Worship in Spirit: Created for Connection

Introduction

I appreciate Jacob jumping in and doing what he did this morning and leading singing. Last I knew Scott was going to lead singing, and I had the list from last night. So I was shocked this morning when Jacob got up. I appreciate him being willing to do that. Sometimes that’s just what happens. Things change and we have to adapt. I want to draw your attention to John chapter four this morning. I’ve been working through the ideas of spiritual disciplines and how they help and affect our life in so many ways. And I’ve been wanting to get to this discipline of worship for quite some time. It’s actually one of the ones, you know, some of these disciplines we’re more familiar with, some of them we’re less familiar with.

Something like fasting that we typically don’t do a lot of in our it’s kind of a different sort of idea for us to talk about that concept. Worship is something that for the most part we do this weekly, and that’s great. it’s a an important discipline, and it’s an important part of our lives. And part of what we’ve been seeing as we’ve been working through these different ideas is Jesus’ involvement in them himself. And we find this interaction in John 4 that’s quite interesting, where he meets a Samaritan woman, and we’re not going to go through the entire text, but I want to pick up at a certain part where she is discovering who he is. She’s realizing this is a man of God.

She realizes he’s a prophet. And her first question upon recognizing this has to do with worship. You have to be a prophet. The things that he’s telling her and saying to her, she’s she’s beginning to pick up on this reality. And so she says in verse 20, John 4 and verse 20, our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship. Jesus said to her, 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. The discussion then goes on where Jesus reveals to her that he is the Messiah, the one that they’ve been looking for, and her reaction then is to go and then tell all sorts of people that the Messiah is here and all the things that he told her, and then the people come to Jesus and they realize this themselves. But I want us to think about this phrase or this interaction with Jesus and the woman, and the phrase he uses here, a couple of them actually, that God is spirit, and true worshipers will worship in spirit and truth. Well, ultimately, I believe spirit and truth work together, and they’re kind of indivisible.

But this morning, as we’re going to see with a couple different items, we can kind of divide them and talk about different elements of them. And for the next two weeks, actually, I’m going to be talking about this idea of worshiping in spirit. Worship is not just an act. Worship is about connection. And what I want us to see as we work through Scripture this morning is that God very specifically created us as spiritual beings, and we are made to commune with God, and God is spirit. It’s an important concept and idea. Worship is our spirit responding to God’s spirit. It’s aligning our hearts with his will. It is connecting our minds to his purposes. It’s a recognition of who God is and who we want to be through his transforming power.

So next week I want to talk more about transformation. I’ll probably hint at it a little bit this morning. But that’s the ultimate purpose of worship is recognizing God, honoring God, and then the transformation that comes through that as I’m trying to be recreated in his image. This is what scripture reveals to us. This is what we are trying to accomplish. Richard Foster says, forms and rituals do not produce worship. Nor does the disuse of forms and rituals. We can use all the right techniques and methods, but we have not worshiped the Lord until spirit touches spirit. Let me kind of paraphrase what he’s getting at here. You know, prayer, we’re told prayer is important, singing is important. These various elements that we often call worship, those items themselves, they have an important function, but the reality is if the heart is not engaged, they aren’t doing anything.

If we’re just saying words, if we’re just singing words, if we’re just going through motions, the fundamental aspect of worship, it is what is coming from the inner man, not merely the externals. So let’s talk for a minute about spirit, and let me just preface this slide here by saying this is very general. It’s very hard to give a dynamic answer about how all of these things function. So this is a very simplistic answer about dividing the ideas of spirit and life and soul, but I wanted to try to give some kind of explanation because it’s somewhat important to where we’re going and understanding the idea of God being spirit, us being created as spirit beings, and then seeking that connection with God and how we worship.

1. The Spirit of God Gives Life

The idea of the spirit, and this is true actually in Hebrew and in Greek, is the idea of animating power. It can be wind, it can be spirit or breath. The Spirit of God gives life. And as we’ve talked about at other times, it’s also about God’s presence. It’s about God’s presence or nearness. And so we see all sorts of ways in which that functions throughout the Old Testament and actually through the new as well. He is the source of life and energy and power. And sometimes that is spoken of by this next term that has to do with the breath of life. So in Genesis 2 7, it says, Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.

Now before this, the Spirit of God, which is energy life forces hovering over the face of the waters. It’s there, it’s present. But when we are given life, that life is given from the Spirit of God. We are given the divine spark. We were given the breath of life. And without that, we would have none. And that’s where the idea of the soul comes in. Soul is kind of the whole of who we are as a person, including mind, spirit, our identity. And we find this term in places like Leviticus 17 that the life or the soul of the flesh is in the blood. Soul, again, there’s a lot of overlap, and the semantic range of these terms can overlap and they can be used sometimes interchangeably, so I want to make note of that.

But if we are going to divide them, they would divide in a general way in this sort of manner. The soul is typically that which is connected to the material world. So, for example, the life of the flesh is in the blood. The blood is material. I don’t want you to do this, and I don’t want to do it, but if we were to cut ourselves, we would see blood. Right? It’s there. It’s in the material world. The interesting thing about breath or wind, even as Jesus talks about in John 3, is you don’t see it. You experience it, you feel it, but you don’t know where it comes from, and you don’t know where it’s going. It’s just there. It’s this invisible force that exists that is very hard to explain.

This is a lamp. It has no light. But all the parts are there. Well, at least for this illustration, we’re going to assume all the parts are there. You can’t see the bulb because of the shade, but we’re going to pretend like we know it’s there. All the components of this lamp are present, and yet there’s no light. You could turn that little knob all you want. And there would be no light if it’s just the lamp itself. That’s like in a simplistic form, your soul. You can have a mind, you can be formed from dust, which is what Genesis is talking about. You can have all the component parts, but without the energy, without the power, there is no light. And so, at least in a very simplistic way, illustrations have their limits again.

This is the concept of the spirit. There is no life without the spirit. Without God breathing life into us, we are just an empty shell. We may have components, we may have a body, and we may have a brain, and the various parts of our being, but without the breath of life, without this energy and life force, the lights are off. There’s nothing there. And so as we work into this idea of worship, I think we need to first kind of get this fundamental idea that it is the Spirit of God that animates us. It is that which gives life. And I want to start in a very physical sort of way. We’ve already touched on Genesis 2 and verse 7 that God breathed into man the breath of life, this divine spark, that which comes from Him.

We cannot do this ourselves. We don’t generate our own power. It’s just like that lamp. You don’t put the lamp there on the table, and it somehow can create light unless you plug it in. And it gets that invisible force of electricity that then brings the light. It’s all there. All the component parts are there, but you have to have that invisible power. And by the way, prayer is the same way. The power is not in prayer. The power is in the God that we pray to. And so without plugging it in, without having that force, that energy that is sustaining us, there is no power.

It is finding alignment with God, finding connection with Him. In Isaiah 42 and verse 5, it says, Thus says God, the Lord who breathes the breath to the people on it, and spirit to those who walk in it. There is no life, there is no breath without the power of God Himself. And then ultimately we’re told the Spirit returns to God who gave it in Ecclesiastes 12 and verse 7. And so we are embodied spirits. We have a body in this physical realm, and within that body, God has created us with the Spirit, and eventually at some point, that spirit will then return to the God who gave it. But there’s also invisible spiritual life force. Just like there is invisible physical life force, this exists in the spiritual realm as well.

2. We Have No Life Apart From Him

And having God’s spirit is about life, it’s about identity, and it’s about God’s presence. It’s really the same sorts of things. We are from a physical standpoint created in God’s image. That’s our identity. And without him, we have no life. And it speaks to God’s nearness to us that we are his and that he created us. And in the spiritual realm, it is the same way. We are alive in the spiritual realm and the heavenly places because God made us alive together with Christ. He raised us up with him and seated us in the unseen realm or in the heavenly places or in the spiritual realm in Christ Jesus, we’re told in Ephesians chapter 2. We have no life apart from him. Without the divine breath, without his force and without his power, we are dead in our trespasses and sins.

That’s the context of Ephesians chapter 2. But God, who is rich in mercy, he made us alive in Christ.

Ephesians chapter 1. He’s already talked about that in the earlier chapter. And now he’s saying, without him, you are dead. And he’s speaking here in a spiritual way. And I want us to understand, we’re going to come back to this idea. He says, You once walked in these evil ways. You followed the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works, and the sons of disobedience. So the spirit that is within us matters. There is invisible spiritual life. We can’t really see it around us, but it is something that gives us strength, that gives us knowledge in our inner man, we’re told in Ephesians chapter 3. And Romans chapter 8. Paul speaks in detail about this. He says in verse 6, Romans chapter 8 and verse 6, for to set the mind on the flesh is death.

But to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law. The idea of worshiping in spirit has partially to do, really in a big way, to do with submission. It is submitting to the will of God and to the things of God. And so he’s recognizing here, if we are walking in the ways of the flesh, if we’re setting our minds on the things of the flesh, then we are not going to have the life that comes from the spirit. For the mind that is set on the flesh, he says is hostile to God. It cannot interact with God in the right way. It is disconnected.

Verse 8, those who are in the flesh, this is in sinful humanity, they have not gone from Adam to Christ. They are still living in the flesh. They cannot please God.

Verse 9, you, however, are not in the flesh. He’s speaking to those who are in Christ. He says, You’re not in the flesh, but in the spirit. If in fact the spirit of God dwells in you, anyone who does not have the spirit of Christ does not be able to do that.

But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is life because of righteousness. If the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give you life, give life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who dwells in you. The Spirit gives us life. And there is no life apart from him. And if we think we can generate life ourselves, we don’t understand the gospel. We aren’t going to transform ourselves apart from the power and the force of God without him working within us to will and to do for his good pleasure, Paul says in Philippians chapter 2. This is the working of God that’s happening in our life because the spirit is working in us.

It is transforming us and changing us from within. It is giving us life. Romans chapter 8, continuing, it says, the Spirit Himself, verse 16, bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. This is about identity.

This is about being part of God’s people. This is about spiritual connection that’s happening here.

3. True Worship Involves Spiritual Connection

A whole, particularly the supernatural or the idea of a spiritual realm in any regard, is that Christianity itself, that the foundation of who we are as God’s people exists on a spiritual plane, something that in many ways we can’t see. We walk by faith, not by sight, he says in 2 Corinthians chapter 5. It is not about completely the material world. Now, the physical, the body and the mind and the spirit are meant to all work together, and they’re all part of God’s creation. But what we have to understand, even in the words of Jesus Himself, God is spirit, and true worshipers worship in spirit and truth. And so it’s not just actions, it’s not just the material, the physical things, how we go about it.

Those things can matter, and certainly God has some things to say about that. But the heart is the fundamental aspect of this, the inner man, the inner being. Am I connecting to God in the spiritual realm in a spiritual way? Or am I merely going through motions? The reality is we’ve seen this frequently, even within the Old Testament and within the new, that forms and functions can be mistaken for true spirituality. Look at a place like Amos chapter 5. He says, I loathe your feasts.

But what about the spirit that stood behind those? What about the heart of the matter? Was their sincerity and truth in what they were doing? Well, in this case with Amos, no, because they were also worshiping idols and serving false gods. And so going through the forms and functions didn’t really mean very much to Yahweh. Just because they went through the sacrificial offerings for the morning and the evening and the various festivals and did those things in the right way didn’t mean anything to him. Because their hearts were not right, and there was no spiritual connection between God and those who were supposed to be his people. They had neglected what mattered most. The relationship that God sought with them. The physical is not all there is.

God created us with his spirit. And he wants us to connect with him there. It is not just the externals, it is also and very much so what is internal. And so true worship involves spiritual connection. Again, I think this is something we actually know when we say this sort of thing all the time. But as we see even in the Old Testament, regular reminders of this are important. Because as humans who exist in a very physically dominated world, we don’t think much about the invisible. It’s very easy to get drawn into the forms and functions. Forms and functions in and of themselves are not bad. They can be very good, particularly if we use them the right way to then navigate our heart toward God, which is what was actually meant.

And so God gave them sacrifices and feast days and things like that in the old law for that very purpose. It’s just unfortunately they ended up misusing them very often. They missed the big purpose of what this was all about. And so worship is our spirit reaching for God’s spirit. It is submitting to the will of God. That is the foundational element of what worship actually is. Or we could use even the terminology of Paul himself, that we are filled with the Spirit. And when we are filled with the Spirit, the things of God then come out, right? Don’t be drunk with wine, he says in Ephesians chapter 5, but be filled with the Spirit, singing and making melody to the Lord in your heart. Now we all know that when we sing, it involves our voice.

But that’s not the fundamental issue here. It’s not the voice that God really cares about. That’s the function through which we do it. What he’s actually wanting is this melody, right? He’s using some imagery, some illustration here. The melody he wants is what is coming from within. Within the heart, which is why it doesn’t matter if you’re a good singer or not. God wants you to be doing this. It’s not about having perfect harmony and sounding great. I mean, all those things are nice, and we would like to do that. But what truly matters to God is the sincerity and truth that’s coming from the heart. And so see how these are matched? It’s not that you have spirit here and you have truth over here and they don’t work together.

No, they’re very much interconnected. And we can get out of alignment and we can emphasize one over the other. That’s certainly true. We can have a zeal for God that’s not according to knowledge. We can have passion for God, but be very mistaken on what we’re doing. And we can also be very ritualistic and go through motions and have no heart. And so, yes, we can make mistakes in either direction, but the ideal is that these are working together. God is spirit, and those who worship him should be worshiping him in spirit and truth. Paul says it this way in 1 Corinthians 6 in verse 17, he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. We are meant to be joined to him.

4. Spirit Touching Spirit: The Bluetooth Connection

And it’s not just actions. We are meant to be joined in heart. Why is it that God had so much good to say about David? David was a man, we say after God’s own heart, but the idea is he’s seeking the heart of God. That’s what he’s after. And this can be done not just in collective worship, as we’re sort of talking about here. It can be done in other ways. We can worship on our own. We can praise God in the silence of our own home together individually. But all of this is seeking this connection with God. It is spirit-touching spirit. We want this relationship with him. Let me illustrate it this way. Maybe our younger people will connect to this. Think of like a Bluetooth connection.

The signals are there.

There’s signals all over the place. But you have to decide you’re going to connect to a specific one, right? And so there’s Bluetooth signals. Maybe you’re trying to connect your device to another device or your headphones to your phone or whatever it might be. And so there’s a signal being put out, and what do we have to do? We call it, we have to pair it, right? We’re pairing those signals together. True worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. His signal is out. He’s seeking. Bluetooth signal is on. What he’s wanting is for us to get that signal and connect to him. For those signals to connect, where spirit is then touching spirit. But here’s the interesting thing.

This matters with proximity too, right? We begin stepping away. God’s always there. His signal is there. He wants us. But we begin stepping back from God and going the wrong direction. We start to have signal problems. Or maybe there’s some kind of interference. We’re too busy for the things of God. We’re getting distracted by various things in the world. And so that signal is disrupted. We can even have competing signals. That’s what I mentioned earlier from Ephesians 2. You were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. They connected to the wrong Bluetooth signal. They’re following the Prince of the Power of the air.

The signals are out there and they attach to the wrong one. Spirit is touching spirit, but it’s not the right spirit. It’s the spirit of evil and disobedience. It’s working against the things of God. And so to worship in spirit means we understand the need to connect to God and to do things in his way, submit to his will, to stay away from the interferences and the obstacles, to draw near to him, to keep that proximity close, which is where a lot of these spiritual disciplines come in. It’s not that these spiritual disciplines are laws or rules you have to keep. No one’s out there saying you got to fast every week, you know, or you need to get off to a mountain and pray. We’re going to keep track of how often you do.

5. A Disconnected Spirit Produces Vain Worship

These aren’t laws. But the idea here is this concept of connection. When I get away and I get rid of interference and I’m seeking the heart of God, it is then opening myself up to allow the voice of God in, to allow the truth that God is speaking into my life and allow it to change me and transform me into Him. Again, more on that next week. And so the other aspect of this is a disconnected spirit produces vain worship. If the spirit is life, and there is no spirit in what I’m doing, that means it’s death. It’s empty. No matter how the externals look, if the inner man is not changed, there’s no connection. And this can happen in variety of forms. It can be showy performance.

Here’s the thing I can’t judge your heart, and you can’t easily judge mine. So we have to have some introspection on this. Now we can look at the fruits of what’s happening and usually discern some things, but this process is very hard except for in my own heart. I can do that for myself. I can’t really do it for you. But the thing is we can we can use our, I think our body and our mind or spirit should all be interacting, but we can act in ways that look really righteous and holy. And yet there’s actually no connection. At the same time, we can be very solemn, and some of this depends on context, why we might act certain ways. This is all through scripture.

I mean, this is how we speak about worship. If I tried to demonstrate worship for you, like sometimes we use these pictures to do that, right? and I deal with this every week, and it’s interesting what happens as I’m trying to do these sorts of things. If I tried to find pictures about worship, what would happen? You know, be somebody like this, right? You know, or bowing down, or with their hands like this person right here, because we demonstrate or we understand, we express those through physical means, but it’s actually what is inside that truly matters. And so these outward expressions are meant to express our heart, but as you know, there can be deception even with that. We can deceive ourselves if we’re not careful.

And so being showy and doing all the things with our body can actually still have emptiness within that is not true connection to God. Or being solemn and serious also can just have no actual real connection to God. It’s not actually about the externals, but it is actually what is within us that truly matters. Isaiah 29 and verse 13. This people draw near with their mouth and they honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me. Jesus quotes this in Matthew 15. Amazing. This problem existed back in the days of Isaiah, and it existed in the time of Jesus. And unfortunately, it’s very possible to exist today as well. We can say the right things, do the right actions, but still have vain empty worship.

Because it’s the heart. It’s connecting to God that’s actually what we’re truly after. And that’s what God is after. He’s seeking that connection. There can be corrupt religion. We don’t like to think about that, but it does exist. 2 Timothy 3 talks about that. People who are truly selfish and greedy, they’re very self willed. They have an appearance of godliness, but they deny its power. It’s not really about the things of God, it’s the things that they’re after. This is all very possible in the world that we live in, just like it was in their world. And so what I’m really wanting us to get at this morning is the need to develop a heart for God.

All of that should be mixed with the things and how we use our body, and the Bible talks frequently about that, even Romans 12. It talks about this idea of being a living sacrifice, presenting our bodies as living sacrifices and being transformed by the renewing of our mind. God wants all of it. He doesn’t just want empty actions. He doesn’t want just thoughts. He wants the heart, which is then expressed in all of those ways.

6. He Yearns Jealously Over the Spirit in Us

James chapter 4. It’s an interesting text as James is dealing with people who are believers. And they’re struggling a little bit.

And then he says this in verse 4 You adulterous people.

The signal’s off. It’s misaligned. Right? The connection is with the world. And if you’re connected with the world, you are not connected with God. That’s the point he’s making here. Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the scripture says he yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us? He wants your spirit. And he wants my spirit. He is yearning jealousy, jealously for that. He wants me to yearn for him in the same way he yearns for me. That’s what he is after. And it’s not just in the actions and the behaviors, it is in our thoughts, it’s in our heart and our inner man, ultimately being transformed to become like him.

He is yearning jealously over the spirit he made to dwell in us. There is a spiritual part of who we are. And that is a fundamental aspect of what it means to worship God. And Jesus is saying that very thing in John 4. It’s not about Jerusalem, it’s not about this mountain here, it’s not about a physical temple or ultimately the sacrifices and all the things in the Old Testament. Those are not the point. Those were used to try to get them to understand the importance of the heart and the spirit. And they had a purpose that was then leading up to the time of Christ. And that’s what Jesus is sharing with this woman at the well. But now that time had come, and all those forms and functions were going to go away.

And something different was going to come out. And that was okay, because the point was the heart. Not offering morning and evening sacrifices and having the Passover and doing that’s that wasn’t the point. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, Jesus says himself. And so the whole concept and idea of all of this and what Jesus is getting at is the need for our spirit to be connected to his, for his spirit to testify with our spirit that we are sons of God. And if we are sons, we are heirs of the promise and we’ll have the inheritance, assuming that then we will suffer with him so that we will then be glorified with him. This is Romans chapter 8. He wants the wholeness of our being.

But this only happens if we are tuned in to the right frequency. Interesting that when Jesus speaks to the angels of the churches in Revelation, this is how you concludes. Pretty much each letter. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. We all have ears. Physical. But the point he’s making there, same point Isaiah made, just because we have ears doesn’t mean we’re tuned in. It doesn’t mean we listen. It doesn’t mean our frequencies are matching. Sometimes, although we have ears to hear, we’re listening to other things. We’re allowing the interferences of the world. We’re allowing the Prince of the power of the air to make that connection. And we’re hearing his things and the things of the world rather than the things of God.

And that’s why repeatedly through John, he keeps saying this phrase, he who has an ear, let him hear.

They have eyes to see, but they won’t see. The physical is only part of this. It is the reality that I should desire the Spirit of God. And until Spirit touches Spirit, I’m not really submitting to his will. I’m not actually worshiping him. So Christianity and worship itself, it’s not about becoming a better you or the best you can be. It’s about being transformed into the image of the Creator. The one who created us with the Spirit, the one who created us and set eternity in our heart. That concept is that we realize there’s something more than this. There’s something more than the physical, the material world. And there’s something within us, even people who aren’t believers, they’re yearning for something bigger in life. And sometimes they express that in other ways that aren’t religious or aren’t about God, but they know there’s got to be something more than this.

Because God has created us with a spirit on a spiritual realm, and he has set eternity in our heart. And this is expressed through presenting our bodies as living sacrifices and through renewing our minds according to the will of God and discerning his things.

Conclusion

The greatest command.

You know there’s a bigger purpose. That’s called spiritual discernment. You sense the eternity that’s in your heart. And I pray that you lean into that reality. Even if this morning you’re not willing to just give your life to Jesus Christ and submit to his will, if you’re not, even if you’re not at that point right now, that you are willing to lean into that concept and realize there is something more than here. What is it? What is it that’s more than right here and right now? What is it that’s more than what I can see with my eyes? Am I willing to lean into that reality and seek that connection with God in my life? I’m begging you to do that this morning. To consider that, to think through that, and to realize that God Himself is yearning for this.

He created you and he wants your heart and he wants your spirit. He wants you to love Him and to serve Him with all of your being. So for some this morning, it might be that you realize you need to give your life to Jesus Christ. That’s the central element here, right? It’s no longer I who live, but it’s Christ living in me. That’s a spiritual concept. I’m not saying that Christ is somehow physically coming into my physical body. This is about a spiritual, unseen sort of concept and realm. It’s an invisible force that I’m getting rid of self. And I’m allowing God to come in and change me from within. Are you willing to do that this morning? You can give your life to Jesus Christ, be buried in baptism, and come up a new person, beginning to live this transformed life in Jesus Christ.

Can we help you come now as we stand and we sing?