Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that openly give thanks his name.  Hebrews 13:15

God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.  John 4:24

Jesus taught that true worship involves both spirit and truth. In these two ingredients lie the center of what God desires for us in what we call ‘worship’. Today I want to look at worshiping in spirit. What’s that?

We have to assume that when Jesus said these words, at least two people understood what He meant: First, the woman He was speaking to understood Him; Second, Jesus’ disciple John, who wrote down this quote, understood Him. The woman immediately associated His words with the coming of the Messiah. Exactly how she made that leap we can only guess.

But we don’t have to guess about what John made of Jesus’ words because He wrote a whole Gospel from which we can gather his thinking. He uses the same word “spirit” to refer to feelings and emotions. He says in John 13:21: “After saying these things, Jesus was troubled in his spirit.” Clearly an emotional response to the fact that He would be arrested, tried and convicted that night.

But John also used the same word “spirit” in John 3:6 to mean something supernaturally produced in us by the Holy Spirit: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

Putting those together, worshiping in spirit would mean worshiping with Spirit-given feelings and emotions like joy, awestruck wonder, and longing for God. Everyone who worships God very much recognizes what I’m describing here and experiences it at least some of the time. But what if we’re not feeling it?

Let’s say you’re in a meeting and the “worship time” begins, but you’re not feeling very worshipful? No joy, no awe, nothing. What to do? Well, you could go through the motions and sort of prime the pump—sometimes we have to work our way up to that level; we could give up and put our hopes on next week, we could weather out the “worship time” and hope the sermon grabs us after that…lots of possibilities.

One common thing people do is to decide that feelings are optional; acting like we are feeling what we are saying and singing. But Jesus called that hypocrisy: “You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me…’” (Matt 15:7–8). So if our hearts aren’t feeling especially close to God, and we’re not supposed to just pretend, what else can we do?

When David started penning Psalm 40, his heart did not start out very full of worshipful feelings. He was totally self-focused, weighed down with the crisis he was facing. But then God lifted him from that pit of destruction, set his feet upon a rock, and put a song of praise in his mouth (Psalm 40:2-3).

So what happened between feeling overwhelmed and singing praise to God? David tells us, “I waited patiently for the Lord.” Not going through the motions of worship. Not giving up on worship. Instead, he waited patiently for the Lord to draw him into worship. “He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.”

What does it mean to wait patiently for the Lord? Many think it means passively hoping that God will change us. But the Hebrew word for waiting doesn’t imply passiveness. Instead of passively killing time it means eagerly seeking. It means taking the steps that God has promised to use to help us, while trusting him expectantly to work.

So how do we eagerly seek God? We’ll talk about that next time…