Little Chats With God

Posts Tagged ‘spirit’

“God is spirit, and His worshippers must worship Him in spirit and in truth.”  John 4:24John 4:24
English: World English Bible - WEB
24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

WP-Bible plugin (NIV)

Lord, I’m so glad You put a balance in Your Word. As humans, it is so easy for us to go screaming off to one end of the spectrum or the other, when often the two extremes are simply the two sides of the one coin.

I know, Lord, that You are not like the gods that mankind chooses to make for itself. You are far too big to be represented truly by stone or wood, and whilst in the days of the Old Covenant You chose Jerusalem as the place on earth where Your presence would rest, there is no way that any temple, no matter how great or glorious, could ever contain You. You fill the universe. When the Samaritan woman in this Scripture disputed whether the correct place for Your worship was Samaria or Jerusalem, she was completely missing the point of Your greatness.

But we do that so easily, Lord. Unable to come to terms with Your infinity, we try to put You in boxes: to say that You are here or there, that You must be worshipped this way or that. And of course, our place and our way is always the right one!

Help us to remember that You are spirit. The places, the rituals, the formulas of man just don’t cut it – only spirit to spirit does.

Yet You also said that You must be worshipped in truth. We cannot invent a god of our own making, shaped in our image and likeness, and pretend that it is You. We cannot say that any of the gods of this world are just You under another name. There is only one truth, and that is You, the eternal Father, who manifested Himself in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, who said “I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father except by Me.” Help us always to worship You as Who You are, and to reject the claims of false gods which do not live up to the truth.