Dennis Tuuri

I don’t want us to go off kind of halfcock. The wives of the church, in terms of worship in spirit and truth, the Spirit of God in the inspiration of the word tells wives that they are to worship their husbands. Now, that’s a strong statement, but I have reason for it.

There are two terms used in the New Testament, two Greek words for the worship of God. One is the one in the text we have today that we have to worship in spirit and truth. The idea behind the Greek word is to bow down, to kiss the feet, to prostrate oneself before whom you’re worshiping.

The other word that’s used frequently is translated to fear God or to reverence him. Cornelius was a God-fearer in Acts 10:2, I think it is. There are God-fearers referred to there. People that honored and worshiped God are fearing God, not in a slavish sort of sense, but reverencing him, having a proper understanding of proper fear. The way we think of the word is reverencing God. That’s what wives are told to do.

The husbands use the same word. It’s the base word for our word phobia. You’re to have a phobia, a proper phobia of God. Not fearful in the sense of pulling back, but fearful in the sense of reverence. And wives are told at the end of Ephesians 5 that they are to reverence, to fear, worship, we could say, their husbands.

And in First Peter, when the discussion of the wife is entered into there, she’s to be submissive with godly fear the way the women of old were fearful, reverential of their husband. Sarah of Abraham. So it’s very important that I don’t lay before you a stumbling block in the message from Abigail, that somehow lets the wives of our church off the hook in terms of their basic requirement as a wife to submit.

First Peter says in godly fear or reverence. That word for reverence at the end of Ephesians 5 is the one that many people translate. The New American Standard does, I believe, “respect.” So wives are to respect their husbands. But really the word is more properly translated, I think, reverence. Respect almost sounds like admiration for something in him, and it isn’t quite that. It’s something else going on, I think. But in any event, I wanted to put that out there as a result of my meditation on this text and see its correlation to worship in spirit and truth.

For any of us to not have a proper sense of submission with reverence to the authorities that God has placed in our lives, and yet to come to church and offer him worship, we are not really offering worship in spirit and truth. It must be lived out in the context of God’s anointed office-bearers in the home, in the state, and in the church as well.

Another thing I meditated on this past week that I wanted to say before we get into this sermon is, you know, we talked about the Samaritan woman here from John 4 running off and telling people in the town about Jesus and we said that a mark of discipleship is to go and proclaim Christ, to want to share him with your friends and relatives. You know, the woman is not told to do that by Jesus. If you meditate on that text a little bit, Jesus doesn’t say, “Go tell people about me.” Now, he does do that in Matthew 28, but there explicitly he’s telling the disciples, the twelve, the office-bearers of the church, so to speak.

So what we have in the woman from the well is not something that’s commanded of you so much as something that you will do if I faithfully preach who the Lord Jesus Christ is every Lord’s day, and in your family worship and in your personal Bible reading, as you come to appreciate and love the Lord Jesus more, you will tell other people about it. It’s an overflow of properly assessing who Jesus is and what he’s done for you.

So my job, you know, really is not to get up here and exhort you to go tell your neighbors. My job is to get up here every Lord’s day and say, “Isn’t this wonderful what Jesus has done in our lives? And isn’t Jesus a wondrous savior of the whole world?” As we saw the men at Sychar saying last week at the end of the story in John 4.

And that’s the way I think that we’re encouraged and built up to the end that we would share Christ with our neighbors.

Meditation on the word is important. Now, I mentioned this maze, and it relates to the sermon because in the early church we have architectural evidence that the churches would frequently put a maze at the entrance to the church, either in a tile and mosaic in the floor, maybe some. In the later in the church’s life there would be mazes in front of the church.

The idea is life is difficult to get through. You got to walk through this maze to get back into the garden. We don’t know where the garden of Eden is. It’s hidden. We were kicked out. And the church represents the garden of Eden. And so God brings us back through this maze. So it was interesting meditating on this maze yesterday in Candy, going through these twelve checkpoints she had to go through. And I thought to myself that the way people approach life is sort of the way they approach the maze.

You know, the little ones can go in there and the corn is high. It’s higher than an elephant’s eye. It’s tall corn in Candy. For some, I don’t know if it’s always that tall, but it is quite tall. And you can go in the middle of that maze and get all twisted around. And you know, if you’re a little kid, you can get a little frightened. And immature Christians are frequently marked by fear, not recognizing the great deliverance from their sin the Lord Jesus Christ has affected for them. And in our fear we tend to sin.

So you can be like a little child, not recognizing the complete release from sin that Christ has provided for you. And in your fear, you know, kind of get all tangled up in the context of the maze.

Other people, older kids or teenagers, you know, we don’t care about the maps that are posted at twelve places. We’ll just run through this thing and we’ll figure it all out. So they run around in their wild exuberance and they don’t figure it all out. They don’t find the twelve checkpoints, and pretty soon they’re in there for a couple hours and maybe then they finally mature a little bit and start reading the map.

We can go about our lives in an exuberant Christian fashion but not really pay attention to the directions and do all kinds of things that may be well-intentioned and zealful but not have a base in knowledge.

Other people can go into the maze, older people, I suspect. And you know, well, not be that diligent, try to figure it out, but we’ll just enjoy the day and we’ll walk slowly through it and just sort of wander. And maybe we’ll come out at the end and maybe we’ll get three or four of the checkpoints done. You know, you can sort of be that way about life, you know, not recognizing that God has called you to a particular path and he’s given you instructions on how to get through life. And you can just sort of give up, you know, and you sort of improperly remove yourself from the details of life.

But then there are people that are, you know, who are sober in the middle of the maze like me. No, I finally got to the place of reading the maps and we go through life, and if we have constant reference back to the touchstone of what life is all about, the word of the Lord Jesus Christ, then we’re going to negotiate the maze with an exuberance that comes from knowing we do find what God wants us to do.

We go through there with a proper sense, not being foolish. We know we need the map to get through that maze. We’re not completely without a reverential understanding of what God has provided, but we’re directed and focused and sober to recognize the word will get us through this with joy and in due course we will come to this place.

So that’s the way the week goes for Christians. We go through these mazes to come here and then we get to the garden and God ushers us into his grace and we are trained up then to worship him in spirit and in truth.

You know, the maze had another thing very similar to our lives. It had a promised reward. I don’t, I’m not sure I would have done all twelve checkpoints. You had to punch little points. If there wasn’t this reward at the end. Well, at the end I found out the reward is you get a chance to win a television. That’s what I need. Another television. Probably not.

But the scriptures are the same way. God holds out rewards for us. And in terms of worship, we very explicitly in Isaiah 58:13-14, God tells us there’s a great reward to those who keep Sabbath with him, who call the Sabbath a delight. You know, he will feed us with the heritage of Jacob, our father. He’ll cause us to ride upon the high places of the earth. And so we have this reward as we approach worship if we’ve been sober and word-oriented and a proper sense of reverence, without you know immature fear, and if we’ve stayed to the path that God has called us to, and we come and we apply all these things in the context of worship, he promises to bless us greatly.

He says that come be with me today. I will give you more instructions for what life is all about and I will give you the great blessings if you call this day a delight.

Last week we talked about the men of Sychar wanting Jesus to stay with them for a period of time. Tarry with us, please. We want to be with you. The disciples at the end of John 1, “What do you seek?” He says, “We want to be with you.” That’s what we want. They tell him and they spend probably the Sabbath day with him.

In Acts 4:13, we read that they, the Jews, saw the boldness of Peter and John and perceived that they were uneducated and untrained men. They marveled and they realized that they had been with Jesus. They realized that they had been with Jesus.

We want to be with Jesus today. We want to tarry with him in his word and at his table and with his people. And as a result of that, we want to go into the week so that people can recognize these are men that have been with Jesus. These are men who are effectual in what they do and say. These are young boys and girls who are maturing. These are women who are strong, dominion-like Proverbs 31 sort of women, and queens in their respective spheres of influence.

We do that by being with Jesus. And Jesus today gives us instructions about really the central point of who we are as people created in God’s image. He instructs us today. He, the touchstone, the standard of all things, instructs us in worship, which is at the center. It’s the goal of all that maze. It’s at the middle of the maze or the end, whichever way you want to look at it. God brings us back into the garden today to worship him.

And so Jesus’s instructional text today is very important to us. Let’s look at the text. And what you’ll see is that I’ve laid it out. First of all, the text, and another one of those chiasms, a little bit different than some, but there’s a way. I struck me that all I do here on your first portion of the outline, the text. I simply give you blocks of text in specific order as they’re given in verses 23 and 24.

Okay? So there’s a description of what true worshippers are. Then it says that God is seeking such to worship him. And then it says that God is spirit. And then it describes what true worshippers are again. So there’s a beginning and end, a description of what worship really is like. And what it’s like is in spirit and truth. And then at the center of the text of these two verses here is this description of who God is. God is one who the Father is seeking people to worship him. And God is spirit.

Life-giving force is God, and he is the one who enables us to worship him. So that’s the way the text seems to flow: beginning with a description of who we are as worshippers, focusing on who God is, and then the transition point is that God brings us into this worship. And as a result, we have a repeated description of what true worship is like.

So that’s kind of the way the text flows. Begins with true worshippers in verse 23a. “But the hour is coming and now is when true worshippers…” and then he’ll describe what true worshippers are.

We note immediately that if he tells us there are true worshippers, then there are false worshippers. Right? And this is not something new. We know this already. We know that in Romans 1:25, we know that the ethical rebels of Romans 1, the last half of Romans 1, are described in verse 25 as those who exchange the truth of God for the lie and worship and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.

It’s not a question for man as to whether he’s going to worship or not worship. The question is, is he going to worship in truth? Is he going to be a true worshipper or is he going to be a false worshipper? Is he going to worship the creator or, if he refuses to do that, God turns him over to a worship of the creature?

Who are you going to worship? The father God who has given you this wonderful garden, who has provided all the blessings. I know you people, you’re all blessed abundantly. Yes, you’ve got trials and tribulations, but the blessings that have flowed to you through the work of Jesus. You sit in the garden and are you going to worship him who gave you all these blessings or the serpent who says, “Well, did he really do these things?” You see, that’s the creator or the creature.

All people are worshippers. Some worship vainly. Jesus says in Matthew 15:9 that even in the context of the church, there are those who are not true worshippers. “In vain they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” To replace God’s law with man’s law is to lead people to vanity in worship. To be vain means empty. In emptiness do they worship me, he says. Their worship doesn’t affect the fullness of what it’s supposed to affect. They’re worshiping falsely.

All men everywhere worship. Does everybody worship? Yes, everybody worships. Romans 1 tells us either the creator or the creature. Jesus said some people worship in vanity, however, in vain. Vain means emptiness, empty. And you must worship either the creator or the creature. Those are the only two options for you being created in the image of God. You have to do one or the other.

So there are true worshippers. What do true worshippers do? The text tells us first of all they worship the Father. True worshippers will worship the Father. So right away we have a very important point here that the object of our worship is the Father. Now this is interesting because the woman has just said that our fathers wanted us to worship at Gerizim. So her focus is on the traditions of men, the fathers. Now fathers are important to us. Good traditions are good things. But there is a contrast here, I think, between recognizing that we are too prone to worship the fathers. But instead, here true worshippers are described first and foremost as those that worship their Father in heaven, the Father.

So we worship the Father and we worship the Father in spirit and truth. And I’ve separated them on the outline. They are two different things, right? So you worship the Father in spirit and truth. But the word “in spirit and truth”—there’s a single preposition “in spirit and truth.” And so there’s a unity and diversity to spirit and truth there, which we’ll talk about in a little bit.

But for the sake of the outline, there are three specific designations of who true worshippers are. They’re those who worship the Father. They worship the Father in spirit, and they worship the Father in truth.

Now at the center of this is that the Father seeks such to worship him. “For the Father is seeking such to worship him.” The only way you’re brought here today to worship God is not because you sought after God to worship him, but rather because God sought you to become a true worshipper of him. So the emphasis here is the sovereignty of God seeking out true worshippers.

And this is why this text is so central to this entire John 4 account, because what the Father is doing—Jesus must needs go through Samaria. Why? Because the Father is seeking true worshippers who will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is seeking people to worship him.

And secondly, God is spirit. “For the Father is seeking such to worship him. God is spirit.” Now, this phrase, “God is spirit,” in the Greek, it really says “spirit is God” or “spirit God.” Spirit is placed forward for emphasis or stress. And what does this mean?

You know, one of the ways that people look at this text is to say well this means that God is immaterial, God is like a ghost, can’t see him, and so since God is like a ghost, we have to worship him in spirit and truth. Jesus is saying you don’t want to go to some physical place like Gerizim or Jerusalem. Our worship has to be sort of ethereal or ghostlike to be true worship of the Father. And I think this goes wrong, first and foremost, because it doesn’t understand how this phrase is being used.

It is true that God is immaterial in that sense. It’s true that there are these attributes, that being spirit is an attribute of God. You know, he’s not bound like the way we are to locality, et cetera. But I don’t think that’s what’s being talked about here when the correlation here, the way the outline shows it, is that what’s happening is true worshippers are a result of the Father, the God who is spirit, seeking true worshippers.

I think the stress here is on the movement of God in spirit to liven his people. God is spirit. He is a life-giving spirit. We’ll look at some texts that talk about that. He is the one who has power and effectually brings to pass this regeneration of men, of this woman and the men at Sychar, to affect them becoming true worshippers.

God is light, you know. Well, what does that mean? It means that God is light to us. It means he lightens our path. It means that apart from God, we dwell in darkness. God is love. You know, we can think of that in a Greek category, some sort of abstract characteristic of God. But no, it seems like it says that God is love toward us, toward his people. It’s his relational attribute to us that’s being discussed there.

And it seems like when it says here specifically that the Father is seeking worshippers and that God is spirit, and we must worship him in spirit and truth, God is this life-giving force. He is power, opposed to the weak and beggarly things of the world that the woman was engaged with, the tradition of the fathers. God effectually brings people into relationship with him, and that relationship is described as worship, first and foremost, at its center.

As always, you know, this is not some new characteristic of God. You know, this is read into this text as well. You see, well, to this spiritual disciplines of the Christian life, to worship in spirit and truth means that now God is spirit and now we have to enter into worship with all of our hearts and so we have emotions is what spirit means and truth means intellect and so we have to worship both our emotions and our intellect. That’s the way a lot of people look at the text.

I don’t think that’s correct. Now it is true that our worship involves our intellect, our minds. Certainly, you have to think about what you’re doing as you worship God today, and it is true as well that worship should be our delight, should have an emotional aspect to it. Those things are true, and it’s true that God has these characteristics in terms of his being.

But I don’t think that’s what this text is about, because if Jesus is saying there’s some sort of change, okay? He’s not just, you know, he’s not just disputing Gerizim worship. He says the hour is coming, now is, when neither in Gerizim nor in Jerusalem, you know, will this worship take place. It won’t be localized anymore. There’s a change he’s saying.

And so if we have a change, what is being changed? And if the content of what Jesus is saying is that now we have to worship with, you know, our full being, mind and heart, then does that mean they didn’t have to do that in the Old Testament? Does that mean the Old Testament God was not a spirit? No. No, absolutely not. The scriptures are clear. Calvin in his commentary says that God is always like himself. He did not from the beginning of the world approve of any other worship than that which is spiritual and which agrees with his own nature.

So that’s not what’s going on here. God is spirit defines God in his, not in his metaphysical being, I don’t think, but in terms of his relationship to men that he creates—men who are like, who have life. He brings them to life and energy through his spirit. Okay. So this life-giving, powerful God seeking worshippers, creating them in the context of the world, is at the center of this little section on worship in spirit and truth.

And then he goes back that God is spirit, and those who worship him. So now we have again we have a component of worship being discussed. True worshippers are those who worship him. So there’s a demand to this aspect of worship. “We must worship him in spirit and in truth.”

Now notice that first it says that true worshippers will do this. And then here after the pivot point, it says those who worship must worship in spirit and truth. And this shows us that worship is both a duty as well as a delight.

Which is it? Is to worship a duty or is to worship a delight? What is it here? Well, in the text it seems to be both things. We’re true worshippers because we’re worshiping with our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We want to do it. And yet there’s an obligation component at the back half of the verse here that we must worship him in a particular way.

This is not dissimilar from many things in life. You know, we train our children to brush their teeth, right? And when kids are little, they don’t want to brush their teeth. At least my kids never really did. Maybe a few of them did. Most of them haven’t. You know, if you leave it up to your child as to whether or not they’re going to brush their teeth, they can go a week or two without brushing those teeth. Get big things all caked up. You need a chisel to take it off after.

If you leave your kids to their own devices, that’s what they’ll do. Now, I imagine there is no adult here who doesn’t every day brush your teeth. You’ve gotten to the place where you, well, you might delight in it, but at least you do it, you know, without a sense of duty doing it because you know that if you don’t brush your teeth, people are going to stand about five feet away from you. And then if you don’t care about people, you know that eventually your teeth will hurt a lot.

So you have matured into knowing what you should do and you do it now. You enter into that teeth-brushing thing in the morning and maybe even think about a little meditation about God cleansing you and your mouth is the place where all that filthiness, in Romans, says it’s like an open pit, you know, and rotting things are in there. And you’re going to clean yourself up. Use a little mouthwash to remind yourself your speech should glorify God. So you enter into a delight too.

It’s the same thing here. Worship is to be a delight and a duty. And if for you it’s mostly duty, it probably means you’ve not matured a lot. But God is maturing you into calling worship a great delight.

Okay. The three key words in this text, I think, are Father, spirit, and truth. And both at the top and at the beginning, we have the worship of the Father going on in spirit and in truth. Okay. So that’s the text, an overview of what the text is about.

Let’s talk now a little bit about this touchstone, standard of what Jesus teaches us about worship. Very few verses, little bit of content, but we want to understand what this content is. Jesus, of course, is the touchstone for all of our lives. And certainly when it comes to worship, where there’s so much stress in the Old Testament on false worship, diverting God’s people from obedience to God, we want to be very careful how we worship. We want to understand what our Savior tells us about worship.

Jesus Christ is the one who ushers us into the worship of God. And we want to understand here what he means. If Jesus only meant here that worship is to be from the heart, if that’s what’s meant by spirit and truth, if that’s what Jesus is saying, then there’s no real contrast, which he’s trying to contrast, what he’s saying to what the woman was doing and worship in Jerusalem.

If he’s just saying we’re supposed to worship from the heart, there’s no contrast with Old Testament worship. If he wanted to contrast with that, he would have said, “Make sure when you go to Jerusalem, you’re not just performing an external ritual.” If he wanted to really stress the importance of internal realities, he would have said, “When you go to Jerusalem, make sure you’re not just doing this external ritual.” That’s not what he says here.

He says something different. It seems to be that he is making a very important point. The reference here is “an hour is coming and now is.” “The time is coming and now is.” He’s making a point about redemption history, changing something about worship.

And I want to talk about two aspects of our Savior’s teaching. And the first really is not new, although it’s probably more defined in the New Testament. The first element that our Savior tells us about worship is that we’re to worship the trinity. True worship is trinitarian. This is why we had “Holy, Holy, Holy” at the beginning of the service. This is why our song of preparation for communion will be the Gloria, a statement of our affirmation of binding ourselves to the Trinity and the Trinity to us through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

True worship is trinitarian. When we worship the Father in spirit and truth, it seems to me a rather obvious reference to the Father, the Holy Ghost, and the Son, the truth of God. And while these things can’t be firmly divided, the Trinity is a unity as well as diversity. This diversity of Father, Spirit, and Son seems to be portrayed for us in the text.

We worship the Father. That’s very explicitly stated here. We worship the Father. In Galatians 4:6-7, we read, “You are because you are sons. God has sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying out, ‘Abba, Father.’ Therefore, you are no longer a slave, but a son and of a son, then an heir of God through Christ.”

So God has sent the Spirit of his Son, who is the truth, into us so that our hearts cry out, “Abba, Father.” And I think that, you know, it would not be too bad of a thing to train your children that when they come to worship, they’re crying out, “Abba, Father.” We come to worship the Father explicitly. The Father is seeking such to worship him. Those who worship the Father must do it in spirit and in truth.

And so worship, you know, it’s a frightening thing to go into the presence of God’s throne room. But God has assured us that we get in. And not only has he assured us that we get into the throne room and he won’t kill us, he has actually said that in that throne room there are wonderful gifts that he’s going to give to us.

You know the scriptures. Jesus says which man is there among you who if his son asks for bread will give him a stone and if he asks for a fish he’ll give him a serpent. Or even you know, dads on earth, you know, human fathers are better than that. Well, what about our Father in heaven? When we cry out to him, “Abba, Father,” as a result of him sending the life-giving Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ and making us true worshippers, will he not answer our prayers? Well, of course he will.

We come to worship God as our Father. Isn’t that great? We get to go to Father’s throne, his chair every Lord’s day in special convocation of worship and ask him for what we need. Now, sometimes, you know, we don’t know what we need. The older we get, the better we know what we need, and the Lord God gives these things to us. This Father has sought us out for this very purpose. This is a delight. This is a wonderful God that we have who has sent his only begotten Son to die on the cross for us, that he would bring us into his throne room and assure us that he loves us because we’re so fearful because of our sins.

He says, “I’ve forgiven those sins. I love you. I accept your prayers. I’m going to answer your prayers. And also, I’m going to give you the three most important things in your life. And I’m going to every Lord’s day, I’m going to give you these presents that are what you need to do everything else in life. You know what they are, I hope by now.”

When they went to Jerusalem, when they went to the temple, they would go in there. The Holy of Holies they did not get to go into. There were presents all wrapped up, waiting for Christmas, waiting for the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ to be fully dispersed to his people. What were they?

There was a rod in there—Aaron’s rod that blossomed—that marked Aaron’s authority and restoration to personhood, to make him cognizant of his ruling abilities and his glory, the weight that he should be properly accorded. That was a gift for the people of God wrapped up, waiting for Jesus to come. There was that manna in there, the wondrous food representing, you know, Christ come down from heaven. But there was great food, the best of food, represented in there, and that represented the joy that we would have in fellowship with God as we get to eat a meal with him at that great throne room.

And then there was the word of God itself, the tablets with the word of God on them. God had these gifts all wrapped up. And every Lord’s day, we’ve taught you this. When you come to church, you know, teach your kids. We’re going to church to cry out, “Abba, Father.” And this wonderful Father of ours is not going to give us, you know, a stone when we ask for bread, nor a serpent when we ask for fish.

He’s got great things in store. He’s got glory for you. You want to shine like one of these bright lights up here that make this room bright? God’s going to give you glory. Again, he’s going to forgive you of your sins and assure you’ve been forgiven of your sins. And he’s going to make you feel like a person, like somebody again. Not pridefully. The reflected glory of the Father we take into the world. He’s going to strip away your false glory, your pride, and he’s going to give you true glory, which is just what you need to walk into this week.

And he’s going to give you a renewed mind. He’s going to take your thoughts, your intellect, and he’s going to change that. He’s going to write his word upon your very heart. He’s going to transform your mind through the gift of knowledge, the preaching of his word. And not only that, he’s going to let you eat at this holy table here. He’s going to let you eat of life. He’s going to let you rejoice together with him in the context of the convocated host.

We all want to be seen as somebody. We all want to know things. We want to know the, you know, the secret stuff. That’s why we like slander and gossip improperly, we do it. But God says he’ll give us the secret things. It’s the glory of God to conceal a matter and amaze. But it’s the glory of kings to search a matter out. And God sends his Spirit so that you can search out the truth as we come together to worship him. And you’re going to know that stuff.

And everybody wants to rejoice. Everybody wants to, you know, drink and eat and be married. And God says, “That’s not bad. It’s only bad when you do it apart from me.” And God brings us together to all eat together and to rejoice. God has good gifts.

We worship the Father. We worship in the spirit. What does that mean? Well, in Revelation 1:10, John said, “I was in the spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice as of a trumpet.” Where was John? If he was in the spirit on the Lord’s day, where was he? He was in the environment created by the spirit. It’s just like when Adam was in spirit on the seventh day, the Sabbath day, when God came to be with him. Okay? Being in spirit, I believe, is being in the context of the spirit-created environment. God comes down to meet with men. We go up to meet with God. And that is affected by this life-giving spirit.

To be in the spirit, to worship in the spirit, is to worship in the context of the environment that he creates. Where does the spirit take us? What’s the environment he creates for us to worship in or takes us into? It’s the throne room of the Father.

And that’s what happens to John. John was in church. That’s where he was on the Lord’s day. Like, you know, people should be. And it wasn’t just the Lord’s day. It was that part of the Lord’s day when he was in the spirit. He was in the atmosphere, the environment created by the spirit. The church had been gathered. The spirit had called the people together. He had formed up the host to go into the throne room of God.

And John sees a glimpse into the throne room that was rather magnificent, to take back not to individuals to read in private devotions, but to take back to be read in spirit on the Lord’s day. “Blessed are those who hear and the one who reads.” The Revelation was to be read in church on Sunday. And that’s where the great blessing would come is that letter was read. It’s good to read it privately, study. I’m not saying don’t do that. But to be in spirit on the Lord’s day is to be in church.

The spirit forms up his body of Christ in the context of God’s throne room.

Was God’s spirit in the Old Testament? Well, of course. God is not changed. God is immutable. What does immutable mean? Means doesn’t change. Children on your children’s outline. I’ve given you all the answers up to now. Do you got nine of them written down? Number nine is what does immutable mean? Immutable means doesn’t change. God doesn’t change. God didn’t evolve into spirit here with the coming of Jesus. God is always spirit.

God was spirit in the Old Testament. What did God the Spirit create as an environment for the people in the Old Testament to worship in? The special area of worship that God the Spirit created for people to worship in was a temple at Jerusalem. Where did people worship in the spirit in the Old Testament? Jerusalem.

Now, they got together every Lord’s day in their little villages, synagogue worship, but the focal point of worship was localized worship in the presence of God, special presence indicated in the context of worship in Jerusalem in the temple. So when you wanted to worship in spirit and truth in the Old Testament, what did you do? You went up to Jerusalem three times a year as a man. That’s what you did.

So the spirit creates an environment, and what Jesus is saying is the environment is going to change now. It’s not going to be localized in Jerusalem. Spirit’s still going to create an environment though. And that’s where you got to be to be in spirit on the Lord’s day.

We’re going to be talking about the Sabbath here in about a month or so because we’re going to get into John 5 finally. And John 5 is all about the Sabbath. And you have to understand what the Old Testament taught to see what Jesus is teaching about the Sabbath in John 5. He’s executing the Father, right? He comes to proclaim the Father. He proclaims the true meaning of Sabbath. But he assumes that we all know what the Sabbath is taught up to them.

There’s a handout downstairs on the handout table written by Doug when he was pastoring up at CSCC. It was a position paper for that church, number back. It’s an excellent summary of the teachings of what we believe about the Sabbath and the Christian Sabbath, the Lord’s day.

What you need to know is that we think God forms things differently on the Lord’s day. The spirit creates an environment on the Lord’s day where this day is supposed to be different from all other days. You know, there are some proscriptions of the Sabbath. You know, the Sabbath didn’t just come along with Moses. The Sabbath was a creation ordinance, one day out of seven. And so there’s this correlation the Reformed church has always taught between the Sabbath of the Old Testament becoming the Lord’s day, the Christian Sabbath of the New Testament.

And that means this day is a day that to be in the spirit on the Lord’s day means to be in church together. But the spirit doesn’t create just an hour and a half of environment. There’s a particular environment he forms us up into the rest of the day as well. And that is an environment where you’re not supposed to work. You can avoid it. Sometimes you have to work, but you should choose, try, plan, pray not to labor on the Lord’s day. And that’s an environment where you’re not supposed to go by things. I don’t care if it’s the afternoon and church is over. You’re not supposed to go off purchasing things.

It’s very clearly laid out in the proscriptions of the Old Testament, which we believe carry over to the New, that the Lord’s day is a full day, one day out of seven, a creation ordinance, which you’re not supposed to buy or sell. We don’t have much temptation to sell, but we have a lot of temptation to buy in this culture. Very common in Christian cultures too. We’re not supposed to do that. That’s to move outside. That’s to move outside of the spirit of God. You see, the spirit of God makes this day special. And he makes it special by setting it aside.

God says to call it a delight. Don’t do these normal things. Or if you’re going to do things you normally do, talk to people. Enter into that conversation with a renewed sense that this is the Lord’s day. The spirit has created a different environment. No commerce, no purchasing, no selling, no production, no productive labor. The normal work you do is to be set aside.

And there’s a requirement that was binding upon the culture around the bottom. We want to impose blue laws. That’s what we believe at Reformation Covenant Church. The scriptures teach that we should not have people laboring in the culture on the Lord’s day, nor markets open. We want them closed. Okay? That’s the way this country was formed.

This is not something that’s just particularly Reformed. Even you can go back sixty, seventy years, and the American Baptist Sunday School Union or I’m not sure if that was the right name, but something along that line. They had competitions every year for the best Sabbath essay. Stores weren’t open in this country for 150 years of its beginning because people understood the spirit creates an environment on the Lord’s day.

And we’ll have more to say about this Sabbath in the context of the days to come. And I would encourage you all to get one of the handouts downstairs that was a position paper for Christ, the Sovereign, and seems to accurately express what this is talking about.

The spirit, the full name is Holy Spirit, and so it means to worship in holiness. It’s a reflection. And there’s a sense in which worship is this great invitation to come and receive gifts from the Father. But there’s a sense in worship too where the holiness of God is declared: “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty.” And we’re reminded of our sinfulness. It’s an uncomfortable aspect to our worship because if we’re going to worship in the spirit, we’re worshiping in the Holy Spirit.

And that reminds us of all the sins we’ve done that create a sense of unholiness in us that we need to be cleansed of from Christ. So the spirit comes, creates an environment. Our environment has a time and a place, and it is holy. There’s a holiness aspect to it.

So we worship the Father in the spirit and we worship in the truth. And I think this is a reference to the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” The way of glory, proper story, the truth, the preaching of God’s word, and the life, administration of sacraments. These can relate to the three gifts. But what we see here explicitly is Jesus declares himself to be the truth.

And so when we worship in truth, we worship through the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus in John 6:3 said that he was the bread of God who came down from heaven to give life to the world. The Lord Jesus Christ is, in the words of the confession, a life-giving spirit. You know that Nicene Creed, we sing that, right? And we sing about “the Lord and giver of life.” “The Lord and giver of life.” Now that’s explicitly in the section on the Holy Spirit, right? And that’s true. The Holy Spirit is also the giver of life in that sense.

But the Lord Jesus Christ gives life to the world as well. Now remember what we’re talking about is worshiping the Trinity. And we can’t draw too sharp a distinction between the three members of the Trinity, but there are emphases or stresses in it.

In Romans 8:10-11, we read that if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit, the spirit is life because of righteousness. If the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who dwells in you.

So the spirit of God, the spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit is a life-giving spirit. But in 1 Corinthians 15, we read of Jesus: “The first man, Adam, became a living being. This last Adam, Jesus, became a life-giving spirit.” So the Lord Jesus Christ—we worship the Father through the spirit and we worship in the context of the Son. So we worship in a trinitarian fashion.

Whom do we worship through? Well, we worship through Jesus Christ. Jesus in his exalted humanity after his resurrection goes into the throne room of the Father and in doing that brings humanity itself into the throne room. And there’s a sense in which our worship is really Jesus worshiping the Father, okay, because we’re the body of Christ, right? And Jesus goes into the heavenly throne room and is worshiped and worships as well in his humanity. He brings us into the proper worship of the Father. Okay.

Who do we worship? The Father. Okay. In Revelation 4, as I said, Jesus Christ worships. He says earlier in this text, he said, “We worship what we know, right?” He defends the Jewish teaching that worship was going on in Jerusalem. It’s changing now, but it has been worship in Jerusalem. We, the Jews, know who we worship. Well, Jesus knows the Father intimately, right? And Jesus’s worship of the Father intimately, he worships what he knows, is the worship we as restored humanity enter into in the power and life-giving power of the Holy Spirit.

Life personally, as you mature in Christ, he brings you more and more victory over sin and over enemies, right? And he brings us victory over the sins of the families, right?

C.S. Lewis, remember the article, uh, the sermon in the lunch—I think it was called—I mean the family. The home is one of the worst, probably one of the most heightened places of sin in the entire world. We always talk about how great the family is. You know, it’s not great. The family is a place where men think they can be themselves, pigs, brutes, you know, that’s what we are. Why does Paul warn us not to, you know, “Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath?” Because that’s what we like to do. That’s what we’re want to do in our Adamic nature, and we do it a plenty in our homes.

Children, if your parents do that in your home, don’t think that your home is whacked out somehow. Your home is like every other home. Dads are mean guys every place. I’m serious here. That’s who we are. And women like to carpet husbands in their fallen state. That’s who we are.