“Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5). Moses heard those words from Yahweh at the burning bush, and ever since, the human heart has longed for holy ground, a place where heaven touches the earth, a place to meet God face to face.
In John 4, Jesus sits beside a well in Samaria in the noonday heat, “wearied as he was from his journey” (John 4:6). He was tired and thirsty. Along comes a Samaritan woman to draw some water. She is weary too, but for different reasons.
Jesus asks her for a drink, proceeds to offer her living water, and then says: “Go, call your husband” (John 4:16). Her conscience is pricked after Jesus reveals to her that not only does she not have a husband, she’s had five of them, and the man she is currently with is also not her husband.
Then she does what we often do when someone asks a question that hits a little too close to home: she changes the subject: “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship” (John 4:20).
Between this Samaritan woman and this Jewish man stood centuries of bitter hostility. The mountain she referenced was Mount Gerizim. It was there, upon entering the Promised Land, that Israel heard the covenant blessings pronounced by Moses (Deuteronomy 11:29; 27:12; Joshua 8:33). But after Solomon, the kingdom split in two (1 Kings 12), and the national rivalry between Israel and Judah led to competing claims about who held the holiest ground.
The Samaritans descended from Israelites who intermarried with foreigners after Assyria resettled the land (2 Kings 17:24). They built a rival temple on Gerizim and edited their own version of the five books of Moses to make Gerizim the true place of worship.
In Jesus’ day the temple was still towering over Jerusalem, the religious center for faithful Jews who followed the words of what we now call the Old Testament.
So, which mountain is the true holy ground? According to Jesus, neither. Salvation is from the Jews and the tabernacle and temple were places where a holy God could dwell among a sinful people, but they were shadows.
Now the One sitting beside that well is himself the true temple. As John tells us earlier, Jesus is the Word who became flesh and dwelt (tabernacled) among us (John 1:14). He is the One who said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19).
The holy ground is no longer on a mountain, but in the one who was crucified on a mountain for your sin.
True Worship
Listen to the words of Jesus:
“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 4:23–24).
Everyone worships. Every heart bows down to someone. The question is who? In his answer, Jesus distinguishes true worship from false worship, living faith from dead ritual. His words are a winnowing fork, separating the wheat from the chaff (Matthew 3:12).
Jesus tells us a few things about whom we worship and why. First, we worship the Father. Israel knew God as the LORD, as Adonai, as Yahweh, the great I AM. But Jesus brings us to worship God as Father. In the Spirit of adoption we come not as strangers or slaves but as sons and daughters, crying, “Abba! Father!” (Romans 8:15).
That is distinctly Christian. We pray, “Our Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:9). True Christian worship approaches God not merely as Creator or Lord of the universe, but as one near to us, as Father.[1]
Second, the Father is seeking worshipers. John tells us that Jesus, “had to pass through Samaria” (John 4:4). Long before the Samaritan woman went looking for water, the Father saw her and sent his son to meet her. God gives what he commands. He commands true worship, but he also seeks out worshipers, sending his Son and Spirit to make true worshipers out of thirsty sinners.
True Worshipers Worship in Spirit
Jesus says, “God is spirit” (John 4:24). He is not confined to a body, a building, or a mountain, and we must worship him as he is, not as we imagine him.
Because God is spirit, worship must be spiritual, which means that true worship is not bound by places or things. Not Gerizim. Not Jerusalem. Not the Sanctuary or “worship center.” Not physical representations, images, or idols.
True worship comes from the inward, invisible spirit of man, expressed through our external, visible bodies, offered to the infinite, invisible God, through the visible God-Man Jesus Christ.
Like this woman, our flesh would rather argue about holy places, holy times, and holy customs than deal with the living God face to face.[2] But Jesus won’t let us hide behind externals.
The true worshiper needs no altar on a mountaintop; his altar is the cross, and his temple is the earth. In Christ, the morning is holy, and the evening is holy. The church is holy, but so is your home and workplace.
In Christ, worship is not limited to your morning quiet time; it is living before the face of God all day long. Worshiping in Spirit means that waking in the morning and sitting down to a meal become occasions for holy communion with God.[3]
Worship in spirit comes from within, from a sincere, loving, and grateful heart. The worship God accepts through Jesus has an inner vitality that sets it apart from the merely outward religion of the natural man.[4]
To worship in spirit is the inward faith of the heart, giving birth to prayer, a clean conscience, and self-denial, so that we offer ourselves to God in obedience as holy sacrifices.[5]
Paul reminds us that: “a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter.” (Romans 2:29). And he calls us to present our bodies “as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1).
Spiritual worship is the sacrifice of praise (Hebrews 13:15) and the offering of obedience. It comes from a spiritual heart made alive by the Holy Spirit.
This means that spiritual worship goes beyond public worship in the church on Sundays, extending to family or household worship around the table, private worship in your secret place, and all-of-life worship you offer every day as you work to create and cultivate your little slice of God’s glorious creation.
The difficulty is that no part of this inward, spiritual life is natural in our fallen, sinful state; thankfully, the Holy Spirit gives it to us. Paul writes in Philippians 3:3: “For we are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh.”
Church, rejoice in the fact that the Holy Spirit himself enables you to worship the Father in Spirit.
True Worshipers Worship in Truth
Jesus is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). We no longer come to God through the blood of bulls and goats, which could never take away sins (Hebrews 10:4). We come trusting in the precious blood of Jesus, the Lamb of God, who offered himself once for all (Hebrews 10:10).
Worship in truth must conform to Scripture. Jesus prayed, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17). Scripture is our standard. True worship is God-centered, not governed by our feelings or whims.
Though contrary to the individualistic spirit of our age, this is good news for us, because “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Left to ourselves, we will always drift toward idolatry, worshiping created things in the place of the Creator (Romans 1:25).
But God despises idolatry! “I am the LORD; that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols” (Isaiah 42:8).
God cares how we worship him. How do we know this? Because he tells us how to worship him in Scripture.
This is where the Samaritans went wrong. They altered God’s Word and abandoned the place God had appointed for sacrifice, the temple on Mount Zion. Worse, they set up a rival temple on a different mountain, as if God wouldn’t mind a little change of scenery.
They altered the terms of worship without approval and God did not accept them. Worship that is not regulated by God’s Word is false worship. To invent our own forms of worship is to insult God.[6]
He has revealed himself to us, and our response must be in accordance with his revelation. But true worship must be in spirit and truth.
Holding Spirit and Truth Together
As my pastor is fond of saying, “Good theology requires tension.” Jesus joins together what we too often separate.
“In spirit” speaks of the inward life of faith and the heart’s affections responding to God. “In truth” speaks of objective revelation, the mind grasping what is true about God so that the heart can respond accordingly in Spirit.
Holding these together isn’t easy. It is hard to bring a proud heart low in repentance, harder still to bring a wandering mind to holy meditation. The last thing a proud soul wants to do is think deeply about God.
It takes humility, because the more you see the beauty of God, the more ugly your sin becomes. It also requires patience, because swimming in the infinite depths of an eternal God takes a lifetime of prayerful study and contemplation.
True worship comes from people who feel deeply and love sound doctrine. Strong affections for God, rooted in truth, are the heart of biblical worship.[7] True worship needs both heat and light. The light of truth ignites the heat of passion.[8] Truth without spirit leads to dead orthodoxy. Spirit without truth leads to idolatry.
But to tremble humbly before God, to confess your sin to him, to believe in him, and to love him and long to know him more deeply, is spiritual worship.[9]
Charles Spurgeon put it this way:
“True worship lies in your heart paying reverence to him, your soul obeying him, and your inner nature coming into conformity to his own nature, by the work of his Spirit in your soul.”[10]
So what keeps us from true worship? Here are three obstacles:
The Corruption of Sin
The first obstacle is sin itself. At its root, all sin is idolatry, loving something more than God. To worship God in spirit, you must turn from your sin.
Your pride must be humbled, your lust must be put to death, and the evil desires of your heart must be cast out.[11] You cannot cling to your idols with one hand and lift the other in praise.
The first act of true worship is the prodigal’s cry: “Father, I have sinned” (Luke 15:21). The second is the cry of faith: “Lord, I believe in Jesus, and I trust him for my salvation.” The third: “Father, thank you for saving me.” Confession, faith, and gratitude are the foundation for true worship.
Idolatry and Ritualism
The second obstacle is trading the unseen God for something we can see, taste, touch, hear, or smell. This is the sad history of religion: man will, apart from Christ, forget his God and set up something visible in place of the invisible. Idolatry is the ruling religion of mankind.[12]
From Jewish cleansing rituals to Roman Catholic relics and Eastern Orthodox icons, our default is to worship something tangible, malleable, moldable. But the New Covenant brings us out of the shadow of the law to the substance of Christ.
Brothers and sisters, don’t let empty rites and rituals distract you from truly worshiping the invisible God. Don’t be tempted by counterfeits. Remember Israel at the foot of Sinai: “Up, make us gods who shall go before us” (Exodus 32:1). They wanted a God they could see and manage. But the Lord is not served by human hands (Acts 17:25). He doesn’t need us; we need him.
Distraction and Busyness
These last obstacles afflict us all.
“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; prone to leave the God I love.”1[13]
How often do we sing lyrics without paying attention to the truths they express, pray while thinking about the next item on our to-do list, and work while thinking about the weekend?
Our attention is precious. It’s also wasting away. Every notification and every buzz of modern life trains us to look away, and we carry our restless minds right into the presence of God.
So we go through the motions. Our lips move and our hands may rise, but our hearts are somewhere else. Jesus warned of this very thing: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Matthew 15:8).
So slow down. Persevere. Be still and know that he is God (Psalm 46:10). Take heart and know that the Father who seeks worshipers is patient with distracted and busy hearts. Lean into the simple, ordinary means God has given us and the liturgy that shapes our corporate gathering each week.
Word-Shaped Worship
We sing the Word with music full of Scripture and full of heart, because if your heart does not sing, you have not sung at all.[14] We hear the Word read and receive it as God himself speaks to our hearts. We pray the Word, coming before him reverently, reminding our restless hearts that they find their rest only in him. We hear the Word preached and receive it with tenderness, allowing it to awaken our conscience and respond in faith. And we see the Word played out in baptism and the Lord’s Supper, visible proclamations of inward, spiritual realities: Christ’s death, his resurrection, and our spiritual union with him.[15]
Conclusion
What is the test of true worship? Witness.
The weary Samaritan woman came for water and found the Messiah. “I who speak to you am he,” Jesus said (John 4:26). By faith she found the satisfaction her soul had always longed for. John tells us that she left her water jar behind and ran to tell others about the living water she had found (John 4:28).
That is the biblical pattern: God reveals himself to us in Christ. We respond in faith. Faith overflows in worship. Worship brings satisfaction in God. And a satisfied soul cannot help but bear witness.
That is what happened in Samaria: “Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony… And many more believed because of his word” (John 4:39, 41).
Church, the Father is still seeking worshipers to worship him in spirit and truth. You do not need to climb a mountain or find the right building or say the right prayer. The holy ground is Jesus Christ, your redeemer. Come to him weary. Come to him thirsty. Confess your sin, trust his blood for forgiveness, and drink deeply of his grace.
[1] Charles H. Spurgeon, “The Axe at the Root—A Testimony Against Puseyite Idolatry,” sermon no. 695, delivered June 17, 1866, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington, Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, vol. 12 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1866), https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/the-axe-at-the-root-a-testimony-against-puseyite/.
[2] Spurgeon, “The Axe at the Root.”
[3] Spurgeon, “The Axe at the Root.”
[4] Spurgeon, “The Axe at the Root.”
[5] John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John, trans. William Pringle (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1847), on John 4:23–24.
[6] Spurgeon, “The Axe at the Root.”
[7] John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, rev. ed. (Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2011).
[8] Sam Storms, “What Does It Mean to Worship God in Spirit and Truth?” The Gospel Coalition.
[9] Spurgeon, “The Axe at the Root.”
[10] Spurgeon, “The Axe at the Root.”
[11] Spurgeon, “The Axe at the Root.”
[12] Spurgeon, “The Axe at the Root.”
[13] Robert Robinson, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” (1758).
[14] Spurgeon, “The Axe at the Root.”
[15] Ligon Duncan, Does God Care How We Worship? (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2020).
