Worship With Purpose

Purpose means destination. When you identify purpose you know the destination. Maybe you have heard about the conversation that a family had as they were driving down the highway. The child said to the father, “Daddy, when will we be there?” The father replied, “Be where, son?” Child; “where we are going?” Father; “We are not going anywhere particular, son, but we are making good time.”

There are many people today that live that way, with no particular destination in mind. There are many Christians today that do not know where they are going when it comes to worship. Or worse, they do, but it is not where the Bible teaches worship should go!

When Jesus taught on true worship, new covenant worship, it was to a class of one; the Samaritan woman that He was waiting for at Jacob’s well (John 4:19 – 26). Her question of the right place of worship was legitimate. There was a great debate between the Jews and the Samaritans about worship in that day. The so called “worship wars” have been around much longer than recent times!

The Samaritans lived in the heart of the Promised Land. Sychar was less than a mile from the place where Abraham built the first altar in the Promised Land (Genesis 12:6-7). It was the first place of worship. It was the second “purchased” plot of ground of the Promised Land (Genesis 23, the first; Genesis 33:18 – 20, the second), and Jacob worshipped there, at Shechem. Moses told the elders of Israel that when they crossed over into the Promised Land they were to build an altar on Mount Ebal and to write on the stones the whole law. Half of the people were to stand on top of Mt. Ebal and the other half on Mt. Gerizim, and they were to declare the blessings and the curses of the law. Sychar was in between these two mountains. It was one of the main and earliest places of worship. They claimed the place of true worship.

The Jews claimed that Jerusalem was the only true place of worship. The worship leader of the Jews, King David, had united the twelve tribes with worship, according to God’s Word, at Jerusalem. He had purchased the place of worship, the threshing floor of Araunah, which became the building site for the Temple. It was the same site that Abraham had offered up Isaac hundreds of years earlier (Genesis 22). The Samaritans were part of the “split” that occurred following the death of King Solomon (1 Kings 12). The tribes of Benjamin and Judah that had survived the exile, returned to Jerusalem and had rebuilt the Temple on the same site as Solomon’s Temple. It had to be the true place of worship. And so the argument went on and on.

Jesus told the woman of Sychar that the time had come when neither place was the right place. Jesus introduced a new place when He said, “…true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth.” John 4:23-24.

So, where is that place? Jesus answers that question in 4:25-26 and with that answer teaches the first and most important truth for those who desire to learn true worship; He gives the purpose of true worship by revealing the destination of true worship.

In those verses Jesus reveals Himself to be the true Messiah, the Christ, to this woman. She leaves her water jar and runs into the city as the first evangelist in John’s gospel! The whole town comes out to meet Jesus and declares Him the Savior of the world! Jesus stayed with them an additional two days, according to 4:39-43. Can you imagine that two-day discipleship conference?

Here is the point: The revelation of Jesus Christ is the destination of true worship. Jesus reveals Himself to those who are worshiping the Father in spirit and in truth. He is the purpose of worship. He is also the Leader and Teacher of true worship. He is also the object of true worship, for He and the Father are One! Hallelujah!!!

If you desire to know Christ more and more, know that there is only one way; learn to worship the Father in spirit and truth, because the purpose, the destination, of true worship is the revelation of Jesus Christ of Himself to true worshipers, those who worship the Father in spirit and truth. So what does “in spirit and truth” mean? That, my friend, is the question. We will work on that question some more, tomorrow.