When Do We Worship In Spirit And In Truth?
By Elmer G. Klassen
With a slight wind blowing in one window and out the other but not enough wind coming through for keeping us cool without using cardboard fans, provided free to the church by the Bergen Mortuary, we sat fanning and swatting flies in the country church our grandparents had built. After singing some hymns we expected to hear a sermon our neighbor farmer had prepared the night before. The time to worship had come. Every Sunday morning we all met in our places to worship God. We expected to meet a holy God in church without special music or famous speakers.
It was costly to take time to be holy during the summer months. We could look out the window and see the wheat fields ripe and waiting for harvest and there we sat singing:
Take time to be holy,
Speak oft with thy Lord;
Abide in Him always,
And feed on His Word.
Make friends of God’s children;
Help those who are weak;
Forgetting in nothing
His blessing to seek.
Sundays were set aside to worship our victorious God with the neighbors. A farmer may prefer worshiping God while standing behind the steering wheel of a Model D John Deere tractor driving back and forth across the fields during harvest time singing loudly his favorite gospel songs, but we were taught that once a week we were to take time to worship God with others.
Being in church rather than in the fields could cost us part of the harvest, hut our lives were blessed because we took time to be holy by worshiping corporately our Creator and our Provider.
Some of this spirit of worshiping God in a certain place with others has been lost. Rather than taking time to be holy we are listening to the needs of others on Christian radio broadcasts. Rather than speaking oft with the Lord we are speaking oft with each other about what other Christians are doing. Rather than feeding on His Word we are feeding on books that tell us about our hurts. Rather than making friends of more of God’s children we are making friends with the world. Rather than helping those who are weak we are complaining about the rich and wanting their money. Rather than forgetting in nothing God’s blessing to seek we are forgetting nothing when attending fund raising seminars on how to pay our bills.
These things may all be necessary but these things are not worshiping God. They keep our attention on man and man’s failures. When or where do we worship God? Where on earth is God to be found? When do we worship God in spirit and in truth?
It takes time to find God in spirit and in truth. We worship what we take time for, and more often than we want to admit we worship what man is doing for God rather than worship God Himself.
What we do in our leisure, what we do when we have extra money can quite well tell us where our hearts are. Warren W Wiersbe writes in his book, Real Worship: “What a person worships is a good indication of what is really valuable to him. … There is today such an emphasis on Bible knowledge that we are in danger of ignoring, or even opposing, personal spiritual experience. … What we are and what we do are both determined by what we worship.”
In this issue of the Herald Jack Deere writes: “It took me too long to learn that knowing the Bible is not the same thing as knowing God, loving the Bible is not the same thing as loving God, and reading the Bible is not the same as hearing God. The Pharisees knew the Bible, loved the Bible, and read the Bible, but they did not know, love, or hear God.”
If we are not to worship our knowledge of the Bible, not to worship our works done for God, not to worship our family in family worship, not to worship the people with talent in our church – where do we find the God we are to worship? Why is worshiping God such a mystery?
The worshipers of the true God do not worship what they see or what they know. When Jesus was confronted by the woman at the well as to where we are to worship He gave the answer: The time is coming when we will not worship on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. Samaritans at that time were worshiping who-knows-what and the Jews were worshiping what they had learned. True worshipers, Jesus told her, worship God in spirit and in truth. But when or where do we worship in spirit and in truth? Where do we find the God we are to worship?
When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments He first and foremost said that we are to worship only one God and we are not to bow before anything we have made of Him. We are not to worship statues we have made of God or the statues or pictures we have made of Christians. Statues and pictures may be good to remind us of past events. They are good reminders, but lest we worship the reminders, God gave us a statue to remind us of Him not made by human hands. (The word for statue in German is “Denkmal” which can be translated “something that will cause us to remember.”) God has left us not only his “statue” to remind us but also with specific instructions how to worship God in spirit and in truth.
Worshiping God’s way is a safeguard from worshiping famous Christians, family members or ourselves. God has provided us a manner to worship which allows no self-worship or permission for self to rule from within. Self-worship leads to self-love and self-love leads to Satan worship.
Much is said by Christians which honors self and honors Satan’s victory in them. There is too much talk and writing about the coming of the anti-Christ and too many excuses given Christians for living sinful lives and of excusing them for lack of deliverance from the power of sin – the result of lack of worshiping God in spirit and in truth.
A lack of worshiping God is very evident in the testimonies we hear from Christians. Their preoccupation with self and their wishes do not satisfy nor give honor to God. “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart” seems to be a lost promise in most of our counseling sessions. When do we delight ourselves in the Lord? How do we delight ourselves in the Lord? God has given us instructions as how we are to do just that.
Until we delight ourselves in the Lord God’s way we can not expect Christians to be overcomers. Until we are able to give testimony to the fact that we are overcomers we do not have much to testify about. If our testimony meetings do not give honor to God for deliverance of sin we have missed the point why the Gospel has been given to us. Most Christians have yet to learn to worship a victorious God.
The Apostle Paul had his problems with the Christians in Corinth. He promised no salvation to those who continued in sin. He admonished them to prepare for worshiping God by examining themselves to see whether they were in the faith. He warned that Jesus Christ was not in them if they failed the test of doing what is right. They were to aim for perfection, be of one mind, live in peace with each other and with God.
To solve their problems Paul did not send them to trained counselors but instructed them to come together as a church every Sunday to eat bread and drink wine together in remembrance of Christ’s death on the cross for them and in remembrance of His victorious resurrection from the grave for their victory. They were to take Communion, observe the Lord’s Supper regularly. Neglecting to do this, Paul told them, is the reason why Christians are weak and sick and “a number of you have fallen asleep.”
There is more to taking the Lord’s Supper than going to church on Sunday morning and eating some bread and drinking some wine with other Christians and declaring thereby that we are members of a church. Taking time to be holy used to mean taking time on Saturday night not only to study the Sunday School lesson but using the party line telephone service to make things right with neighbors before taking communion the next morning even if there may be a click heard on the line telling us that others would be listening to what was said in preparation for the Sunday morning Lord’s Supper. Maybe this preparation for the Sunday morning worship was the reason why we did not know what a policeman looked like and thought that lawyers and judges were only for the godless.
There must be a preparation for worship if we want to worship God in spirit and in truth. This is how the Apostle Paul told the Christians in Corinth to prepare. “Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. But if we judged ourselves, we would not come under judgment. When we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world” (1 Corinthians 11:27-32).
Where do we worship God in spirit and in truth? When do we delight ourselves in the Lord? We worship in spirit and in truth and delight ourselves in the Lord when we meet in God’s presence after we have prepared ourselves for the event. God is worshiped in spirit and truth when Christians have put away bitterness and envy, have peace with God and are one in spirit with those who worship the same God. Worshiping God is corporately declaring that Jesus Christ is our victorious Lord. That is what Sundays are for Saturday nights are good for making things right in preparation for Sunday and Sunday mornings are for worshipping God in spirit and in truth.
The neglect of a right observance of the Lord’s Supper has led many evangelicals to psychologists. This has proven to be costly and disastrous in many cases. Many evangelicals are weak and sick because a proper observance of the Lord’s Table has not been kept.
To help readers to understand the proper observance of the Lord’s Supper we are offering Andrew Murray’s book, The Lord’s Supper, to the contributors to the Herald of His Coming. This book contains meditations to help for a right observance of the Lord’s Supper. They are designed for use not only on Communion Sunday, but for private use each day of the week preceding and the week following. Here is true nourishment for those desiring to delight in the Lord and to receive the desires of their heart.
This month we have printed messages from men with different persuasions not for the sake of being controversial but because we are determined to focus on worshiping together with other Christians, the true and personal God who alone is our focal point. God will not give us revival until we accept other believers in the Lord Jesus Christ as our brothers and sisters in Christ! We are bringing judgment on ourselves when we take Communion and observe the Lord’s Table while rejecting other believers in our God.
All the articles we print from month to month are for the purpose of directing our attention to the Christian’s victory over sin and the freedom, joy and hope we have in God right here and now on this earth, by faith in Him.
Be the first to react on this!
