Spirit and Truth

John 4 and the Samaritan Woman at the Well

Once again, Lord helping us, we will be looking at the Gospel of John, chapter 4. Gospel of John, chapter 4. Once again, let us ask the Lord to bless our time together. Our gracious Heavenly Father, we have gathered together this evening.

You have given to us a place to gather in comfort. We possess the Word of God. We have done this many times before, but protect us, Lord, from a spirit of slothfulness or apathy. Lord, help us to once again listen to your Word, be changed by it.

Meet with us by your Spirit, we pray in Christ's name. Amen. This morning we began looking through and working through the dialogue between our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Samaritan woman. I wonder if in the future sometime we will come to know what her name was.

I'm sure that we will in in heaven someday. But we just simply know her as the woman at the well, the Samaritan woman, and we have looked a lot at the background. We'll be looking at a little more background this evening because we've gotten to the point where after Jesus has introduced himself in saying that he can give living water and a person drinking of this water will never thirst again, a theme that we will see picked up in only two chapters in John chapter 6 as well.

Jesus had said to her in verse 16, go call your husband and come here. The woman answered, I have no husband. Jesus's response to her was, you have rightly said you have no husband for you have had five husbands and the one whom you now have is not your husband.

This you have said correctly, truly, faithfully. The woman said to her, sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. So she cannot help but recognize that in Jesus's words there is an element of supernatural knowledge.

Maybe no one else knew exactly how many relationships she had had. Maybe one or two of them were secret or unknown to others. But Jesus knows what her current situation is. She knows that she has never met him before.

So sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Now you would think that the next line would be something along the lines of what must I do in light of the accuracy of your statement concerning me. I recognize my sin, etc, etc.

But instead when she says I perceive that you are a prophet, the very next words out of her mouth are a theological argument. And it is a theological argument that demonstrates yet once again that there is a strong antipathy that exists between the Jewish and the Samaritan people.

And no matter how kind Jesus's words have been or how focused they have been in speaking to her, it does not really matter because there is still that antipathy that is to be found in these words. So notice she says to him, our fathers worshipped in this mountain and you or maybe you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.

Now, what is behind this? Well, when you think about it, if you only had the first five books of the Bible, if you only had Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, would you know where to worship God in this day and age?

Hmm. Yeah, all that stuff about Jerusalem comes from a later time period. It comes from other books primarily. I mean there are prophetic references to God possibly pointing out a place of worship, but where was worship undertaken?

There in the Pentateuch, but in the tabernacle and the tabernacle doesn't have a specific home. It doesn't call a certain place home. There was no temple that had been built where God is to be worshipped.

The tabernacle was a mobile place of worship. And so what had happened was, once what had happened with the Assyrians, the destruction of the northern kingdom, and the Samaritan people developed, and they only accepted those books of the Bible.

Then they interpreted certain passages, especially in light of the well that was there in a certain way to indicate that that was the place where God should be worshipped, not the well. But there in that part of Samaria rather than in Jerusalem, and we know that there were tensions between the northern and southern kingdoms before this, and there were issues about where to worship, and there had been unfortunately a long tradition of setting up competing places of worship in the northern kingdom that are recorded for us in the other books of Scripture.

Which is one reason why the Samaritans didn't like those of the books of Scripture, because those places were clearly condemned by God. But this is what has happened, and it's fascinating that the response to the revelation that she is speaking to a prophet is to seek to engage in, you know, we might say, well, can we really tell that she just wanted to get into a theological debate?

I mean, yeah, there are gonna be some people that are gonna look at this, and they're gonna go, she was deflecting. She didn't deal with the reality of what this man had just said to her, didn't deal with the reality of what was actually going on in her life.

It's a whole lot easier to have a theological argument with someone that is based upon hundreds of years of what we might call racial tension, though it wasn't racial tension, it was it was religio-ethnic tension.

But it's a whole lot easier to do that than it is to deal with your sin and to deal with the reality of what has just been revealed to you. But it still strikes me as odd that if you say, I perceive that you are a prophet, so let's argue.

I mean, that does strike me as a strange thing. Maybe not so much in these days when every radio and television commentator thinks they are a theologian and will argue with anyone who says anything about the Bible as if they had ever read it themselves, but it does seem somewhat strange that her first default response upon saying, I perceive you're a prophet, is to say, well, you know, our fathers worshipped in this mountain.

And you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship. So let's have ourselves a long-term dialogue here in regards to the proper place of worship. Well, Jesus's response to her is a fascinating response.

It does give us some tremendous insight into the truth. But it is meant clearly in the conversation to move past traditions and roadblocks and get back to the important thing, and that is, who is Christ?

And so he says to her in verse 21, 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. 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 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.

What an incredible response is offered to this woman, a response that completely short-circuits any attempt, if there was an attempt on her part, to disrupt the flow of conversation with a ancient argument that no one had ever seemed to be able to come to a conclusion about in the first place.

Because what you have is not a compromise on Jesus's part. He specifically says that an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. So in other words, he sets aside the roadblock that had been the fundamental division between Jews and Samaritans, because they were looking backwards.

They were looking backwards upon issues that now, in the light of the coming of Jesus, we're going to be completely done away with. And you need to understand, it's so hard for us today. We live so far away.

We are so removed in time and geographically from the issues of the early church. Sometimes things like this do not strike us with the weight that they should strike us with. But remember that one of the first major arguments in the early church is, who's this message for?

And we see in Acts, we see in Galatians, we see the fact that there is a struggle about, well, don't you have to become Jewish before you can become Christian? Don't you have to enter into the Old Covenant before you can then enter into the fulfillment of the Old Covenant and the New Covenant?

And so you have the Judaizers, and you have all the issues that come up in Acts chapter 15, the Jerusalem Council, the book of Galatians, all the things related to that. But you have here, in John's gospel, an indication that in the earliest portion of Jesus's ministry, in this conversation with a person outside of what would be strictly defined as the Jewish community, you have the indication that the gospel is going to be doing away with all the ancient divisions that people thought were so vitally important in maintaining their fidelity to God.

You see, for the Samaritans, this had been the understanding for so long that the idea of accepting that God had designated Jerusalem as the place of worship, to accept that would be to abandon all of your historical beliefs, your people.

It would be, it was too great a cost, and so it had become a barrier for these individuals to even consider the rest of God's truth. And so in the very first sentence, Jesus says, something new is coming.

Something you haven't considered. An hour is coming when it's not going to be here. It's not going to be in Jerusalem. No. In neither of these places will you worship the Father. Now, isn't it interesting that he introduces the Father?

He's going to talk about God as spirit. He's going to talk about the Father seeking to be his worshippers. And again, if you weren't reading John, having already read John chapter 1, or didn't know what was coming in John chapter 8, certain people will focus upon things like this, and say, see, Jesus is abjuring any worship of himself, and so on so forth.

Well, that is, that is not the case whatsoever. But what he is talking about is the fact that true worship will be offered to the Father, and it will not be something that is focused upon geographical boundaries, which is exactly what had divided the Jews and the Samaritans.

And so he says that hour is coming. It's not going to be here. It's not going to be in Jerusalem. We can lay those things aside. He does say to her, you worship what you do not know. That's an interesting statement to make.

You worship what you do not know. We worship what we know for salvation is from the Jews. Now, what that means, evidently, is he is recognizing the simple fact that having not only a limited, truncated canon of Scripture, it's not that they didn't know about the other prophets.

It's not that they didn't know about the other books. It's that those books contain things that were specifically in opposition to the traditions that defined the Samaritan people and the Samaritan religion.

And so they rejected those things, and the result is that you worship what you do not know. You do not have accurate knowledge. You have some accurate knowledge. You are seeking to worship. But because of your traditions, you have cut yourself off from the full revelation that you could have possessed.

And he contrasts that, and notice he uses the term, we. She is the one that had said, you people. Jesus doesn't say, oh, I'm not Jewish, because he is. He is of the people of Israel. And so he says, we worship what we know.

Now, immediately you have to stop and go, yeah, but Jesus said to the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem that their worship was vain and empty, and that they didn't know the Father. Yes, that's right. So is Jesus contradicting himself?

No, he's not. What's the difference then? Well, many people very often make what are called category errors. Category errors. Used to be in the olden days. My next birthday is going to put me closer to 60 than to 50, so I can start talking about the olden days.

Sort of fun, and Pastor Frye can do that a whole lot better than I can, but I'm starting to have fun doing it personally. It's a great excuse for all sorts of things. I can walk into Target and go, what am I supposed to get?

I don't remember. It's been too long since I left the house. It's fun. But in the olden days, we were actually taught to think logically. I actually had, you know, I took a class. Brother Callahan, do you remember that, Brother Callahan?

I took your logic class at Phoenix College. And does anybody teach that anymore? I'm not, I don't know if anybody could these days, because there's a worldview that lies behind logic, and in the universities that I see today, hey, if you need to have a stuffed animal in a safe place when anybody says anything to you that you don't happen to agree with, I'm not sure that logic is really the first thing on your mind these days.

I really don't. But it really ends up impacting people's thinking when they think about things like this in the scriptures, because they're like, well, wait a minute. He says the Jews know God, but then he says to the Jews you don't know God.

How is Jesus not contradicting himself? Well, if you think clearly in the proper categories, you do not have to accuse Jesus of contradiction, because you see, here, you do not find the kind of strong language condemning this woman that you find in the condemnation of the Pharisees.

Why? Because the Pharisees did have great light from God. They possessed the scriptures. They had a true and a full revelation of the nature of Yahweh. They were covenanted to worship him aright, and yet they did not do so.

It's not that they did not have the knowledge of God. They chose to reject that knowledge, and to keep him at a distance, and to, and the great sin that was theirs was the hypocrisy of having truth, but not living in the light of it.

These people did not have the truth, so you don't see the kind of condemnation. They're not saying you had great light, and you sinned against that great light. No, they do are, there's a straight direct statement that is made to her.

Salvation is from the Jews. Your traditions are in error, but it does not follow that the Jews therefore have everything right either. Jesus says salvation is from the Jews. We worship what we know. That doesn't mean that all the Jews are engaging in true worship.

So you need to let Jesus speak in the context in which he himself speaks. He's not contradicting himself, but he is saying that the message found, there is absolute consistency in the message found in what we would call the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, the Ketuvim, the Old Testament, the Law, the Writings, and the Prophets.

There is a consistent revelation of who God is. You can know who God is from those scriptures. Those were the scriptures of the early church as well. There was never an idea in the early church, at least amongst the Orthodox in the early church, that you had the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament.

That has always been an utter statement of heresy. It's amazing how often I remember hearing that in my younger days in other churches, where people, not from the pulpit thankfully, but where people just, it's just so common for people to think of the God of the Old Testament and then make a distinction speaking of the God of the New Testament.

No one writing in the New Testament, no one in the early church could conceive of such an idea. The whole point was that the God of the Old Testament had revealed himself in Jesus Christ. The Son had been sent by the Father.

The Spirit is the Spirit of God. There is perfect harmony and fulfillment in what is taking place. And so he says, you worship what you do not know. We worship what we know for salvation is from the Jews, but but an hour is coming, just as in the preceding verse, an hour is coming and now is.

And now is when the true worshippers, true worshippers, not the Jewish worshippers, not the Samaritan worshippers, but the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, not in Mount Gerizim, not in Jerusalem, not in a specific geographical location, but in spirit and truth.

Which means that Christian worship, as we would define it today looking back upon this, Christian worship is never intended to be limited to a particular geographical location. The gospel must be able to transcend all geographical and language and cultural barriers if it is to be for the whole world.

And here you have the first indication in the gospel of John of the universal nature of what this is going to be. It's interesting what happens in Acts, but we see that gospel moving out and the Spirit of God has to keep pushing people out, pushing people out, because the tendency is to keep within the Jewish confines and God has to drop sheets in front of Peter and smack him over the head three times and say, don't call what I've called clean, unclean, and even then he still compromises later on.

And wow, tradition can really, really, really have a strong and binding and blinding effect upon people, even people indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God. Yes, that can happen. Yes, that can happen. An hour is coming, now is, right now, true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.

That is what we have the privilege of doing. We don't have to go to Jerusalem. We don't have to go to a specific location. Because of the presence of the Spirit of God in our lives, we are able to worship God in spirit and truth.

And while we love to gather in this place, like I mentioned last week, I saw that video of the church in Houston. Right now, there are churches in Tampa and places in Florida where the water is flowing in.

And every hymnal is being destroyed and the piano is being destroyed. I don't think we could destroy the organ. We're going to open it up someday and find all the dead bodies, I think. Nothing could destroy that, but we know something could happen.

It's probably not going to be a flood. That's the one thing we're probably okay about, but there could be all sorts of other things, I suppose, and something could happen, and we might have to rent a room at a local hotel.

And guess what? If we did that, we would still be able to worship God in spirit and truth. We'd still be able to do it. Now, I'm not sure what Pastor Frye would be able to do without Trinity Hymnals, but we'd still be able to do it in spirit and truth.

It's not location. It is the spiritual nature of this worship. For such people, the Father seeks to be his worshippers. For such people, the Father seeks to be his worshippers. God does not want formalistic worship.

He had said that in the Old Testament. We know, we see over and over again, the condemnation of just formal ritual. The stench of the sacrifice of people who are doing what the law says without the intention of the heart.

The Father seeks to be his worshippers, those who worship in spirit and truth. And the point is here, since he's saying this to a Samaritan woman, there has never been any foundation in the Gospel message for any kind of division amongst the people of God, based upon any kind of man-made division amongst those people.

Those early Christians could not look down upon those Samaritans. Oh, they may have been Jewish in their background, but Jesus had given the Gospel to a Samaritan woman, had started a revival amongst the Samaritans.

How could they then withhold from the Samaritans that very same Gospel? The same thing was going to be true for the Gentiles as well. This Gospel is for all people. That's why we hear this, if we think about the tensions that existed in the early church, we can see how important this is, and we can see how this same writer, John, when he receives the Revelation, how important it was.

Remember Revelation chapter 5? Men from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation, give their praise to God because they have been made one kingdom by the work of the Lamb who has given His life in their place.

There is no place for any kind of division within the body of Christ on any kind of man-made basis whatsoever. There never has been. Is the history of the church filled with compromise on this? Oh yeah, certainly is.

Certainly is. But there is no foundation, because the Father seeks to be His worshippers, those who worship in spirit and in truth, and it doesn't matter whether you're Jewish, or whether you're Samaritan, or any of the all kinds of Gentiles, which covered everybody else.

You see, God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. So often we focus upon verse 24 as a proof text in our theology classes. God is spirit. And that's vitally important.

It is a truth that God's essential nature is spiritual, not physical. It's not God is simply a spirit, just one spirit amongst many spirits, because the point is, God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.

And so it's the realm of worship, which is spiritual in its nature, that takes it away from being in Mount Gerizim, or whether it's in Jerusalem, or any... You know, man's religions tend to very much set up places.

And when you think about it, the tabernacle was the resistance to that. The tabernacle didn't make a particular place. You could set up the tabernacle anywhere, as long as you had enough flat ground. There's nothing in the scriptures that say, well, you know, the place where the tabernacle has to be set up has to be this, this, this, and has to have this kind of view, nothing like that.

And you can see in the history of the people of God, that the temple became a focus of what? False religion and idolatry. Well, they say, Jerusalem, the temple, the temple, the temple. Yahweh is never going to allow His temple to be destroyed.

Well, watch what happens. He did, more than once. But this idea in man's religion of setting up a particular place, and then you have to go on pilgrimage. You've got to go on pilgrimage. You've got to go to a certain place.

You've got to do certain things. This is very common in the religions of man. Very common. But it is not to mark Christian worship. Because God is spirit, and the realm of worship cannot be limited to a physical thing.

That does not mean that there were not people who worshiped God aright, and were helped in their worship by the offering of the sacrifices, by the prayers that were offered, by the beautiful music in the temple, and God established those things.

But it was true spiritual worship in the midst of that that was pleasing to God. And so here you have a Samaritan woman, and she is getting some amazing revelation. Ever thought about what must have been like for her?

What a blessing. You wonder what her role was later on. Wonder how long she lived. And I wonder if in the early church, she had any position at all in the sense of, that's the one. She's the one who had the conversation with Jesus.

She's the one that was by the well, and Jesus said to her, God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. Hello. And it's nice to know that someone out there loves me.

But I thought that was on mute. Well it is now. Anyway, my iPad appreciated the point that was just being made. Maybe that was the woman from heaven going, yes, that was exactly what happened. I don't know.

That would be an inappropriate use of technology to contact me as I'm asking that particular question. But it does make you wonder. Because there was a revival. It's not going to be that long before the gospel message is going to be coming into Samaria, after the resurrection of Christ.

These words, God is spirit, those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. My goodness. Such depth, such meaning to be found in the revelation of who God is. How different from the world around us.

And those who worship him. This is Jesus' own goal as to what true worship is to be. Must worship in spirit and truth. Is there a danger? I guess we have to deal with this. Is there not a danger of splitting those two words?

Is there a danger? Well, we can certainly see that there are a lot of people that claim to worship God in spirit. But they don't seem to be overly concerned about truth. They don't seem to be overly concerned about truth.

There's a real spiritual nature, they think, to their worship. And we rightly say, well, there's two words there. It's in spirit and truth. And so for us, we very rightly point out, hey, you have to have the truth.

You have to have God's revelation of truth. God does not want pagan worship because pagan worship was worship focused upon an unknown deity. So you just do your things and hopefully you can satisfy the unknown deity.

That's pagan worship. One of the things that specifically sets Christian worship apart from pagan worship is that we worship whom we know. He had just said, we worship whom we know. And so it is absolutely correct for us to say there must be truth.

There must be doctrinal truth. We must allow God to speak. He has to define who he is. We don't get to make God in our own image. We don't get to come up with a kind of worship that pleases us. We need to know who God is first.

What has God said about himself? What has God said about worship? Very true. Very true. Cannot be compromised. But one thing I've learned, as you know, the Lord's opened the door. I think I've been down there five, maybe six times now.

I'm starting to lose track. I go down to South Africa. Fascinating place. Am I the only person in this room who's been to South Africa? Yeah, I'm the only person who's been there. And wonderful believers in South Africa.

Some wonderful churches in South Africa. Antioch Bible Church. Sort of my home away from home. Tim Cantrell is one of the primary pastors there. Just a wonderful brother. Wonderful church. Solid ministry.

But man, they stand out. They stand out. Most of the churches in South Africa are a tremendous amount of wild-eyed charismania and word-faith stuff. And just really, really strange. So wild and abusive that the government is starting to take over and say you've got to be licensed, you've got to go through this, that, and the other thing.

Because they've got people doing such foolish things that they've got people dying in churches. And the true churches suffer because of the foolishness and the false churches. There's a lot of zeal, very little truth.

But, the church is there and there is a reformation of Reformed theology in South Africa. They're having a conference right now, the Resolution Conference, with Voddie Balcombe. Voddie's there and he's preaching.

And Voddie's Reformed. And there's good Reformed men. And every time I go down there, I spoke just a few weeks ago there, and we had people travel from nations around South Africa just to come to hear me speak on the Reformation and things like that.

It's wonderful. But, the reason that there needs to be a Reformation emphasis is because of the bad reputation of that word in South Africa. Because many of those that supported apartheid, many of those who were very clearly racial in their religion, called themselves Calvinists, called themselves Reformed, Reformed churches.

And so, it is a wonderful thing. When I spoke there at Antioch on the Reformation, when I looked out, a very, very thoroughly mixed, integrated audience. And everyone loved the truths of the Gospel and there was no division and there was tremendous racial harmony amongst the Christians there in South Africa.

But, they have to overcome the fact that there have been times when there are people who very much strongly emphasize truth, but without the Spirit. And it wasn't even a balanced truth. And unfortunately, as I travel the world, there's a lot of places where I encounter that.

You go to London, there's been a lot of impact of Hyper-Calvinism there. Real Hyper-Calvinism, not the fake kind of Hyper-Calvinism, but the real kind of Hyper-Calvinism. And Reformed theology sometimes has a bad rap in Ukraine for other reasons.

There has to be a balance. Not a sacrifice of one or the other. The fact is, my friends, sometimes a zeal for truth, if it does not have the spiritual element, can become a very, very ugly thing. In fact, I would suggest to you, Calvinism without the Spirit is an ugly, ugly thing.

It's never meant to be divided Spirit and truth. There is never meant to be an opposition between the two. And I know most of the time when I hear people say, you Calvinists are afraid of the Holy Spirit, I just go, oh please.

But sometimes I wonder if there isn't just a germ of truth in there. Just a germ of truth. It's Spirit and truth. We cannot divide them. We cannot divide them. We cannot be afraid of the spiritual realm.

We cannot retreat from the spiritual realm into our doctrinal formulations. It is all one divine revelation from God. And worship must be done in Spirit and truth. Now the Bible says that worship is to be done in a disciplined fashion.

And God is the one who defines what worship is. And all these things are true. But the point that I think we all have to agree on is we can never take refuge in how much we know about the truth when we are using that as a means to escape from the Spirit's conviction about the things in our life that shouldn't be the way they are.

Our lack of love. Our lack of love even for the truth which always has to demonstrate itself in our love for others. Our love for the lost. Whatever else it might be. Spirit and truth. Two words that must be joined together for Christian worship to actually be Christian worship.

And so our desire must always be in this place or wherever else we might be. God is Spirit. And those who worship Him must worship in Spirit and truth. For such people, the Father seeks to be His worshippers.

How often do we think of ourselves? Define ourselves as worshippers of God. If someone were to ask us how easy would it be for us to use other terms? I'm a Reformed Baptist. I'm a Christian. I'm an Evangelical.

But how often is it I am a worshipper of God through Jesus Christ? This must be a way in which we think if Jesus introduced this as basic truth to a Samaritan woman, how much more should it be absolutely basic truth to us as well?

Let's pray together. Our gracious Heavenly Father, we indeed do thank you that you remind us of who you are and that you seek worshippers, true worshippers, who worship you in Spirit and in truth. And Lord, we confess that there are times when we have emphasized the truth at the expense of the Spirit.

Just as there are many that go the other direction, we want to be balanced, Lord. We don't want to be the chosen frozen. We want to be those who are alive in our worship. We want our worship to be informed by, directed by, your truth.

But we want it truly to be Spirit-born and come from our hearts to be worship of the whole man. And so, Lord, we would ask that as we seek to obey your truth, Lord, that you would find us to be the kinds of worshippers that you seek.

Pleasing to you. Use us in this coming week to be your worshippers and your servants. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.