Know How To Worship In Spirit And With Truth! Series

Opening Illustration: Me Church - video clip

Series: What is the Spirit saying to the church today?

Sermon 5: “Know how to worship in Spirit and with Truth”

NOTE: Today we are going to start our service with our teaching before you worship because our subject today deals with how we worship. My desire at the end of the teaching is help you to worship in the Spirit and with Truth.

Thesis: To worship the Lord in Spirit and truth means we are connected to His Spirit and we are worshiping Him with the right motives, the heart in the right place and our minds focused and centered on the right person and mission.

Scripture Text: Played from the Dramatized Audio Bible- have congregation follow along in their Bibles.

John 4:24: Jesus Talks with a Samaritan Woman

1The Pharisees heard that Jesus was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John,

2although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples.

3When the Lord learned of this, he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.

4Now he had to go through Samaria.

5So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph.

6Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour.

7When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?”

8(His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

9The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)

10Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

11“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?

12Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”

13Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again,

14but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

15The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

16He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

17“I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband.

18The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

19“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet.

20Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

21Jesus declared, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.

22You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.

23Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.

24God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”

25The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

26Then Jesus declared, “I who speak to you am he.”

The Disciples Rejoin Jesus

27Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”

28Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people,

29“Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?”

30They came out of the town and made their way toward him.

31Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.”

32But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”

33Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?”

34“My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.

35Do you not say, ‘Four months more and then the harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.