How To Adore God: Part 1

Many years ago in a remote village a woman was married. I suppose it’s true that most women believe that marriage is going to bring some level of happiness, and I’m sure that that was true of her as well. She was in a culture where women basically had no rights, none whatever, and so there was nothing that she could do when her husband decided that he would divorce her, possibly because he was more interested in another woman. So she went through the reality of a divorce and her world came tumbling down.

And then something else happened. She met another man and for whatever reason they were married and she thought, I’m sure, that at last she was going to be happy. At last she’s going to find the man of her dreams, the one whom she really loved. But that marriage also ended in divorce. When she met a third man, she was cynical by now and I’m sure that she had given up all possibility that marriage is supposed to be the means of happiness. But then maybe again, maybe this man – after all, hope springs eternal in the soul – would bring her the happiness that she desired. He also divorced her.

Then there was a fourth man and a fifth. When she met the next man they decided to not even have the charade of a wedding. Why bother? They simply decided to live together. And here’s a woman with that kind of a history, and you know what happened to her then. Miraculously, wondrously she met Jesus Christ and, notice this, Jesus gave her the opportunity to gladden the heart of God.

And I want you to know today that Jesus used the opportunity of speaking to her as the basis of one of the most interesting and insightful passages in all the New Testament on the topic of worship. So I am going to invite you to take your Bibles and turn to the fourth chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus is sitting on Jacob’s Well. Now most of you have not sat on Jacob’s Well. I had the privilege of doing so way back in 1968 when tour groups were actually able to go there. Now for the most part, with some exceptions, they can’t, but you could actually go to Jacob’s Well. We poured water down the well to see how long it would take for the water to hit the bottom, for the water to splash.

We also saw Mount Gerizim, which is going to be referred to in this passage, so I want you to paint the picture. But the best thing we can do is actually look at the text. Jesus is sitting on the well. He asks this woman for a drink. It was unthinkable to the Jews that a man would speak to a woman because women were often despised. They were very low class. And Jesus says, “Give me a drink.” And she says to Him beginning in verse 9, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (for Jews have no dealings with Samaritans) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and whom it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.” Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband;’ for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain (and she’s pointing to Mount Gerizim), 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 woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”

Wow! What a discourse on worship. You have to understand that in the Bible God is relentlessly self-serving. God wants all things to culminate in Himself. God is the One who desires worship. He does things, the Scripture says, for His name’s sake. He said, “I chose Israel for My name’s sake.” And when we pray The Lord’s Prayer we say, “Hallowed be Thy Name.”

As a matter of fact, God said in the Old Testament, “I am raising up Pharaoh that My name might be declared throughout all the earth.” The reason that Pharaoh was raised up, my friend, was so that God’s fame and God’s reputation might be spread around the world, that He might be known as a great and holy and powerful God. And that’s why Pharaoh was raised up – to give glory to God.

In fact, eventually every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. There are those who do it in this life and they will do it in the life to come. There are others who will only do it in the life to come, but God is going to receive glory from everyone. And therefore isn’t it interesting that His great desire for us is to bring Him to light by becoming worshipers?

I’ve entitled this message How to Have a Passion for God or How to Adore God, I should say, and in the next message we’re going to get more specific as to what worship is really going to cost us and what it’s all about, but here we lay the foundation work for a marvelous discourse on worship.

And I speak to those of you who are broken down, those of you who have gone through one bad experience after another, those of you who feel that God has deserted you. I want you to know today that you too can become a worshiper of God. The invitation that God gives to a broken immoral failed woman is the invitation that He gives to all of us.

Now the doctrine of worship is much discussed today. The last issue of Christianity Today had an article on whether we should have traditional worship or whether we should have contemporary worship. I didn’t have a chance to read the article, though I am sure it has some mighty good things to say, but those kinds of discussions have been going on for years and they will be here long after you and I are gone. There’s one problem with them, and that is that sometimes worship is looked at as something that happens only in church. It is as looked at as our verbal expression to God in reading and in singing. So the question is, should it be contemporary or should it be traditional? And while those discussions may be healthy, actually Jesus is going to get to the heart of the problem and show us that worship is much deeper than those kinds of questions.

Now in order for us to get into the text, let’s remember who this woman was. Well, first of all, she was a woman, and I mentioned a moment ago that Jewish men did not talk with women, particularly unknown Jewish women. And here Jesus has a conversation with her. She was not only a woman, but she was also a biracial woman, keep in mind. Now in order to understand why, you must realize that in the year 722 B.C. you have the Assyrians coming into the land, and they take northern tribes to Assyria. That’s called the captivity. And what they did was they took these people and they displaced them but they brought Assyrians back into the land to live there instead. But some of the Jews were still living in the land. Not all of them were taken forcibly to Assyria so they intermarried with these Assyrians, so what you have are people who are half-breeds.

Oh how those pristine self-righteous Jewish leaders despised these people of mixed blood. They called the Gentiles dogs, but for someone who was part Jewish and part Gentile, there was almost no word to condemn them. They were so despicable. They were beneath the animal kingdom.

This woman was part of that group. She was biracial. She was not only a woman. She was a biracial woman. She was a poor biracial woman obviously, and she was also known as an immoral biracial woman, and it’s to this one that Jesus offers the gift of salvation, and eternal life, but also the great discourse on the topic of worship. And what I’d like to do to get to the heart of this is to simply point out briefly three facts that Jesus mentions about worship which will change our lives, which will make me a different pastor, which will make you a different person, which will change your marriage and your whole outlook if you and I actually take these words seriously and begin to apply them.

The first fact is that worship is a matter of heart. It is not just a matter of geography. It’s a matter of heart. I’m picking it up in verse 23. “But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit.” That’s a small “s.” It’s not the Holy Spirit but the human spirit or the human heart. What Jesus was saying is that there is this big discussion. Should it be Gerizim or Jerusalem? Now in order to understand that discussion, you have to go back 200 years before the captivity that I told you about, back to 931 B.C. when you remember Solomon died and he had a son by the name of Rehoboam who made some foolish decisions. And some of the northern tribes said, “We’re going to establish our own kingdom.” So you have two kingdoms. You have the south with its capital in Jerusalem, and you have the north with its capital in Samaria.

And when Jeroboam of the northern Kingdom (Don’t get these guys confused – Rehoboam and Jeroboam.) became king he said, “I don’t want my people going to Jerusalem like the Scripture says they should. You know, I want them to stay here and worship. We’re going to set up our own worship here on Mount Gerizim. (and archeologists have actually found the altar that was on that mountain) And we want all the people to come here to worship, you see.” So that’s the basis of the rivalry.

So the woman sitting there on Jacob’s Well (You can see Mount Gerizim and Mount Nebo, another mountain in the area very close by.) said, “Our fathers said that in this mountain we should worship, and you Jews say that worship should take place in Jerusalem.” Jesus said, “Woman, I want to tell you something. Woman, understand that worship is a matter of spirit. It’s not a matter of geography.” You can worship anywhere because God is everywhere, and if you’ve come to God through Jesus Christ (and now we’re looking at it through the lens of the New Testament), you can worship because your whole life should be an expression of worship, the adoration of the wonder and the glory of God. That’s supposed to be the centrifugal force of our entire existence, and that’s why you can worship on the CTA. In fact, it might be a good place for you to worship.

Many of you may know Kathy Persson, and I didn’t get her approval to tell this story but I’m sure that I do have it. John Persson is our camp director. But Kathy told me that one day long before she was married she was hitchhiking through Europe trying to find out who she was and trying to find God, and she ended up at L’Abri which is where Frances Schaeffer was doing some teaching. And spiritually she was reborn. Her life was straightened out there. And then she said to Dr. Schaeffer, “You know, when I go back to the city of Chicago, what if I go back there and find out that God isn’t real?” And I remember Kathy telling me that Dr. Schaeffer said to her, “Look, if you go back to the harsh streets of Chicago and find out that God isn’t real, then don’t come back up here to the Alps because He isn’t real up here then either.”

Oh, we say, “Well, you know, if I were in the Alps I could worship God because the heavens declare the glory of God.” And it’s true that nature makes us respond to God, but my dear friend, Jesus is saying that worship is a matter of spirit. It is a matter of the heart, and the issue isn’t the Alps or the Chicago streets. The issue is the condition of our heart. That’s what Jesus is saying.

Now I want you to notice that the whole thing then comes down to a matter of desire, doesn’t it? Do we desire God? You say, “Well, we do have worship services in church so the geography is important.” Well, let’s think about that for a moment. Of course, when we come together we have a worship service, and there’s something that goes on here together on Sunday mornings that does not happen during the week because we are with other members of the body. And that’s so important. We call it corporate worship because God is among His people in a sense that is experienced that may not be true when we are alone. We can worship alone but God is with His people.

And furthermore the direction of our mind and our hearts and our thoughts intentionally are directed God-ward. Now you can take our bulletin and look at it on any Sunday, and I believe that what you’ll find is that it is intentionally God directed. Look at the songs that we’ve sung today.

I Worship You, Almighty God.
There is none like You.
I worship You, oh Prince of Peace.
That is what I long to do.
I give You praise, for You are my righteousness.
I worship You, Almighty God;
There is none like You.

Can there be anything that is more God directed than that, speaking directly to God? We could go through the bulletin and see it every Sunday, but here’s what I want to tell you, folks. And here now you have my heart. Alright? If we are not worshiping God during the week, we can’t worship God on Sunday. And dare I say we won’t worship God on Sunday? We won’t come to the service with a sense of anticipation, and say, “I wonder what God has in store for me to learn, but also I delight to sing His praises because I adore Him and I love Him and I can hardly wait to see what we are going to sing today to magnify the name of God.” Unless our hearts are right, we won’t say that.

You know, it’s hard for us as preachers sometimes to give the congregation a spanking, but today you are going to get it from somebody else, but God’s going to use me to do it. Okay? Now here it is. I’m preaching on worship. God knows it! And wouldn’t you know that here’s a letter that was sent to me at the end of June and it arrived (at least I saw it) on my desk this week. It may have arrived earlier. Listen. It’s addressed to me.

“I was a visitor at your church this morning, and I do thank you for the provocative message. But as I first walked into the sanctuary I heard and observed a steady chatter in nearly every direction. I sat down in a section to the right of the podium expecting at least a few moments of quietness and meditation. The incessant talk by people both in front and behind me continued. I may tell you that what I overheard had little or nothing to do with spiritual matters. It was largely small talk and outright gossip. Why aren’t your parishioners encouraged to be more respectful of the house of worship?”

Are you okay if I go for the next paragraph? Are you with me here? This gets even a little more sensitive here, but I’m going to read on.

“Secondly, I noticed loud applause on several occasions during the service.” He says, “God’s house is a place of holiness set aside especially for Him.” Now I want to tell you this. I am not opposed to applause at times. It’s a controversial issue. Some people think that we should never have applause. Others think that it should be all the time. I am not opposed to it so I may not entirely agree with the letter but this is the part that I do agree with. “Unfortunately the applause seemed to be more in the nature of a response to entertainment than a reaction to God’s Word.”

I think this person has something to say to us. It’s alright to applaud, but let’s not applaud just because we saw some ability on this platform, not just because the choir sang so well. Let’s applaud for God. That’s why we applaud. We say, “I praise You and I magnify Your name.” Now you can clap and say, “Lord, I magnify Your name.” That’s what we should be doing, and not just because the singer happens to be so good, and thank God for the good singers that we do have. We need to ask ourselves this question.

And then he goes on to say that he bemoans the fact that believers seem to have succumbed to secularism, etc. but let me communicate to you the last paragraph.

“Christians are privileged to contemplate the things of God, the holiness of His being and His commandments in Jesus Christ, and to refrain from the works of the devil in all their subtle manifestations. What better time is there than before the service in God’s house to meditate reverently on what He requires of all of us?”

There’s something to be said for that. You know, I came from a little church that was so small that if 50 people had shown up we’d have had to go to the neighbors to get some chairs. And we knew though as children that you could talk out on the street. You could even talk in the lobby, which was as small as your kitchen. Two or three people could take their overshoes off in the lobby at a time if they were tall and thin. But all of us as children knew that the minute you went into that sanctuary you were quiet. Why? It was that you were now going to come together into God’s presence. You were going to give God glory and praise, and this is the place where, in a special way, we will meet Him.

Now what we have to remember is this. Jesus is saying that worship is a matter of heart. I’ve emphasized that, of course, you can worship Him alone in a hospital room or wherever you are, but there’s a sense in which we come together now, and we worship God together, and this is a special place, not because of the brick and mortar, but because God dwells with His people.

Jesus said, “It’s a matter of heart.” You see, this is my struggle. This is my “kamph,” to use the German word. This is the thing that tears in my soul. When we talk about styles of worship and we reduce it to words and style, we forget the fact that the real issue is one of heart. And we are dishonest when we reduce worship to words, or when we sing about God but do not seek Him, when we praise Him but we do not obey Him.

Remember what Jesus said to the Pharisees. He said, “Well has Isaiah prophesied, you hypocrites. The people honor Me with their lips.” They were singing the right songs. Maybe they had discussions in those days too. Should it be contemporary or should it be traditional? They were singing the right songs, but He said, “Your heart is far from me.” Jesus is reminding us that worship is a matter of heart.

Secondly, it’s a matter of truth. That’s in the same verse, verse 23. What does that mean? Truth, first of all, regarding who God is! We come into God’s presence and we know that we are in the presence of the one true holy God. My friend, the God that we worship is not the God of contemporary talk shows. This is not the God, you know, who is accessible to everybody at any time and in any way and through any name. This isn’t the God that we are talking about. That’s the god of mythology. It’s the god of the occult. We come before a God who demands a sacrifice before we can approach Him. And that’s why we come in the name of Jesus. We always begin our worship services that way because apart from that we would be blown away. We would be rejected and so we come, and we come, and we come and we know that this is a holy God, the truth about who God is, the truth about who we are.

You know, despite my many faults, and I am sure there are many, one thing that I do like to do is to practice what I preach. I don’t always do it. Sometimes I preach way beyond my experience. Years ago on Saturday night I used to look into a mirror and I used to practice my message. And then my kids used to say, “Dad is practicing what He preaches.” I don’t do that anymore. Maybe I’ve outgrown that, but I said this week, “I’m speaking on adoring God. Maybe I should spend some extra time adoring God.” So as I began to adore God, I mean really, really seriously adore Him, it’s amazing all the things that God brought to my attention. He said, “What about that sin that you haven’t dealt with? What about those thoughts that you’ve had that have not yet been confessed? What about this matter that you didn’t take care of?” And suddenly I began to realize that this business of worship means that when we seriously worship God the first thing He does is He begins to clean us up. And I began to realize again how easy it is to worship Him with our lips and our hearts are far from Him. And if we are serious, if we worship in truth, we will worship like Isaiah who said, “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips because mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts,” and we fall down and we worship and we say, “Oh God, we are sinners, we are sinners, but we worship.” That’s worship in truth.

If God wills it next time I preach on this, which is the next message in this series of two, I hope to speak about the cost that is involved in worship. It isn’t just coming to church and singing hymns, even though they are good hymns and good choruses. Jesus said it’s a matter of heart. He said it’s a matter of honesty. It’s a matter of truth.

Thirdly He says it’s a matter of priority, and this excites me the most. It’s a matter of priority. He says, “The Father seeks such worshipers,” or as my translation says, “These are the kinds of worshipers the Father seeks. The eyes of the Lord go to and fro throughout the whole earth seeking those whose hearts are perfect towards Him.” The eyes of the Lord go along the rows of Moody Church all along there. The eyes of Lord go into the balconies. The eyes of the Lord go into the homes. The eyes of the Lord go among the people of God, and God is saying, “I am seeking for someone who will worship Me in spirit and in truth.”

So God goes seeking, and what happens to us? Well, you know we’re too busy. We’re too tired. God hasn’t been there for us like we wanted Him to be there. He hasn’t answered our prayers. Little do we realize that unanswered prayer is one of the means by which God seeks worshipers. We don’t understand that so we think that God has blown us off, and we don’t understand what’s going on. And so God goes on a hunt and He goes seeking, and maybe He finds one in 10 or one in 20. I don’t know, but I do know this: It is almost impossible to develop worshipers in an affluent culture because as long as we are secure in our jobs, as long as we are secure in our relationships, as long as life is going along pretty well we will not seek God. It is when He comes along. And this is why God has various means by which He does His seeking, or else He would never find anyone who worshiped Him. And one means is unanswered prayer. The reason He doesn’t answer our prayers is He wants us to keep coming back. And He wants us to realize that we need Him even more than an answer to our prayer. That’s the whole point. Disappointments in life! It’s God seeking. God is saying, “I want you to no longer be able to depend on those people, and depend upon things,” so that He keeps cutting out from under us all the props, so that finally we are left alone with Him, and we cry up with Asaph and say, “Whom have I in heaven but thee, and there is none upon the earth that I desire beside thee. My flesh and my heart fail. God is the strength of my life and my portion forever.” I’ve got nothing left but God.

In the trials of life God is seeking worshipers. He gives Job ten children. Ten children are dead – boom - in a windstorm. Ten fresh graves on the hilltop! What did Job do? He bowed low and he worshiped and said, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” That’s how God does His seeking. And God desires that this be the centrifugal force of our life. And Jeremiah, you remember, said, “My people have done two evils. Number one, they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living water.” That’s the first thing that they do, but they never stop there. He says, “They have hewn out cisterns – broken cisterns that can hold no water,” and so what they are doing is they are seeking water somewhere else, and you and I have to seek water. That’s true physically. It’s also true spiritually. You are going to find it somewhere but all of the watering holes of the world are empty or foul. But you and I don’t believe that, do we? We keep hanging on and saying, “I have to find it here. I have to find it there – somewhere, someplace,” and God keeps saying, “Here I am.”

Nancy Spiegelberg wrote: Lord, I crawled across the barrenness to you with my empty cup, uncertain in asking for a drop of refreshment. But if I had known you better, I’d have come running with a bucket.”

My wife used to say what my mother used to say too, that sometimes when you eat between meals you spoil your appetite. You know that that is true. If I drink a milkshake I don’t have to eat for a day and a half. My appetite is just gone. Here’s what happens. We cram our lives with so many different things, and if we have a little bit of room we add something else to it, totally cramming our lives. And we get enough of these things to be able to make it by in life, and in the process we bypass God. We bypass the Father, who is seeing worshipers.

Let me conclude with some observations. Worship, my friend, is at the heart of all ministry. Do we believe that? Worship is at the heart of all ministry. I think of what Pastor Wiersbe said in his book on worship. He’s talking about all the things we do except worship. And then he says, “And what more shall I say for the time would fail to tell of Sunday School contests, bus ministries, youth rallies, discipleship programs, church growth seminars, liturgical renewal movements, ecumenical programs, denominational promotions, all of which promise new life for me and my congregation. But they didn’t do the job because they were cut flowers that had no roots. They had been divorced from worship and therefore they could not produce fruit. This explains,” he says,” why success in these ventures often creates more problems than it solves, for the emphasis on our successes are often on men’s techniques and achievements, and not on God’s power and God’s glory.”

It’s the heart of ministry. We minister because we love God and because we worship. It’s the heart of the purpose of life. Here’s a woman who blew it in terms of her marriages. She had five marriages and was now living with a man unmarried. Would you say that she failed in her marital relationships? Even by today’s standards, that is failure, and Jesus says, “Why don’t you become a worshiper?”

Many years ago, more than 25 years ago, I wrote a book entitled Failure: The Backdoor to Success, and remarkably it is still in print. I like to say that the reason is because it sold so well at Moody Bible Institute during exam time. But do you know why I wrote that book? I was sitting in a seminary classroom many, many years ago, and I overheard a professor say one statement that captivated me. It is simply that success as we generally think of it is not open to everyone. Not everyone can be successful in getting money. Not everybody can be successful in their job. Maybe not everybody can be successful in his or her marriage. Success as we generally think of it is not an option to many people, but fellowship with God is.

You can delight the heart of God by being a worshipper no matter what your past is. You can learn to adore God, and in adoring God you can fulfill the delight of the Father who seeks for worshipers. And if He does not find them in high class society, He’ll go to the lower classes and find those who know the beauty of forgiveness, and He will find there people who delight Him because the centrifugal force of their life is worship.

Let me give you a final observation. It’s the basis of ministry and it’s the basis of purpose. And by the way, speaking of purpose, you know, of course, that heaven will not need any preachers. But heaven is going to need worship leaders, because in heaven we’re going to continue to do what we have done here on earth, namely worship God. And God says, “I want you to begin right now.”

Let me give you a final thing, and that is that it is the heart of evangelism. You know it’s interesting that this woman, if we had time to read the rest of the story, left her water pot and went back into the city and told everybody whom she met, “Is He not the Christ?” It says in verse 28, “Leaving her water jar…” All kinds of people have asked why she left her water jar. Why didn’t she take some water with her? Well, maybe it’s because of the enthusiasm of the moment. I like to think of this. Maybe there’s even more here. Maybe it’s this. Now that she has learned the refreshment of living water, it almost seemed as if physical water was no longer necessary. She says, “Now I’ve met the ‘Water of Life,’ who has come to fill my soul and given me a spring of water that gushes up into eternal life.” She was so excited about that that she forgot that she even needed the other water to live.

At any rate she runs and she tells everybody about this, and it says in verse 39, “Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in Him because of the woman’s testimony who said, ‘He told me everything I ever did.’” And she became an evangelist to lead others to Christ. And Jesus stayed there, and isn’t it wonderful that she learned to worship. She learned about forgiveness, and a bit of worship, and she became an evangelist.

John Piper is right when He says that the real goal of missions is not even to see people saved as such. The real goal of evangelism in missions, he says, is worship. Why? It’s because we value God so much we want more tongues to give Him praise, and that’s why we go to the far ends of the earth. It is for the glory of Jesus. It is that more people in more cultures, in more situations, will be able to praise His name. And that’s our motivation.

You say, “Well, how do we learn to worship?” I hope to deal with that more specifically in the next message except to say this, that even the how is less important than the more fundamental question of heart and truth and priority. It’s in His presence that somehow all of life is rearranged and begins to make sense.

You say, “Pastor Lutzer, I have failed greatly. There’s not much of my life left. I’ve walked far from God.” Would you join this woman in becoming a worshiper, adoring God and delighting His heart?

Let’s pray.

Father, we do say in sincerity:

Fill my cup, Lord.
I lift it up, Lord.
Come and quench this thirsting of my soul.

Father, we’ve thirsted for many things. Make Moody Church thirsty for God like that deer panting after the water brook. Oh come, Holy Spirit, make this a sanctuary in which we adore You and everyone around us knows that we adore You. Make us an adoring people. Help us, Lord, because we are so needy, and we confess our sins which are so many that stand in the way of complete focused adoration. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.