Small group Bible study curriculum with lessons by:
Scott Aniol, Tom Ascol, Voddie Baucham, Josh Buice, Costi Hinn, Phil Johnson,
Steven Lawson, John MacArthur, Laramie Minga, Matthew Sikes, Paul Washer, James White
Main Point: True worship is any expression of obedience, praise, honor, adoration, and gratitude offered to the true God by a regenerate soul who knows the truth about God and loves him.
Main Passage: John 4:19–24
Memory: “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.” (Jn 4:23)
A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” . . . 19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.
20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” (Jn 4:7, 19–20)
Jesus’s discussion with the Samaritan woman reveals a contrast between true worship and false worship. In 722 bc, when the northern kingdom of Israel was conquered by Sargon, the Assyrian, and scores of Israelites were taken away, the only ones left in the north were the poor. Over time, these poor Israelites intermarried with idolatrous pagan people, and their descendants constituted the hybrid group known as the Samaritans. The Samaritans developed their own kind of worship at Mount Gerizim—a simple approach based on what they knew from the Pentateuch, and that alone; none of the history books or literature or prophets informed their worship. They had their own kind of worship. However, their worship was vain.
Worship Based on God’s Commands
How did this Samaritan woman, with only the Pentateuch in her religious background, know that a relationship with God was defined as worship?
She would know that because she knew the Ten Commandments, the first three of which clearly articulate the worship of God as central to a relationship with him. The first commandment identifies whom we are to worship:
And God spoke all these words, saying, 2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. 3 You shall have no other gods before me.” (Exod 20:1–3)
The second commandment addresses how God should be worshiped, or rather, how he should not be worshiped—by means of any visual representation:
You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5 You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Exod 20:4–6)
The third commandment lays out very clearly the responsibility of any human being before God to make certain that he or she never takes the name of the Lord in vain:
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. (Exod 20:7)
The Samaritan worship would have also known well the Shema, the central statement of faith for an Old Testament Jew:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. (Deut 6:4–6)
The Pentateuch is clear about the importance and nature of true worship. On the negative side, do not take the name of the Lord in vain, or you will not be guiltless; on the positive side, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and might. So this woman knew that a relationship with God is defined in how that individual conceives of the divine being.
| Think About It |
| 1. Based on God’s commandments regarding worship in the Old Testament, what would render worship vain? 2. How important are external acts of worship in rendering worship either true or false? Name some examples in the Old Testament and today. 3. How important are internal aspects of worship in rendering worship either true or false? Name some examples in the Old Testament and today. |
Vain Worship
The Samaritans had distorted true worship; as Jesus said to the woman, “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews” (Jn 4:22). Yet even the Jews failed to obey God’s commands and often worshiped in ways that rendered their worship vain.
Blaspheming the Name
And speak to the people of Israel, saying, Whoever curses his God shall bear his sin. 16 Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him. The sojourner as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death. (Lev 24:15–16)
One way of taking the Lord’s name in vain is to blaspheme the name. This means to accuse God of any evil, any ignorance, any incompetence, any impotence, or anything that is less than who he truly is—to declare that God is not who he reveals himself to be. That is a form of cursing God.
Normally, people blaspheme the name because they are bothered by the biblical revelation of God. They would like to determine that God is not nearly as harsh about sins and immorality as some things in the Bible may appear to make him sound, so they want to say that God is more tolerant of sin. Or they want to say that God really can’t possibly know the future, because if he knew the future, he’d do something about it. All these are forms of blaspheming God, not overtly but covertly.
Swearing Falsely
Leviticus 19 adds another way that the name of the Lord can be taken in vain.
You shall not swear by my name falsely, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord. (Lev 19:12)
Swearing by God’s name falsely means that, in trying to convince someone of something that is false, you swear by the name of God so others think you’re telling the truth because you wouldn’t put yourself in such a position before God. It’s like telling a lie, and then saying, “This is true, so help me God.” That is taking the Lord’s name in vain.
Speaking for God Falsely
A third way to take God’s name in vain is to make the false claim that you have heard from God, and speak for him when you haven’t really heard from him.
Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts concerning the prophets: “Behold, I will feed them with bitter food and give them poisoned water to drink, for from the prophets of Jerusalem ungodliness has gone out into all the land.” 16 Thus says the Lord of hosts: “Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord. 17 They say continually to those who despise the word of the Lord, ‘It shall be well with you’; and to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, ‘No disaster shall come upon you.’” 18 For who among them has stood in the council of the Lord to see and to hear his word, or who has paid attention to his word and listened? 19 Behold, the storm of the Lord! Wrath has gone forth, a whirling tempest; it will burst upon the head of the wicked. 20 The anger of the Lord will not turn back until he has executed and accomplished the intents of his heart. In the latter days you will understand it clearly. 21 “I did not send the prophets, yet they ran; I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied. 22 But if they had stood in my council, then they would have proclaimed my words to my people, and they would have turned them from their evil way, and from the evil of their deeds. 23 “Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God far away?” (Jer 23:15–23)
God is condemning those who say they heard God say certain things, but they did not really hear from him. They’re offering a peaceful message, but they’re stripping out the offensive part of the message. They’re saying, “Everything is going to be fine; calamity will not come on you.” We hear this so commonly today: “God loves you. He just wants you to be happy and successful and fulfilled.” This is supposed to be the message from God, but it is not. That is taking the Lord’s name in vain.
Worshiping in any Way that Diminishes God’s Glory
Another way to take the Lord’s name in vain is to worship the Lord in any way that diminishes his glory.
And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2 “Speak to Aaron and his sons so that they abstain from the holy things of the people of Israel, which they dedicate to me, so that they do not profane my holy name: I am the Lord. 3 Say to them, ‘If any one of all your offspring throughout your generations approaches the holy things that the people of Israel dedicate to the Lord, while he has an uncleanness, that person shall be cut off from my presence: I am the Lord.’” (Lev 22:1–3)
This is a warning to Aaron and the priests that how they handled the holy things that were part and parcel of God’s prescribed worship was a serious issue. How they handled holy things was a serious enough issue that if they profaned his holy name by deviating from the prescription that he gave them, they would be executed. If this is how Old Testament priests handling physical things, how much more frightening would be the indictment on one who handled the Word of God?
The prophet Isaiah later condemned Israel’s worship for failing on this very point:
What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well-fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. 12 When you come to appear before me, who has required of you this trampling of my courts? 13 Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations—I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. 14 Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. 15 When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. (Isa 1:11–15)
God had prescribed how he wanted to be worshiped and told the people of Israel to observe his commands. Yet, they became a burden to him. He was weary of bearing them. He said through the prophet Amos, “Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen” (Amos 5:23). I don’t want to see your festivals. I don’t want your prayers. I don’t want your offerings. I don’t want the animal sacrifices. I don’t even want your music. Your hearts aren’t right.
Jesus indicted the leaders of Israel in his day for the very same problem:
7 You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: 8 This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; 9 in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. (Matt 15:7–9)
You take the name of the Lord in vain any time you diminish his holy glory, and particularly, in an act of supposed worship. To take the Lord’s name in vain would be to cheapen it, to reduce it to insignificance, to reduce it to nothing, to make it frivolous, to make it shallow, to make it superficial, to empty it of its glory. Don’t ever do anything in his name that diminishes the glory of God, while naming him.
You may not blaspheme and curse God; you may not swear falsely; you may not make false claims to having heard from God yet speaking what is not true. But in our worship, we also must not do anything that diminishes his glory. Do not speak of him or sing of him or think of him in any way that robs him of his glory. Do not empty his name. Do not use his name in cheap forms of entertainment and emotional manipulation. Anyone who empties his glorious name in any way by having a divided heart should remember David’s words:
Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place?
4 He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully. (Ps 24:3–4)
If you want to enter the holy hill and worship, you must have clean hands and a pure heart. And if you don’t, you are in grave danger.
I think it’s safe to say nothing is more glorious than the worship of God’s people, and nothing is more dangerous than false worship. Everyone who cheapens, empties, or diminishes the holy name of God offers vain worship. Everyone who expresses only external forms of worship without having been washed and sanctified and without having clean hands and a pure heart has taken the name of the Lord in vain, and is not guiltless.
This rich, deep, thorough truth concerning God is sadly missing today. We take our Lord’s name in vain when we think less of him, when we know less of him. When we love him less, we take his name in vain. The history of the church has corrupted worship in a formal way, emptying God of the love that he deserves. The contemporary church has taken the name of the Lord in vain with its often informal worship. Both are vain worship.
| Think About It |
| 1. What are some ways churches in the past have taken the Lord’s name in vain in their worship? 2. What are some ways that contemporary churches may take the Lord’s name in vain in their worship? 3. In what ways have you personally taken the Lord’s name in vain in how you have approached him in worship? |
The Solution for Vain Worship
Yet God provides the solution for even vain worship:
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, 17 learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause. 18 Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. 19 If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; 20 but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be eaten by the sword; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. (Isa 1:15–20)
If your hands are covered with blood, speaking of sin, they need to be washed. You need salvation. Unforgiven sinners cannot worship; they cannot worship a God they do not know nor love.
But thanks be to God that Jesus died to forgive corrupt worship. Through the blood of Christ, sinners can be forgiven, brought into fellowship with God, and recreated to worship God as he has commanded.
Redeemed worshipers should be compelled to recognize that if worship is dangerous when it is vain—if we are in danger of chastisement even as believers, then we must do what God wants us to do in worship. And we find that revealed for us in Scripture.
True Worship
In contrast to vain worship, true worship is any and every expression of obedience, praise, honor, adoration, and gratitude offered to the true God by a regenerate soul who knows the truth about God and loves him. Christ communicates this understanding of true worship to the Samaritan woman.
Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 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. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (Jn 4:21–24)
The Source of True Worship
First, Jesus is clear about the source of true worship: God himself. The Father is the author and initiator of worship. This is the heart of everything. In John 6:44, Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”
This is the foundation of all truth regarding God and the gospel: God is a Father, that is, God is eternally in a relationship of love with other persons. The true God can love, because the true God is three persons in one. There cannot be an attribute of love in a single deity who eternally has only lived with himself. That is why in Islam there is no such thing as love from God.
We have a God who is, first and foremost, a Father—a Father who loves his Son and is loved by his Son. This Father loved and chose the nation Israel. This Father, out of love, continues to choose his own eternal family. The true God is set apart from every other false deity.
This is why it is so foundational for us in the New Testament to hear that God so loved the world. God’s love for the world is behind everything, but not just his love for the world—his love for his own Son. And he extends that love to those who keep his commandments. Jesus said, “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him” (Jn 14:21).
The whole plan of salvation is based on the Father loving the Son, and through the Son and the Spirit loving a redeemed humanity that he brings to glory, so that forever he can lavish them with his own love and be loved by them. Jesus continued this theme later in his high priestly prayer:
The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. (Jn 17:22–23)
This Father, who by nature is love and has eternally expressed that love in the Trinity, is able to extend that love beyond the persons of the Trinity to unworthy sinners. When we talk about God and when we worship God, we go to him, not as a distant Creator, but as our Father—the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who is one with his Son.
This is salvation. You have been brought into a loving relationship with God the Father through the work of the Son redemptively and through the work of the Spirit in regeneration. The whole redemptive plan is the Father loving the Son and seeking a bride for the Son who can love the Son everlastingly.
This is the worship that the Father is seeking. This is that efficacious seeking as God craves the fellowship of the elect redeemed humanity, not only for the fulfillment of his own love, but for the love of the Son to whom he gives those he loves as gifts. Jesus said, “All that the Father gives me will come to me” (Jn 6:37).
The whole point is that God is love; that love existed eternally in the Trinity and was extended through the work of redemption to unworthy sinners who were given to the Son as a bride who will forever praise and glorify him. That is the source of worship.
The Object of True Worship
Second, Jesus identifies the object of true worship. As with the source of worship, the object of all true worship is the Father. God has drawn us to himself to worship him.
The God whom we are to worship is not only a Father, but as verse 24 says, he is a spirit. He is the invisible God (Col 1:15), in contrast to the physical nature of man (Jn 1:18; 3:6). The fact that God is invisible is one of the central reasons that God himself must initiate worship, for man would never know or comprehend the invisible God except that God revealed himself. Both the beginning and end of worship is by necessity God.
| Meanings of pneuma [spirit] 1. air in movement, blowing, breathing (Heb 1:7) 2. that which animates or gives life to the body, breath (Matt 27:50) 3. a part of human personality (Lk 1:47) 4. an independent noncorporeal being (Jn 4:24) 5. the Spirit of God (1 Cor 2:11) |
The Location of True Worship
This leads, then, to the location of true worship. Since God is a spirit, he is not restricted to any one physical location. As Stephen said,
Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by hands, as the prophet says, 49 Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord, or what is the place of my rest? 50 Did not my hand make all these things? (Acts 7:48–50)
This is why Jesus said that an hour was coming when true worshipers would not worship in Samaria on Mt. Garizim or in Jerusalem. The Samaritan temple on Garizim had been obliterated in 125 bc, and in ad 70 the temple of Jerusalem would be destroyed. Even the legitimate Old Testament worship that was associated with the temple was going to disappear in favor of a kind of spiritual worship that had always been God’s will throughout the whole Old Testament.
Since God is a spirit, worship is not a tied to a place. In fact, in the New Testament, the new temple is the living temple of the church. We are a holy priesthood (1 Pet 2:5). We are the temple of the living God (Eph 2:21–22). God in his Spirit lives within us, and the new temple is any gathering of the people of God. When we come together, we constitute the true new covenant temple.
The Nature of True Worship
Finally, Jesus defines the nature of worship as in spirit and truth (v. 24). True worship is in spirit—in the human soul from the heart, and in truth—the knowledge of the true revelation that God has given in Scripture. It is wholehearted, whole-souled loving worship of God in the fullness of the revelation that gives him all the glory he deserves.
| Think About It |
| 1. How would recognizing that God the Father is the source and object of true worship affect how we worship? 2. Does the fact that worship is not limited to a geographical location minimize the importance of physically gathering for worship? Why or why not? 3. What aspects of our worship facilitate worship in truth? What aspects facilitate worship in spirit? |
Conclusion
Jesus had a conversation with a Samaritan woman, and even she knew that her relationship to God could be defined only by worship. God is the source. He seeks the worshipers. He’s the object, the one who is Father, the one who is eternal Spirit. And while there are places where we assemble, the spirit of worship is life itself, because God is everywhere with us and in us. And the nature of worship is from the human spirit, empowered by the Holy Spirit, pouring forth the love of the truth. That’s the worship the Father seeks.
Prayer: Father, thank you for seeking us. Thank you for craving a redeemed humanity whom you chose before the foundation of the world. In love, you predestined us. In love, you sent Christ to die for us. In love, you gave us your Spirit, so that he might shed love abroad in our hearts, and we might be marked by the fruit of the Spirit, which is love. Thank you that you have revealed yourself to us, and the purpose and point of knowing about you is so that we might love you with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Even when we were yet sinners, Christ died for us because you loved us. You love us still in our unworthiness. We want to love you and your worthiness. Make us true worshipers. Forgive us for our sinful emptying of your glory when we have diminished it in how we have spoken or thought or acted with relationship to you. May we ever live and speak and think to the praise of your glory. By the power of the Holy Spirit, in the name of Jesus, we ask these things. Amen.
For Further Study:
Aniol, Scott. Worship in Song: A Biblical Approach to Music and Worship. Winona Lake, IN: BMH, 2009.
Carson, D. A. The Gospel According to John. PNTC. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.
MacArthur, John. Worship: The Ultimate Priority. Chicago: Moody Press, 2012. Ryken, Phillip Graham, Derek W. H. Thomas, and J. Ligon Duncan III, eds. Give Praise to God: A Vision for Reforming Worship. Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing Company, 2011.