Jesus changes the topic with the woman at the well to her "husband" and Jesus' knowledge of her relationships and leads into a discussion about worship with Jesus. Dr. Sproul considers the implication of how we are to worship and the principles God expects us to follow. The section concludes with Jesus revealing His Messiahship to the woman.

We are back in Samaria, where we left off last time. We are going to continue to eavesdrop on the conversation that took place between our Lord and the woman of Sychar. We will pick it up this morning by reading John 4:19–42:

The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.”

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such 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” (who is called Christ). “When He comes, He will tell us all things.”

Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am He.”

And at this point His disciples came, and they marveled that He talked with a woman; yet no one said, “What do You seek?” or, “Why are You talking with her?”

The woman then left her waterpot, went her way into the city, and said to the men, “Come, see a Man who told me all things that I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” Then they went out of the city and came to Him.

In the meantime His disciples urged Him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.”

But He said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know.”

Therefore the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought Him anything to eat?”

Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work. Do you not say, ‘There are still four months and then comes the harvest’? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest! And he who reaps receives wages, and gathers fruit for eternal life, that both he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together. For in this the saying is true: ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored; others have labored, and you have entered into their labors.”

And many of the Samaritans of that city believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified, “He told me all that I ever did.” So when the Samaritans had come to Him, they urged Him to stay with them; and He stayed there two days. And many more believed because of His own word.

Then they said to the woman, “Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we ourselves have heard Him and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world.”

Let us pray.

We plead with Thee, O Father, to give us ears to hear that which we have just read. Give us understanding, that we may understand what the woman understood and what, through her testimony and their encounter with Jesus Himself, those of Samaria came to understand as well. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Salvation Is of the Jews

In the last sermon, we saw that Jesus shocked the Samaritan woman by calling attention to her checkered past of marital and extramarital relationships. She was astonished that Jesus knew her. Presumably to change the subject, she mentioned that He must be a prophet, and so she put to Him a theological question that had been debated between the Jews and the Samaritans for many years. The question was this: Where is the proper central sanctuary where the Lord should receive worship?

The Jews had their temple in Jerusalem. Mount Zion was their holy place. The Samaritans, who rejected everything past the Pentateuch in the Old Testament, had their central sanctuary at Mount Gerizim.

Sometimes when we read this story, we get the impression when she asks, “Where’s the proper place, Jerusalem or Samaria?” that Jesus is answering, “It really doesn’t matter whether you come to the Father according to the ways of the Samaritans or the ways of the Jews.”

The reason this inference is drawn from the text is that Jesus says: “The hour is coming—in fact, it is already here—when the true worshiper will neither worship in Samaria nor in Jerusalem. For God is a spirit, and those that worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.” Because Jesus pronounces the end of Gerizim as the central sanctuary for Samaria, and cryptically pronounces the end of Jerusalem, anticipating its destruction in just a few years, some say, “It doesn’t matter.” Except, He declares this woman is an agnostic.

What is an agnostic? The word agnostic comes from the Greek agnosis, and you may be familiar with its corresponding Latin term. Even if you know no other Latin, I am sure you have heard the word ignoramus. Those who are agnosis are ignorant—that is, they are without knowledge. So, Jesus says, “You worship what you don’t know, being a Samaritan”—essentially: “Your worship is a worship that is done in ignorance. But we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews.”

It is important that Jesus does not say, “It doesn’t matter whether we come the Samaritan way or the Jewish way.” He answers that question. It is the Jewish way that is the correct way, the way God has ordained, and we must always remember that salvation is of the Jews. We are the wild olive branches that have been grafted into the original root, and we have an everlasting indebtedness to the Jewish nation because it is through the Jews that redemption has now come to us.

The Majesty of the Father

What is particularly important in the text is this: Jesus says that the Father wants worship in spirit and truth, for He is seeking such to worship Him. There are a couple of things about this portion of the text on which I want to comment.

As Christians in the twenty-first century, there is a tendency among us to have a woeful ignorance of the Old Testament. It is one of the reasons we have an adult Sunday school class every Sunday morning, studying an overview of the Old Testament, so that our people can become familiar with Old Testament redemptive history.

One of the most significant problems that follows from an ignorance of the Old Testament is a profound ignorance of the character of God the Father. We somehow think that Christianity is unitarian, specifically a unitarianism of the second person of the Trinity where all of our religion centers around Jesus.

We are indeed called to honor, exalt, and worship Christ. But remember that Christ came, in the first place, to reconcile us to the Father, and there is a sense in which the supreme focus of our worship on Sunday morning is to the Father. Of course, our worship is given to the entire triune God, but we need to have the majesty of the Father, in all of His greatness, in our minds as we worship.

Worship in Spirit

Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, is telling the woman what His Father wants. He says, “My Father is searching for people who will worship Him in spirit and in truth.” What does that mean? What Jesus is saying is not that people are supposed to be Holy Spirit devotees and worship Him according to the Holy Spirit. We are supposed to do that as well, but that is not what He is saying in this text.

When Jesus talks about God wanting people to worship Him in spirit and in truth, He is saying that the worship we offer is to come from the depths of our souls, from our inner human spirit that defines the very core of our being. Mary shows us what true worship looks like when she cries out in her Magnificat,

My soul magnifies the Lord,
And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior. (Luke 1:46–47)

The Scriptures repeatedly show the opposite of true worship. It is the worship that Jeremiah exposed in his famous temple speech in the Old Testament. He went to the temple and said: “You people come to church. You come to the temple, and you say, ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord,’ but you trust in lying words, words that cannot profit. This temple is going to be destroyed. If you want to see what it’s going to look like, go to Shiloh”—because at that point Shiloh, which had been the central sanctuary, was now in ruins.

Jeremiah, under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, was giving a message to the people of Israel that their worship had become dead external formalism. They were going through the motions. They were reciting the prayers. They were singing the hymns. But their hearts were not in it. Jesus says elsewhere in the New Testament, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me.”

God does not want that kind of worship. That is external religion, not authentic faith. We are to come with our hearts filled with a sense of awe, reverence, and adoration. The worship that we offer is a sacrifice of praise to His name that we bring with joy.

Worship in Truth

We are also told that worship is to be according to truth. I do not think there has ever been a time in Christian history when the church has been exposed to more of what is called “experimental worship” as now. So often, these experiments are driven by Gallup or Barna polls.

Like a marketing survey, we ask: “What do people want on Sunday mornings? Do they want sermons that will give them popular psychology? Do they want warm, fuzzy sermons where their felt needs are met?” Then people reason: “If that’s the case, then we need to tailor worship according to the felt needs of the people. If we don’t do that, our churches will be empty because people will be bored, and they will see church as irrelevant. People want to get something out of Sunday morning worship.” But you see, Jesus says that what the Father wants are people who will worship Him according to what He wants.

I have said before that the most relevant worship service in the history of the world, one that was completely designed to minister to the felt needs of the people, was the worship that took place at the bottom of Mount Sinai—the worship of the golden calf. It was an exercise not in true worship but in idolatry.

That is why we in the session have to keep a close watch on what we do in worship, asking ourselves, “Is this according to the truth of God and His Word?” That is what Christ is saying to the woman in this text: “The hour is coming, and now is, where the true worshiper worships from the heart, according to the truth of the Word of God.”

The Woman’s Witness

Now the woman says, “I know that Messiah is coming.” She has gone from “You’re a prophet,” to thoughts about the Messiah. “When He comes, He will tell us all things.” Jesus is often reluctant Jesus to reveal His messianic vocation throughout the pages of Scripture. But here, to a despised Samaritan, a despised woman, Jesus reveals Himself: “I who speak to you am He.”

The disciples come, and they are upset that He is speaking to the woman, when she leaves. She is so excited that she leaves her waterpot. We have no record that she even filled it. She just left it there. The whole reason for her being at the well in the first place was to get that waterpot filled with water so that she could meet her daily needs.

Now, after she meets the Messiah, the woman leaves the waterpot. She cannot wait to get into town—that very city where she is an outcast, despised, and hated—and she is bubbling up. She goes into the town, and she says: “You won’t believe it! I just met a man out by the well who told me everything about myself. He’s the Messiah! Come and see.”

I recently received a tremendous children’s book written by Max Lucado. I heard him read it aloud a couple of weeks ago in California. I brought it home for my grandchildren, and the title of the book—get it, parents, for your children—is If Only I Had a Green Nose. It is about people in a kingdom who had been created by their maker, yet are not satisfied with who they are and what they need. They want to be “with it.” There is a fellow in town named “Willie-With-It” who decrees what is “with it” and what is “in.” He decrees that if you really want to be with it, you need to have a green nose. But then it changes. The next thing you know, they need to have a yellow nose, and so they have to get the green one painted. And then the red one, they have got to get that painted. It is just one fad after another in order to be with it. Finally, someone comes along to Willie-With-It and says, “Who made you the thing-picker?” That story has a great ending.

My point is, I have often wondered if people look at me and say: “Who made you the preacher? What right do you have to stand up in the pulpit and tell people how to worship, or what we ought to do?” Any Christian who has tried to bear witness to someone has heard that charge: “Who do you think you are?” The greatest answer to that question I have ever heard is the old answer, “I’m just one beggar telling other beggars where they can find bread,” because that really is all I am, and that is all any of us are. That is what this woman was.

The woman said, “I didn’t suddenly become a righteous woman, a paragon of virtue, where I can say to the community, ‘Follow me.’” No, she met the Messiah. She met the Christ. She knew that she had been redeemed by that encounter, and she wanted everyone in town to know it. For the first time in her life, she was not an ignoramus. She suddenly understood the things of God.

Jesus’ Meat and Drink

The disciples are still concerned about Jesus’ hunger, and they tell Him to eat. He has a little discourse, in which He says, “I have food to eat of which you do not know.” They ask, “Who brought you food?” He says, “My food is to do the will of My Father.”

That is who Jesus was. His meat and His drink, His zeal and His passion, were to do everything the Father sent Him to do. Even though that was His passion, He deliberately took time to minister to the people in Samaria, to offer them the same water that wells up to eternal life that He offered the thirsty woman of Sychar.

This is the Jesus we come to meet this morning. This is the Jesus who has set His table for us. This is the Jesus who comes as our host to meet with us. At Saint Andrew’s Chapel, we believe and affirm the real presence of Christ in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. We believe that this sacrament is a true means of grace through which Christ, by His Spirit, is truly present to minister to us in our weakness. This Christ, who knows everything about us and everything that we have ever done, invites those who come to His table in humility to receive a fresh experience of His forgiveness.

If you are a Christian and your mind is burdened by unresolved guilt, come to the table. If you are a Christian who is frightened by what lies before you in the days ahead, who needs strength for your soul and the food of the grace of God, come to the table. If you want to meet the living Christ in His grace, in His mercy, and in His power, come to the table.

For I declare to you what the Apostle Paul reminded the church: that on the night in which Jesus was betrayed, He took bread. And when He had blessed it, He broke it, and said to His disciples, “This is My body, broken for you.”

In like manner, after they had supped, He took the cup, which was part of the ritual of the Old Testament Passover, and changed its significance, saying: “This is now My blood, shed for the remission of your sins, shed for the making of a new covenant. Drink ye all of it.” Since that day, the church in every generation has come to the Lord’s Table to be nurtured by Him.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.