True Worship

Excerpt from Not in This or That Mount, but in Spirit and Truth (John Piper)

[based on John 4: 16-30]

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When it says that this true worship happens in spirit and truth, it means at least this: you must be born of the Spirit in order to worship God, and you must come to him through the truth, that is, through Jesus, who said, “I am the way the truth and the life” (John 14:6).

Remember, Jesus said to Nicodemus in John 3:6, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh. That which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” To worship God in spirit means to be born of the Spirit and therefore to be a living spirit. Before the new birth all we do is go to church or go to the synagogue or go to the mosque or the temple and act in the flesh. Whether we call ourselves Christians or Jews or Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists, we have no living spirit. We are dead and we don’t know God. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh.”

But when through faith in Jesus the Holy Spirit gives us spiritual life, we are born again. We have a living spirit. We can worship in spirit; our spirits are alive and we have God’s Spirit within. And now we can see and embrace truth—the Truth, Jesus Christ. Now we worship the Father in spirit—our Spirit-given, living spirit—and in truth—God’s supreme Truth, Jesus Christ the sum of all truth.

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