FOCUS 101
Pull up any major world news and you’ll quickly find that the force of fear currently assails the confidence of our heart. This proves that our need to sing worship has never been greater. We need to worship, we need to focus our attention on God.
Psalm 57:7 says, “My heart is confident in You, oh God; my heart is confident. No wonder I can sing your praises!” (NLT). Our need to engage both heart and mind in passionate, faith-filled worship of Jesus is real today. After all, true worship, says Jesus, is in spirit and truth.
“The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” - John 4:23-24
The “truth” part is plain enough — it’s Jesus, that truth centers on his person and work, the one who is himself “the Truth” Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. - John 14:6. But what about “spirit”? Is this our spirit or God’s Spirit? Jesus’s memorable statement in John 3:6 helps: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
It’s not either-or, but both-and. Our spirit owes its existence and vibrancy to the Spirit of God. As John Piper writes, “True worship comes only from spirits made alive and sensitive by the quickening of the Spirit of God” God’s Spirit ignites and energizes our spirit.
Worship should engage both heart and head. It necessitates true doctrine about the Father and his Son, and their partnership in rescuing sinners, and due emotion about that doctrine. It is both an affair of the heart and an affair of the mind. Piper sums it up as “strong affections for God rooted in truth.”
Worship must be vital and real in the heart, and worship must rest on a true perception of God. There must be spirit and there must be truth. . . . Truth without emotion produces dead orthodoxy and a church full (or half-full) of artificial admirers . . . . On the other hand, emotion without truth produces empty frenzy and cultivates shallow people who refuse the discipline of rigorous thought. But true worship comes from people who are deeply emotional and who love deep and sound doctrine. Strong affections for God rooted in truth are the bone and marrow of biblical worship.
So the essence of true worship is not external, but internal — heart and head, emotion and thought, spirit and truth — whether we’re talking all of life as worship (see Romans 12:1) or corporate gatherings for worship.
Yet we’re so prone to identify worship with the externals:
How nice (or shabby) the building is
How many are in attendance
How good the music is, or do we like the songs
How gifted the preacher is
Whether someone near us is doing something on their smartphone other than reading a Bible app or taking notes, or whether one of the worship leaders is waving a hand distractingly or doing those odd facial expressions or swaying or even jumping.
But while the external forms that our worship takes are not insignificant, they are not the essence. They don’t make it, and they shouldn’t break it. True worship is not centered on and coextensive with the forms, but flowing from the heart. Spirit and truth. This partnership in worship takes our eyes off the busyness of life and turns us to the person of Jesus.
Today, choose to worship God in spirit and in truth. After all, It’s not either-or, but both-and.