Worship According to Jesus - June 28th, 2026

It's so good to see everyone this Sunday. If I could just invite for those who are able to please rise for the reading of God's word this morning. And our passage today comes from the Gospel of John, chapter 4, verse 21. And there's already a typo, that's on me, 21 through 24. But if you could turn your attention to the screen, here's a reading of God's word. Jesus said to her, Woman, believe me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know. And we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming, and now is when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For such people the Father seeks to be his worshippers.

God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. Let's pray.

As we dive into your word, would your spirit help prepare our hearts for the hearing of your word? And Lord, I just pray that these words would be your words and not mine. And speak through me and open the hearts of my brothers and sisters here today to hear your truth. In Jesus' name. Amen. Please be seated.

So we're living in an era where worship has gone mainstream. Most of us knows the big most of us know the big names like Hillsong and Bethel, as well as contemporary artists in the 2000s by the names of Chris Tomlin, David Crowder, Third Day, just to name a few. Many of us grew up on that music. I know for me, I made playlists. I would burn CDs and hand them out to friends, right? And to put it in perspective, there's a Christian artist actually by the name of Forrest Frank. And recently he hit number 61 on the Billboard Top 100 with a song titled Your Ways Better. It's been played over a hundred and seventy million times on Spotify and is a frequent song that's requested by my kids in the car.

And if you've been to a Dodgers game, you can't escape Christian music. Andy Pahez, who's having an amazing season this year, he walks up to the Spanish version of the song Holy Forever by Chris Tomlin. There's also a player by the name of Alex Call who plays a song I'm So Blessed by Cain. And that's just Tuesday night baseball in Los Angeles now. And all this is genuinely encouraging, right? But here's what we actually have to be careful about. Popularity is not the same as understanding. This word worship, it's everywhere. Yet a clear definition of worship is almost nowhere. Is worship a feeling?

Does it require a particular style, format, or an emotional experience? No one seems to agree. And this has actually gotten contentious. People are picking churches based off of worship style, classical hymns versus contemporary sets, the organ versus the electric guitar, songs that quote scripture versus songs about how God makes me feel.

So here's the setting. Jesus is first traveling from Jerusalem up to Galilee. And in John chapter 4, verse 4, John tells us that Jesus had to pass through Samaria. And as you can see on this map, the direct route runs from it runs through Samaria as denoted by these red arrows. But during this time, most Jews would actually take the long way, as seen by the yellow arrows, right? You would cross the Jordan River, they would travel up north through Perea, and then cross back into Galilee, these extra miles, oftentimes extra days, just to avoid the Samaritan territory. And let's be clear here. Verse 4 is not an account of John telling us that Jesus is in, he's not an efficient traveler, right?

He didn't punch us in in ways and he was able to get to Galilee faster, right? No. Jesus is going there on purpose. There's a woman at the well that Jesus is going to meet. And that meeting, it's not an accident. The next remarkable thing to note about this interaction was that Jesus was the actually the one to initiate the conversation with this woman. We all know we know how the story goes, right? Jesus gets there, the disciples go off to buy food, and a Samaritan woman comes alone to draw water at midday. And Jesus actually begins talking to her. Now, in first uh century Jewish culture, a rabbi didn't initiate conversation with the woman in public, not even his own wife. So when the disciples come back, look at what verse 27 says, right?

They're they're marveling. Or said differently, they're stunned. Right? These disciples are stunned to see Jesus having this conversation with the woman. And the final striking point of this interaction is that Jesus already knows this woman. Her five husbands, the man she's living with now. And we see here in verse 29, this is the account of the woman. This, see, this is a man who told me all the things that I've done. So what we're jumping into today is not a random conversation between two strangers at a well. This is Jesus, the Son of God, who knows this woman's deepest shame, and he's pursuing her with grace. And it's in that middle of that pursuit, in the middle of all this, this woman musters up this question about worship, and Jesus answers it.

So it's right in the middle of all this where Jesus begins to offer her living water, but she pivots to this question, which was quite a controversial one at the time. It had divided the Jews and Samaritans for centuries. If we look at verse 20, it says this our fathers worshiped on this mountain. And you people say that in Jerusalem is a place where men ought to worship. Her question here gets into the heart of a centuries-long debate. The Samaritans held that Mount Gerizim was the proper place of worship. They could point to Deuteronomy 11:29 or 27.4, where God commanded that the blessings to be proclaimed at Mount Gerizam. The Jews, on the other hand, held that Jerusalem was a place that God had chosen.

And they weren't wrong. Listen to what the Lord commanded in Deuteronomy 12, 5 through 6. But you shall seek Yahweh at the place which Yahweh your God will choose from all your tribes to establish his name there for his dwelling, and there you shall come. And there you shall bring your burnt offerings, your sacrifices, your tithes, the contribution of your hand, your votive offerings, your free will offerings, and the firstborn of your herd and your flock. So I know that for many of us who took Pastor Peter's Old Testament survey, this is all coming back to us now. It's probably jogging our memories, but if you recall, under the Mosaic covenant, the location mattered, right? The tabernacle, and then later the temple was where God's presence dwelt, where the sacrifices were brought, where Israel would come to meet with God.

And it was central to how God had ordered worship under the old covenant. So this question that this woman was asking, it wasn't out of left field. This was a real theological problem that was causing tension between these Samaritans and these Jews, and they had real covenantal stakes. But here's the problem. The woman reduced the question of worship to one of location. Where's the right place, Jesus? Which mountain was the correct address to worship you? You guys are following me, right? And while she's focused on geography, she's completely missing the most important question. And that question is who's the person standing right in front of her. And friends, this is the same problem that's alive in churches today.

The woman was focused on the question of location, and I think we can all agree that we've very much moved past that question here and now. But today's churchgoers have replaced it with a dozen others. In his book called Worship by the Book, the author D.A. Carson, he names four versions of this error that keep showing up across church history. And I want to walk them through them quickly because it helps us name what we're actually dealing with dealing with. And here's how he lays them out. The first problem is what he calls that of external interpretation of worship. It's this idea that you showed up, you sang the words, and you went through the motions, you've worshipped. It's a ritual compliance with really no heart engagement involved there.

The second is the individualistic interpretation. It's the view that worship is this private personal thing.

It has nothing to do with objective truth or the gathered community. The third is what Carson calls the emotional uplift interpretation. Worship is this experience you're trying to achieve. You measure whether it happened by how moved you felt when you walked out of the service, right? And the fourth is called the performance interpretation, where it's this idea that worship is something done for the congregation rather than to God, where the band and the preacher are essentially performers, and the congregation is the audience. If you just sum all these up, what for what do these all four have in common? And it's that all four reduce worship to something we produce rather than a response that we owe.

They make worship about us, our feelings, our preferences, our experience, rather than about God. And brothers and sisters, God's not impressed. Hear what the Lord has said. Here's what here's what the Lord says through Isaiah to a people whose worship had become exactly this. Then the Lord said, Because this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but they remove their hearts far from me, and their fear of me is in the command of men. Therefore, behold, I will once again deal marvelously with this people, wondrously marvelous, and the wisdom of their wise men will perish, and the discernment of their discerning men will be hidden. This was God's response to the Israelites' lip service.

They demonstrated tradition without the heart behind it, and God sees right through it. So Jesus standing at the well, he's not picking aside in the garrison versus Jerusalem debate. He's not picking a mountain.

And this brings us to our second point, the pivot. Look here what Jesus says in verse 21. He says, Woman, believe me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. And then in verse 23, he says this, but an hour is coming and now is when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. For such people, the Father seeks to be his worshippers. That phrase, an hour is coming and now is, is one of the most significant phrases in the Gospel of John. And it's in this moment, Jesus isn't correcting some minor theological detail, right? The pivotal moment is that he's announcing that the entire covenantal structure she built her question around is being fulfilled right here, right now, through Christ.

You see, the old covenant organized Israel's worship around three things the temple, the priesthood, and the sacrifices. And all three of them were pointing forward to something. Actually, they were pointing forward to someone, and that someone had just arrived. Take the temple first. The temple wasn't just a building. The temple was a place where heaven met earth, where God's presence dwelt among his people. Listen to what Jesus says in John 2, verse 19 through 21. And Jesus answered them Destroy the sanctuary, and in three days I will raise it up. Then the Jews said, It took 46 years to build the sanctuary, and you'll raise it up in three days. But he was speaking about the sanctuary of his body.

The Jews here thought he was talking about Herod's temple. But John's actually telling us that he was talking about his own body. No longer would the temple be this physical location, the place where God and man meet, where the glory of God dwells in bodily form. No. Jesus himself is saying that I am the true temple. And consider the priesthood here. Under the old covenant, you couldn't walk straight into God's presence, right? You needed a mediator, a priest who would go in for you and offer a sacrifice on your behalf. But those priests, they kept dying. They had to be replaced. Look what Hebrews 7 says. But Jesus, on the other hand, because he continues forever, holds his priesthood permanently.

Therefore, he is able to also save forever those who draw near to God through him, since he has always lives to make intercession for them. The pivot that we're talking about here is that Jesus holds his priesthood permanently. There's no replacement coming.

You don't need to bring an animal, you don't need to bring a priestly class standing between you and God. We get to come to the Father through Jesus and only through Jesus. And lastly, the sacrifices, right? The Passover lamb, the burnt offerings, the day of atonement. All of this was pointing to one final sacrifice, which Paul puts plainly in 1 Corinthians 5 verse 7. It says, Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb was also sacrificed. The sacrifices are done. The blood of bulls and goats and other animals, they've been set aside. There's no more sacrifices to make, because the one final sacrifice had been made.

And praise God that this is exactly what Jesus was in the process of fulfilling, as spoken by the prophet Jeremiah, right? In Jeremiah 31, behold, the days are coming, declares Yahweh, when I will cut a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. Not like the old cup, not like the covenant which I cut with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. My covenant which they broke, but I was husband to them, declares Yahweh. But this is the covenant which I will cut with the house of Israel after those days.

Brothers and sisters, this was that pivotal moment. The new covenant had arrived. Everything the woman was asking about location, the temple, geography, the external structures of the old covenant worship. They had been fulfilled in Jesus and has given way to something new. Her question wasn't just answered, it was made entirely obsolete. It was no longer a question about which mountain. And the question really then becomes do you know the man standing right in front of you? And it's at this very moment where Jesus tells us this new covenant worship, what this new covenant worship actually looks like. It's in spirit and in truth. So let's take each of those in turn. Jesus says the true worshippers will worship in spirit, or will worship the Father in spirit, right?

In verse 23, when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit.

And when you when you take that word, it's used throughout the New Testament for the Spirit of God. But it also could mean the animating spirit of a person or the inner life. And the question that I think this morning that we need to sit with is what does it actually mean to worship in spirit? And what we can start with is what it doesn't mean, right? The posture of worshiping in spirit doesn't mean just worshiping sincerely. I think sincerity is good, but it's not the goal. You can be completely sincere and completely wrong at the same time, right? The Pharisees were sincere. Saul of Tarsus was sincere as he was dragging Christians off into prison, right? Sincerity without truth is just well-intentioned error.

And worshiping in spirit also doesn't mean being emotionally expressive. And this is perhaps the most common misunderstanding right now. The assumption is if you felt something, the tears, the chills, the rush, ah, worship happened, right? It's the emotional temperature of gathering becomes the measure of your worship, whether true worship took place. But emotion is not the measure, brothers and sisters. Emotion can be a genuine, a genuine fruit of worship, but emotion can also be manufactured. It can be manipulated and completely disconnected from any real encounter with the living God. Right? Skilled lighting effects or a familiar melody or harmony can produce strong emotions in anyone, but that's just not necessarily worship.

So what is it? What is the posture of someone who worships in spirit? And scripture tells us that worship in spirit is worship that flows from a transformed heart, empowered by the Holy Spirit as a response to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm just going to repeat that again. Worship, that worship, worship in spirit is worship that flows from a transformed heart, empowered by the Holy Spirit as a response to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes, and you will be careful to do my judgments. True worship, it begins with a re it begins with regeneration. Before the Holy Spirit has made a person alive in Christ, before the heart of stone can be replaced with a heart of flesh, a person is actually incapable of true worship. They can sing, they can go through the motions, they can be moved emotionally, but they cannot worship in spirit because the spirit doesn't dwell within them.

First Corinthians 12, verse 3. Therefore I make known that I make known to you that no one is speaking by the Spirit of God, says Jesus is a curse. And no one can say, Jesus is Lord, except by the Holy Spirit. Even the most basic act of Christian worship, which is confessing Jesus as Lord, that in itself is the work of the Holy Spirit. Every genuine prayer, every heartfelt song, every moment of surrender is the spirit that's bearing witness within our own lives that we are children of God. We don't work up worship and ask the Spirit to bless it. No, it's the Spirit. The Spirit is what produces the worship in us. And now we have to ask ourselves, what is the what's the Spirit producing worship in response to?

And we find the answers in Romans 11 through 12, which we actually use as as the confession this morning, right? Or the call to worship. It reads this, or the depth of the riches and the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and unfathomable his ways. For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who became his counselor? Or who was given, or who has first given to him that it might that it might be repaid to him? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen. And therefore I exhort you, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a sacrifice, living, holy, and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.

And you guys all catch that, therefore in verse 1, right? Leading up to this point in the book of Romans, Paul spends 11 chapters on the mercies of God. He's talking about election, justification, sanctification, the mystery of Israel, the whole ark of redemption, right? And then he says in chapter 12, verse 1, therefore, on account of all this, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice. This is your spiritual service of worship. For Paul, worship is the overflow of someone who is actually grasp what God did for them in Christ. It's not a technique, it's not a feeling, it's a it's a response. And the better we understand what God has done, the more we're going to be able to worship. The less we understand it, the more we're going to substitute it with something else.

And that something else could be a feeling, a performance, a ritual. And brothers and sisters, the reason why our posture and worshiping in spirit is so important is because we become what we worship. Look at Psalm 115 with me. Their idols are silver and gold, the work of man's hands. They have mouths, but they do not speak. They have eyes, but they do not see.

John takes this word truth, Alethea, and he does something very specific with it.

What John actually does here is he ties truth to a person, and it runs throughout his gospel. Okay? And so you're gonna follow me through a couple places in John. Look at John 1.14. The word became flesh, full of grace and truth. In 117, it says, Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. And in John 8 23, it says, You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. And so the prescription for us is clear. Knowing the truth means knowing Jesus. Truth for John is not this abstraction, this calculus, this algebra that gets you to Jesus. No. Truth is Jesus Himself. And this is why in John 14, when Thomas asks about the way, Jesus doesn't say, Let me show you the way to the truth.

No, what does Jesus say, guys? He says this, right? I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me. The truth is taken on flesh. To worship in truth means to be oriented toward the God who has revealed himself in his son and in the word that bears witness to him. Right? Jesus doesn't say that he knows the truth or he teaches the truth. He's straight up standing here and saying that I am the truth. Which means worshiping in truth is at its core, worshiping through Christ. There's no path to the Father that goes around his son. None. And so true worship is Christ-centered worship. It's actively conscious of the Lord of Jesus' Lordship, His sacrifice, His resurrection, His ongoing intercession in our lives.

And so when we gather together as a church, we're not just here to conjure warm thoughts about this vaguely divine being. No, we come through Christ into the presence of the holy God who made us and redeemed us. John actually also tells us that his truth is the word, right? In John 17, 17, Jesus prays to the Father, sanctify them by the truth, for your word is the truth. The word of God is not merely a helpful resource for us when it comes to worship. The word of God is actually what shapes our worship. It corrects our worship. It keeps worship tethered to reality rather than drifting into whatever feels good. To worship in truth means to let the word of God define what worship is, who God is, what he has done, and how we, as his people ought to respond.

And look how Paul applies this directly to corporate singing, actually in Colossians, right? He says this.

They're planting doctrine into people's hearts, which means the words that we sing matter.

Songs that are vague or self-focused, form people into something else. But what I want to do is I want to return to the point that I made at the outset of all this. Truth without a spirit-filled heart is not true worship either. And the Lord makes this clear through Jeremiah. In Jeremiah 7, 9 through 10, you will steal, murder, and commit adultery and swear while lying, and burn incest to Baal and walk after gods that you have not known. Then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name and stand before him in this house, right? Which are delivered that you may do all these abominations. God is speaking to people who are coming into the temple to worship God.

Like they these guys were in the right place. They were offering the right sacrifices. They were technically compliant, but God wasn't pleased. Why? Because their hearts were far from him. They were using the forms of worship as a cover-up for their corrupt lives. And so what God doesn't want is for us to have these technically correct worship from our hearts that don't actually love him. So going back to this spirit and truth, both. It's not a menu, it's not a la carte. Heartfelt devotion anchored in objective reality. A transformed heart is expressing itself through the revealed word of God. And that's the whole picture. And so I want to I want to bring this home. The passages that we cover today, they're not primarily like a text about style or music or location.

This is this is a text that really is talking about the type of people God are looking for, God is looking for, right? Let me come back to this. For such people, the father seeks to be his worshippers. Just sit and think with that for a second. The sovereign God of the universe, the one who needs nothing, who lacks nothing, who existed in perfect triune fellowship before creation, he's actively seeking worshipers. He's not waiting to see what happens to show up or to see who happens to show up with the right energy or the right posture. He's seeking, right? Jesus sought this woman at a well in Samaria. And he's seeking us today. And he's asking us through this text, will he find in you what he's looking for?

Psalm 95 says this, come let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before Yahweh, our Maker. For he is our God, and we are the people of this pasture in the shape of his hand. Today, if you would hear his voice, do not harden your hearts. And that's what I want to just emphasize for us today is it's about today. Not eventually, not when the timing or the style of music suits you, not when the atmosphere feels right. Today, if you would hear his voice, don't harden your hearts. The door is open right now to come before the God who made you and redeemed you through his son. And I think for us, when we begin to grasp who this God is and what he's done for us, it actually changes how we worship.

We have an example right before us. Look at what happened to the Samaritan woman after her encounter with Jesus, right? She came to the well at noon. And there was a reason why she came to the well at noon. This was the hottest part of the day. When no one else was there, because she was hiding in shame from all of her neighbors because of her sin. But after Jesus revealed to her who he exactly was, what did she do? She ran back into town. She left the water jar at the well, and she went back straight to the people that she'd been hiding from from the first place, right? In verse 29, it says, Come see a man who told me all this, all the things that I have done. This is not the Christ, is it?

And later in the chapter, guess what we find out? That many came to Christ, and many came to believe because of her testimony, right? A woman who cut who came to a well in shame, went back to the city as a witness. And this is what happens when worship in spirit and truth takes root in a human soul. It doesn't stay contained, right? Oh, I now know what it means to worship in spirit and truth. So I'm just gonna sit with that. No, it overflows. And the proper response to encountering the living God is not to sit quietly and just feel something. It's to go and tell.

And I couldn't have a sermon without somehow making references back to the warriors, right? But back in 2015, uh my dad and I uh we jumped on the opportunity to go and watch uh a finals game between the Golden State Warriors and the and the Cleveland Cavaliers. And this was the first Warriors run at the NBA Finals, right? And I had been glued to every single playoff game. I watched every post-game interview. Like I would just go on YouTube and I'd be like, what did Coach Steve Kerr say? How did how did Steph Curry feel about this game? And I read all the expert analysis, I followed all the debates about whether or not LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers were gonna overpower this young warrior squad.

As a matter of fact, Gene and I, we actually got married that year, and we were on our honeymoon during this uh playoff run, and there was a pivotal game against the Memphis Grizzlies, and I actually asked her to stay back at the hotel to watch the game while I while she went around and kind of did her own thing in Korea. But I I share this because it just tells you how much I cared about the Warriors, right? And so when my father and I had the opportunity to go to the finals, like I wasn't gonna miss it. So when the night of the game arrived, I made sure that my dad and I that we were there early. I made sure we found our seats. I made sure that we used the bathroom and made sure we had empty tanks, made sure that we were able to just get settled in and just soak in every single detail before the playoff or before the tip off.

And once the game had started, right? Something shifted. It stopped being about this experience that my dad and I were having, right? Whether, hey dad, are you comfortable or you know, is there enough space here? Are you thirsty? Are you hungry? No. At that moment, he and I, we were just there to cheer on the warriors, right? To be part of something bigger than my own experience or my own father's experience. We were fully present, fully engaged. Everything was oriented to what was going on on the court, right? Fast forward, the warriors end up losing that game, but it's okay, right? It wasn't what I wanted. But the posture of that evening, right? Just showing up, fully prepared, fully present, not focused on myself.

That gives me just the small imperfect picture of what it should look like when we gather before Jesus. How much more should we prepare before we arrive to worship? How much more should we come, not as consumers, right? Evaluating whether today's service is going to meet what I need, but as worshipers who know the God that they are here to exalt. How much more should the posture of our hearts be? This is not about me. This is about him. The Father is seeking true worshipers. He's seeking those who will come to him through Christ in the power of his spirit with hearts that are anchored to his word. He's not looking for the best singers, the most talented musicians, or the most elaborate production.

And my hope and prayer is that that would be true of us here at the beacon. Would he find what he's looking for when he sees us in this room? And may the worship that we offer here and in every corner of our lives be acceptable to him through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you just for your gospel. We thank you for the clear picture of what true worshippers look like. Father, I pray that as we go throughout this week, that we might find opportunities where we truly could just sit and examine the posture that we have in worshiping you.

Thank you for Jesus. Thank you for what he's done. Thank you for calling us to be your own.

Because Lord, when we decrease and you increase, the worries of this world become so small. And just like the Samaritan woman, God, when we know what it looks like to worship in spirit and in truth, we pray, Father, that it would not just be contained within our own lives. We pray for the overflow. We pray that you would open up opportunities for us to truly share this gift with others. And so, Father, would you just do a mighty work through us, through your spirit, and help us, Lord, to lead lives that are acceptable unto you. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Let's all rise and respond in worship.