Pastor Jerry Zepnick's sermon, 'What Is True Worship?', explores the concept of worship through Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well as depicted in John 4:19-26. The sermon emphasizes that true worship transcends physical locations like mountains or temples and must be conducted in 'spirit and truth.' Pastor Zepnick discusses the symbolic representation of 'living water' as Jesus' gift of salvation, which is available to all, not just Jews. He highlights the importance of repentance and a transformed heart in worship, referencing the need for true believers to live lives that glorify God beyond cultural or superficial religious practices. The sermon critiques worldly worship, which prioritizes personal idols over God, and advocates for worship that involves the whole being and is based on a genuine relationship with God through His Word and the Holy Spirit. Pastor Zepnick urges believers to assess their worship practices and prioritize a deep, personal devotion to God, free from idolatry and cultural religiosity.

Morning family. So today we are in the book of John. We're going to kind of pick up where we left off last week, only I'm going to overlap because I really did not finish And I probably won't finish this text today either. We're in John 4 verses 19 through 26, and we've been talking about this conversation that Jesus is having with this woman at the well, and it has been very revealing. It's so deep and thick that I've been kind of crawling through it because it really speaks to us today.

And so, in God's perfect will and grace, He's been using pictures for us because our minds are not made naturally, spiritually, for us to be able to understand and discern. And so he talks about water, the living water. He met her by the well. And this is all foreordained. But let's get into the word and we'll read verses 19 through 26.

John chapter 4 verses 19 through 26. 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 mount 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 in 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. Father, we thank you for your word this morning. I pray that our hearts and our minds would be open, Lord God, this morning. That we might come to a greater understanding of what you call us to, Lord God, as believers, as Christians, not American Christians, not cultural Christians, not part-time Christians, not solo Christians, Lord God, but sold out, functional, believing children of yourself, Lord God, that we can live a life that is glorifying to you. I just pray for our hearts this morning to be open to your word, for your word to change us as it ought to, in Jesus' name, Amen.

And so this extended conversation with this woman at the well, and it talked about, in the past we've talked about her real thirst and her genuine need. And Jesus explains to her about this living water. And if you know me at all, you know that I love fulfilled prophecy. Prophecy and fulfilled prophecy. And so God spoke of this through His prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 41, 17, and 18.

He said, He said, The poor and needy seek water, but there is none. Their tongues fail for thirst. Ay, the Lord will hear them. Ay, the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers in desolate heights and fountains in the midst of the valleys.

I will make the wilderness a pool of water and the dry land springs of water." Family, this is all about Jesus. This is not about physical water. This is not about a mountain lake that you've seen that you get a drink out of. This is about Jesus and what he did for us, what God's gift to us was. John 3, 16, God so loved the world that he gave his son.

That he opened up these fountains of water that all of us can drink. You don't have to be a Jew anymore. It's open to everyone. And so this is, it's fulfilled prophecy and it's all about Jesus. That Jesus is available to everyone in these desolate places of starchy, dry, cultural religiosity.

He's opening up springs. He's opening up opportunities. He did it for me. I was stuck in a dry, nasty, starchy religiosity my whole life. And he looked down and he saw and he said, here's water, here you go, drink.

And that's what it's like for us. And if you're a born again believer, this has happened to you. And so it's all about Jesus. And last week about the love of God and how we talked about evangelizing and how Jesus did that with the woman at the well. And this is all done underneath love.

This is all done in the love of God as we give other people the truth of His Word, as we live and cope with one another. We talked about living stones this morning, Josh did, and that concept is that we're living stones. And Christ is building His church. And as He does that, He puts stone on stone and next to stone and stone by stone. And as He does that, that's us.

And these stones, no two look alike. And He puts them next to each other for reasons that they grind on each other and they perfect each other and they accent each other. This is God's work and this is what we're talking about and this deep love is how we can't live a Christian life and not have that love. You can't say, I'm a Christian, but not love this person or that person. We can't, it's not possible.

And then looking at the pattern of evangelism that that Jesus uses, we see not just the love, but also the calling out of sin. And this is when we're in the Word of God, we call out our sin. God calls out our sin by His word. We're in the word. And this is it.

And all of these things that I'm talking about, if it's the love or the calling out of sin or the evangelizing, the living water, This is not a recipe to create a Christian. This isn't something that, oh I need to put on love now. So I'm going to go over here and I'm going to grab love and I'm going to put it on. Then I'm going to go over here and I'm going to get grace and I'm going to get the Word of God and I'm going to put that on it. No, that's not how it works.

What happens is you give your life to Jesus Christ. You submit yourself. You surrender your will to God's will. And when that happens, you are a born again creature that has the Holy Spirit living in him or her. And when that happens, these desires of your heart change.

You can't not be in the word every day. You can't not love others. This is all just, these are all traits of those who have surrendered to Christ, is what I'm saying. You don't have to manufacture them. And so, when we finished talking of that, we talked about worship briefly, and how we cannot worship God until we confess our sin.

And this is what he talked about with the Samaritan woman. And She needed to see her sin. And she was standing there proud, and she even said, well, I have no husband. Well, this is true, you have no husband. And Jesus, knowing the hearts of all, He said, I know you have no husband.

You've had five and the one you're living with now is not your husband. So he saw all of this. And this was the beginning of the cracking of her armor. And so this worship has to do with us repenting of our sins. It starts with being born again.

This worship has little to do with our outward appearance and our actions. And we see this with some churches that are just crazy on outward actions and they gotta run around and do this and do that and yell and scream and prove to people that they are in the Spirit. And this is not where worship really happens, it happens in the heart. And so we focus on Christ and it's about the state of our heart. Paul Washer said the question is not if you accepted Jesus in your heart, the question is if He changed it.

See, it's a changed heart. And you can see that in a person. So we focus on Christ. We focus on His finished Word, on His perfect Word, on being in His Word. And we know that He is worthy of all of our worship.

When we know Him and who He is in His Word, we know that He is worthy of our worship. The bigger He gets when we get into the Word, and the smaller we get, we get a proper perspective, a properer perspective, because I don't think we'll have that perfect perspective until we reach glory someday. And so Revelation 4, 8. And this I'm saying that this life's worship is hardly the beginning of our worship. It's hardly the beginning of true worship that we will witness for all of eternity.

Because when you're saved, you're not just saved like right now. You're saved unto eternity. From the second that you are born again, and the Holy Spirit comes into your heart and life, you're saved forever. You're not stopped back and forth in between. It doesn't stop when you die and then you get saved again.

You're saved unto forever. And so, Revelation 4, 8, the four living creatures, each having six wings, were full of eyes around and within, and they do not rest day or night saying, holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come. This is the God of our salvation. And so, worship isn't just on Sundays. I'm trying to peel back the layers and I've got to start out, which I'm past starting, but tell you that this text has really worked me over this week.

As I studied through what really worship is, I realized what it is and my downfalls within it. And so worship isn't just on Sundays. It's not confined to a church. It's not confined to when our amazing music team is up here and we do our worship. It's not confined to that.

Worship doesn't just happen among believers either. And this might be shocking, but Worship doesn't just happen with people who believe. Worship is a universal human experience. It's there, it's the strictest sense, the English use of the word, and I had to Google some stuff here and and I'm gonna share it with you but what is true worship is the message today so what what is true worship I think we get this idea in our head of what it is and and when it is and where it is. And we miss what it really is because that's all it really is to us is what it is in here, right?

It ought to be, we ought to have a deep yearning for what worship is to God because he's the one we're worshiping. So when I looked it up, the English use of the word worship means to ascribe worth to something. Ascribe worth to something. That's pretty simple. And the dictionary defines it as the intense devotion, admiration, or preoccupation with a person, object, or ideal.

Okay, So do you see how I'm saying that worship is universal? Everyone does it. So that's a broad definition. Here it is narrowed down between worldly and religious worship. Religious worship is directed toward a deity.

Worldly worship is an outpouring of all that I am toward whatever an individual values most. So that's worldly worship. A person can worship all kinds of things. Heroes, consumerism, money, academia, etc. I mean you can go on and on and on.

And I can try to go down this list and make it exhaustive enough to where it hits what everybody's idol is in the world or in this body or what everyone worships that they shouldn't. But you know what? I'm not going to. I don't have to because that's the work of the Holy Spirit. You know what it is that you pick up above what God has ordained you to worship.

You know what your number one is. And so a person can get on any level of worship with anything else. But you know what occupies your mind when you put your head on a pillow at night and when your eyeballs open up in the morning. You know what occupies your time. Although our worship service began at 10 o'clock today, everyone here has been worshiping all week long, to one level or another, to one thing or another, all week long.

Not what, but who and how you're worshiping in one way or another all week long. All week long. And so John 4 helps us to understand this. And this chapter records Christ's encounter and his conversation with this woman at the well. And this has opened up for me just a whole new understanding of who Jesus Christ is.

It has really helped me to open my eyes up. So this is so deep and it's so long that we can't just take and say, well, he talked to a woman and so Jesus loves and has compassion for poor people and people that are immoral. So we need to have that compassion too. That's not a message. And so the point is that we're breaking this up And so we can, there's so much flavor to it, we need to soak it all out.

And so we're crawling through this. And so this Samaritan woman realizes that Jesus is more than a regular man. He's at least a prophet, a messenger from God. And so we will get nowhere in our Christian walks until we ascribe Christ the glory due to him. And this is what the point of this book is in 2031, these things are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, and that believing you might have life in His name.

This is the point of this whole text. And so, this Samaritan woman doesn't get that all yet. And at this point, she asks a question of worship and she's not a scholar by any stretch. She's not a theologian. She's a woman, which is a huge strike against her.

And she's got a poor reputation. Another big strike against her. Her question shows that her life is bound in a way that she worships. What she worships, I'm not gonna say. But she asks, how do we worship?

She's assuming that her and Jesus worship the same God. And so you see how this is like the early onset ecumenicalism, right? So this is her saying, well, since we have the same God, where do I go worship? Well, the fact is that her God had nothing to do with the God of the Bible. As she's talking to God Himself, And today we have the same responsibility.

Okay, we have the same responsibility to divide what is the true God of scripture and what is this ecumenical American feel good God that just wants you to be happy. We need to be able to discern that. And so she asks how we worship. Not just the means and ends, but who are we worshiping? Who is the subject of our worship?

That will affect the way that we worship. And so Jesus is not something that you add to your life, is what the point is here, I think in a lot of ways. He's not something that, you know what? I'm gonna live the life that I want. I know what I wanna do, and I'm gonna live that life.

And then I'm gonna take Jesus and add Him to that life. And so I've got all the things that I love and that I do, and that my affections are after, and then I'm pulling this wagon behind me, and in this wagon is Jesus sitting there, right? That's not going to work. I'm sorry, but that's not Jesus in the wagon. That's the devil.

And so Jesus is not something that you add to your life. Jesus is your life. Jesus is everything to a believer. He is your life. And you will not have any kind of worship until you surrender your life wholly to Him.

You will not have any kind of worship, relationship with Him until you have surrendered your life to Him. So it really does matter who and and how you worship. And so the the Samaritan woman or the Samaritans altogether were not worshiping according to the God of Scripture. They weren't. You see, it's not enough just to have worship.

It matters who and how you worship. This conversation that Christ is having with the woman reveals the important truth. Worship matters more to God than we can possibly know. And it is to involve our whole being, not our spare time when we roll over in the middle of the night, we can't get back to sleep. Not when things are going terrible in our life, all the time.

And it's supposed to involve our whole being. But this wasn't just a problem for the Samaritan woman. As humans, a common problem we have is not understanding what true worship is. And yet, it's commanded in the Word of God. 1 Chronicles 16, 29 says, Give to the Lord the glory due His name.

Bring an offering and come before Him. O, worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness." That's a command. That's not a question. It doesn't say in the beginning, if you've got time, buddy, it's a command. So as we look at today's past John 19-26, we'll better understand what true worship is according to God and God's Word.

The first point is, first point here, I'm halfway through the first point, a difference of worship. And that is when they talk about what is the difference of worship. We worship in Jerusalem or we worship in this mountain, you worship in Jerusalem and so this is a difference. The Samaritans and the Jews, they had this difference of worship. And if the Samaritans are a branch from the Jews, and I talked about this a little bit last week, but how did this happen?

And it always kind of boggles my mind. I like to know things. And so in 2 Kings 17, 24, this is how it happened. This is how the Samaritans became compromised. It says, then the king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Kutah, Avah, Hamath, and Seferim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel.

And they took possession of Samaria and dwelt in its cities." It's a compromised belief. If you look at what is, I'll say Harvard or Princeton, these began as schools of divinity. America has founded one nation under God. Look at what's happened to it. It's a compromise.

It's a slow leak that happens. It's what's going on in America now with Muslims. And how many other cults, religions, that are coming down on top of and working their way into political circles and overtaking communities. There's governors and mayors of major cities. You think that this is not going to change us?

See, this is a compromise, and this is what happened with what was supposed to be God's chosen people. And so with intermingling lives due to the proximity, the Jews began with intermingling, intermarrying. And this is how the Jews in Samaria over the centuries of time, over the course of time became compromised. And the question I have for us today is, we see it on a state level, I'll say, on this big banner level up above. Do we see it on our level?

Do we see it in our personal lives, in our families? We click on the TV, click, click, there it is. Well the news, we'll look at this program after. We'll look at this, look at that. And the next thing you know, you're wallowing in filth.

You've opened up a portal to hell right in your own home. And you don't even think twice about it. Why? Because other people are doing it. Other Christians do it.

You know, I remember one time I was goose hunting. We had all the decoys out front. And this one lone goose, it comes flying around, and we're hiding, and we're calling. And that goose, sure enough, it circles a couple of times, lands right in the decoys. One live goose and a whole flock of dummies.

We're like, OK, who wants to shoot it? Well, we can't shoot it unless it's flying, it's not sporting, right? So you stand up and the goose looks at you and it looks at all of its buddies on the ground and it's like, I'm safe, these guys are safe, I'm not going anywhere. And it just stands there. You literally have to go and pick it up and kick it to make sport of it see that's what happens with us We stand in the middle of a bunch of flock of dummies, and we do what they think is right.

And we're not worshiping, We're not glorifying God. We're doing what a bunch of dummies are doing. It just blows my mind sometimes. And so this is what had happened with that group of people. So this woman had to well believe that Samaritans worship the same God, but just the location was different.

This is like so many people today. Various paths, they all lead to the top of the mountain, right? The top of the mountain, and Jesus is at the top of the mountain, we've got all these different paths that go to the top of the mountain. It doesn't matter which path you take, as as long as you're sincere, God is going to hear you, right? Yeah, yikes.

Bunch of dummies. We're right back at that again. First John 2, 23. Whoever denies a son does not have the Father either. He who acknowledges the Son has the Father also.

Let's talk about acknowledging the Son. That's glorifying the Son. That is knowing the Son. That is walking in the Son. We're talking about a very, very narrow path.

We're talking about Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one goes to the Father but by me. Not me and anything else, but by me and that's it. We're talking about a very, very narrow path. And it's right here.

This is our way. And so the Apostle Paul stated how this is a common problem in Romans 1, 18-21. He wrote, the truth and unrighteousness because what may be known of God is manifest in them for God has shown it to them for since the creation of the world has of the world his invisible attributes are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead so that they are without excuse, because although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but being futile in their thoughts and their foolish hearts were darkened. See, our primary problem is one of worship. We want to put ourselves or our things or our agenda above and beyond what God is.

But worship is the fountainhead of all of our sin problems, a rejection of God. So we do not worship God, but instead in His place, we think we're not because we do the right things, right? We go to church, we pray, we read the Bible, but we erect these little temples, these little places, these little images that reflect our own passions, our own desires, and eventually we reject the true worship of God. And so we all worship what is the most present to us. What is the most present to us?

Whatever most fills us up. What is the most pressing to our minds? Whatever is the most most pressing to our affections? Word of God tells us, let your affections, set your affections on things above, not on things below. Romans 1.20, and 1.20, I'm gonna read that again.

It says, for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead so that they are without excuse. You see the display of his power, his divinity, his omnipresence, and still we know that's there, and still we try to raise up these little idols and these these little things up before our faces and and we think some kind of twisted way in our head that that this is good or that this is gonna take place of God, even for a time. And so Christ doesn't say to this woman, Christ doesn't say, well, either mountain is okay. You can go to Mount Gerbis or you can come to Jerusalem, whichever. Instead, Jesus essentially tells her that neither place is God's final place of worship.

And so maybe this is, it did it for me, I'm just gonna tell you, Maybe this is meant to shake us up in our beliefs of Christ and our worship to Him. Because it rocked my world when I got deep into this thing here. And so, the question I had to ask myself is does this expose my anemic worship in light of the mighty God of my salvation? And I'm asking you that this morning too. What is your worship to mighty God of creation of Romans 1, 18-21?

What is your response to that? How do you see Christ? How do you see you? So maybe this is meant to shake up just me. Maybe it doesn't say a thing to anyone else here.

But to me it's worth it. And So it exposed to me a level of shortcoming of my worship to God. That I profess to be worshiping Him here now that will last forever. But somehow, I think that I can get by with ignoring Him a lot of the time here. Is that what we think sometimes?

We are created to glorify God, to worship God. And we will be doing it from the time that we leave here unto eternity, but we're not gonna do it while we're here, or we're gonna do it poorly here. And then I'll be released from this body of not wanting to worship God, and then I'm going to magically want to worship God when I step over to the other side. No! That's not how it's going to work.

James 4, 13 and 14. I think this helps me gain perspective, this text. Come now, you who say, today or tomorrow, we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, make a profit, whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? What is your life?

Is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. What is your life? It doesn't matter if you're Judd or if you're Ruth. Your life is a vapor. It's here and it's gone.

It will not last long. In the studies of this text, I came across a quote of Matthew Henry that I'm going to share with you. And it's a little bit old English, so bear with me. And it says, that which thou hast been taught to lay so much weight on shall be set aside as a thing indifferent. Note, it should cool us in our contest to think that those things which now fill us and which we make such a noise about shall shortly vanish and be no more.

The very things we are striving about are falling away." It makes you want to take this world and just loosen your grip on it a little bit, doesn't it? It just really doesn't matter. My second point is the hour is coming and that is the text in verse 21 through 23. The time is coming when our worship will come to a new expression. Not that they were doing it wrong in Jerusalem, but that the temple will no longer be necessary.

And Jesus spoke that in John 2.19. He said, Jesus answered and said to them, destroy this temple and in three days I'll raise it up. It just blew their minds. See, they didn't understand. They had the counsel of Scripture.

They had the book of Isaiah to tell them what's going to happen and they didn't understand. They didn't hear. They were full of themselves and so the time is coming when our worship will come to a new expression. Not that it was wrong, but when he said, the hour is coming and it's already here, the difference is that the Messiah had come. It's not that, well, right now it's noon and by one o'clock.

See the Bible timeline is different than what we think. But the hour is coming as the time is here. The Messiah is here now and He will be sacrificed on the cross. He will die. He'll be buried.

He'll raise again from the dead. The temple curtain will tear from top to bottom And that will be the end of the temple. The temple will no longer be necessary. And so this is what he is talking about. So the worship of God is no longer mediated by a place.

And so you think, well, I can't wait to get to church so I can worship God. No, you can worship God wherever you're standing, wherever you're sitting, wherever you're laying. But by the coming of Christ, it is mediated by. Worship is mediated by a person, Jesus Christ. And so he fulfilled the requirements for us to worship, for us to worship in spirit and in truth.

And so That's not what it had been before for the most part. And so, we all need an anchor for our worship, right? We can't just... Well, the world doesn't have an anchor. And I know people that go from skydiving to scuba diving to hunting to these race car driving.

And they're just going from one thing to the next to the next to the next. And their belly is never full. They never have something to fill them. But our lives and our worship needs an anchor. In the Old Testament, it's the temple location.

It was always God, but It was a temple location where they worshiped God. And in our text, the hour has come, and it all shifts to Jesus. And right after Jesus ascended, the indwelling Holy Spirit. And so this requires no pilgrimage. It can be done anywhere because, you know why?

Because a born-again believer, he lives inside of us, right? We can worship God wherever because he lives inside of us. This is the glory of it all. So 1 Corinthians 6, 19, Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? Isn't that something?

You do not belong to you. God owns you. He put the Holy Spirit in you and He owns you now. So by a Christian's spiritual birth, He receives the Holy Spirit and is united to Jesus. Jesus came to restore right worship to God.

So by the Holy Spirit we can now rightly worship God. And so What is the right worship of God? Point three, Spirit and truth. We cannot just put our ideas of what this means. We cannot just put...

Well, worship means something different to everybody and that's Okay, right? No, it's not. It's not. The same thing with the love of Jesus, the same thing with being born again, the same thing with so many fundamental doctrines of the Word of God. We cannot get them wrong.

And so we cannot just put our ideas of what this means. Worship is a dangerous thing to get kind of right, right? We don't want to get it kind of right. We want to know what it says in God's Word and what we're told to do. Matthew 15, 7-9.

Hypocrites. What did Isaiah prophesy about you saying, these people draw near to Me with their mouth and honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. And in vain, they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men." And that's the whole problem of American Christianity, American religiosity. There is the COGR, it's a big cult, and they just proclaimed that they have been, since they were founded, I think in 1989, They have just proclaimed that they have been doing a lot of things wrong, that some of their leaders they have been doing the wrong things and that they have been thinking wrong about some things and so they are changing things up now in a big way. It's a relative superficial repentance is what it is.

And my question is, what about the rest of the stuff you're doing wrong now yet? And if you were doing all that wrong, what about all those people that thought they were converted through that false system before. And so this is the confusion of modern day or cultural or cultish. So Jesus called them out on their sin. They didn't worship from their hearts.

And so we need not only to have a right understanding of Scripture so that we know who we're worshipping, He calls us to this intimate relationship. This intimate, glorifying form of worship unto Him. And it's not formatted. You can't grab a string with a lot of beads and a cross on one end and just start working your way around it. That's not going to work.

He doesn't hear a thing. Repetitious jibber-jabber. And so, he calls us to this intimate, glorifying form of worship unto Him and Him alone. Not to a specific place, but to a specific person. And the truth, we cannot understand truth because it is God who is true.

But some will say it's not really that important. They have the idea that we don't wanna put God in a box. And so I've been actually guilty of saying that myself. Well, I don't wanna put God in a box. I wanna understand.

And there are some things that that's true for. But when you come to worship, you could say, well, I don't want to put God in a box. And what they mean by that is they don't want God, as he's described in Scripture, They don't like that. They don't like the God that the Bible tells us about. And so they turn it a little bit and they make the God of the Bible a homey peep that stands next to Him and protects Him and answers their prayers and gives them what they want, right?

That's not the God of the Bible. That's not a God that I worship, and it's not a God that I want to worship. And so if you worship God by the boundaries of Scripture, you're not putting God in a box. You're worshiping Him as He requires to be worshiped. So Jesus, as the Word describes Him who lived a perfect life and died on the cross.

Rose from the grave, conquered death. He conquered death. For us, we have victory over death and the grave because we live in Jesus. Right? This is the hope of glory that we have.

He is to be worshiped in truth and spirit. We worship in spirit because God is spirit. That's an intimate experience, 1 Timothy 1.17. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, to God alone is wise. Be honor and glory forever and ever.

Amen. See, God is spirit. He's invisible. And to Him alone, be honor and glory forever and ever. Not to my habits, not to my own idols.

This doesn't mean you need to be filled with this when you walk in the church on Sunday morning at quarter to 10. It doesn't mean that you need to be filled with that. You're not always going to be. We have likely all, at one point or another, walked into church on Sunday morning, been in pain, been in misery, been grumpy, been cross one way or another, been discouraged. We have likely all had struggles of varying degrees.

And even as I speak, I'm sure that there's people here right now that are going through struggles, that are going through grief, that have pain and problems that we don't know about, that we could never know about. We usually think of one or two things. One of two things is what I thought of when I thought about this. And that is, number one, that we can't worship God rightly. That our worship isn't going to be enough for Him because we're bogged down.

Isn't that the way you feel sometimes? You feel discouraged. You feel bummed out and it's like, I can't glorify God, it's not going to mean anything. Our best worship can be as we grieve. It can be as we go through adversity in life.

And we have biblical examples of that. You could ask Job. You could ask David. Ezekiel. These are all great men of God who have glorified God, who have worshiped God in the middle of adversity in life.

And I don't mean adversity in life like I ran out of gas and now I've got to walk to the gas station or my car broke down and I don't know what to do now. I'm talking adversity. Everything you have being taken away. Your children being killed, your wife being killed. That's adversity.

And come off the back of it and glorify God on it. Horatio Spafford lost his family when a ship ran into a ship in the ocean. And he gets the news. Did he sit down and whine about it? Nope.

He picked up a pen and he wrote, it is well with my soul. By God's grace and His Holy Spirit working through the heart and life of that man, we have one of the greatest hymns that have picked people up for centuries. So how do we worship God? Romans 12, 1 & 2. I beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

Scripture calls us to worship as we guard against worries and sin in our lives. And we're constantly exposing ourselves to the counsel of God's Word. That ought to be our immediate reaction just to fall into the Word, to dig into the Word, to put it before us. God speaks to us through that. This woman at Jacob's well had her own idea of worship.

But once she was exposed to her sin and to Christ, the living word, she gained a right understanding of true worship. And we'll see, I'll be excited to go through as we follow through the rest of this text in chapter four, her testimony. But here in America, we all have some form of access to the Word of God. In the Bible times, they didn't. They had to have an apostle come and tell them things.

They had to have a prophet come and tell them something. This is all something that we take for granted. And so here in America, we have that. They had to have someone come and tell them, we have our phones in our pockets, we got computers, we have earbuds, We have multiple Bibles. If somebody doesn't have one, talk to me after.

You can have this one. We have resources that we don't understand. And yet, we have more gods than we can shake a stick at. More false gods. So if you struggle with worship, and like you want to but you can't, God will reveal Himself through His Word.

You need to be in the Word of God. And if you're a Christian, pray for a fresh work of the Holy Spirit. See, prayer is the work of a strong Christian. A man that's born again and has a strong prayer life as a warrior. A man that professes to be a Christian and doesn't pray is a child playing with marbles.

There's nothing there. You got nothing. And so this woman is knowing, she's learning the truth from Christ, But we can have that. You don't have to try to drum up feelings of worship. You're not going to say, I need to worship better.

Okay, so how do I do this? Okay, I'm just going to will myself to worship better, right? No! You get in the Word of God. You discipline your Christian walk to be in the Word of God, to be in prayer to Him.

The worship will come naturally. He is little in your mind and in your life now. When you read the Word, He gets big. The bigger he gets, the littler you get. The littler you get, the more you glorify the God of your creation.

You can't help but to do it. A late preacher, Jeffrey King, was known as saying, worship is the highest function of the human soul. The highest function of the human soul. I wanna get that right. I don't wanna screw that up.

It's what we will do in eternity. So if you want to prepare your mind, your heart for right worship first, repent and belong to Jesus Christ because you cannot worship Jesus until you are born again for real. Repent and belong to Christ. Romans 1.16 says the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation. Next, be in God's Word.

The Word will expose sin to confess and more truth to adhere to in your life. If you want to love the Lord God, be in the Word of God. It will expose your sin. It will show you who Christ is. Pray.

Abide with Jesus by God's Spirit and your submitted will so that you can worship in truth. You're not worshiping in truth If you don't worship the God of the Bible, we need to understand that. You will worship the way He calls us to in spirit and in truth. And when you do that, it's life-changing. There's nothing like it.

It'll blow your mind. There's nothing like it. It will blow your mind. John 8, 31 and 32, Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." See, the lies, you're bound in.

You are a prisoner when you're not born again. When you don't have the truth, when you worship what's not the God of the Bible, you're in a lie, you're bound up, you're not free. And so to rightly worship God the Father through His Son Jesus Christ, we've got to be saved, You've got to be born again. It can't happen if you're not. And are to be in the Word.

I mean the Word is your food. How can you not? So you can't rightly worship the God of truth that you're not familiar with. You need to be familiar with God. And Jesus told the woman at the well, you worship what you do not know.

Your worship, your prayers, your worship, your everything, It's not worship at all. It's falling on deaf ears. It means absolutely nothing. You worship what you do not know. So our lives can glorify God the way that we're designed to.

And it can all start today. It can all start today. This I'm laying out there to start today. It can change you, your Christian walk, your Christian life this morning. This morning.

And I'm asking, I'm asking this morning to assess your worship, to assess your Christian life altogether. I'm asking you to do that this morning. This is the Word of God that is challenging all of us together as a body of believers. Psalm 95, 6. Oh come, let us worship and bow down.

Let us kneel before the Lord our maker. Father, we thank you for your word this morning. I pray for our hearts and our lives to be touched and moved Lord God in a way that lifts you up. Father God, help us to see Your holiness. Give us a hunger and a desire, Father God, to be in Your Word, that we might love You more than we love our idols, more than we love our sin.

Lord God, I thank you for the power of your Word. May it transform our hearts and lives, Lord God, to ones that glorify your holy name, that want to and do truly, faithfully worship You, Lord God. I pray for courage to live this life out in this culture that is so anti-God. Father, give us boldness, I pray in Jesus' name this morning. Amen.

Thank you.