemporary garb, or the smoke and incense of ancient liturgy—is a distraction that Jesus condemned. We have to focus our worship on a correct and deep theological understanding of who God is and what He has done for us, and when we do that the gratitude and emotions that pour from our hearts will be a sweet savor before God.

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