How Does God Create a Worshiper?

This week we’re continuing Jesus’ conversation with a Samaritan woman at a well in John 4. If you remember, Samaritans and Jews didn’t get along, and initially the woman’s confused why Jesus is even talking to her. But what starts off as Jesus simply asking her for a drink of water turns into him sharing with her that he’s able to offer her living water.

And as that conversation continues in our passage today, we see it shift from just being spiritual to also being personal. One of the words we see multiples times in these verses is “worship”. In verse 23, Jesus says that God the Father is seeking people to worship him “in spirit and truth”. He doesn’t say God is seeking people to become worshipers; he says he’s seeking people to move toward true worship.

And that’s because we’re worshipers by default. It’s part of our nature. It’s how God created us. We were made for worship. Only the problem is that we replace our worship of God with worshiping any other number of things in our lives.

Now, maybe that word is tripping you up. Maybe you’re not a Christian here this morning, and you don’t think of yourself as a worshiper. That’s not a word you might use often. But all of us are prioritizers. We value some things over others. Whether it be God or our jobs or our families or our status or wealth or sexuality or something else—the priorities that are most fundamental to you carry the weight of shaping how you live.

Worship isn’t just a musical act of praise—it’s a heart that’s ascribing ultimate value to something in a way that willingly and practically orients our lives around it.

I love my kids when I make sacrifices to give them a joyful childhood. I worship my kids when I give them what they want even though it creates tension and separation from my spouse.

I love my job when I find myself motivated and proactive in doing my best and serving my team. I worship my job when it’s all I ever talk about when I’m at home.

Each of us has something like that in our lives. Maybe multiple things. But each of us has something where our valuation of it shapes the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Something that gives us happiness when we have it but would leave us undone and without hope if it left us.

We were created to be worshipers. And this ties into what Jesus said last week to the woman at the well when he offered her living water:

John 4:13–14 ESV

¹³ Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴ but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

At the end of the day, the thing we worship is the thing we’re satisfied in. The thing we rest in. And here Jesus tells this Samaritan woman that there’s many things we can look to to quench our thirst—to be satisfied.

But they’ll be unsteady. Like a glass of water, they meet a need temporarily and partially. But if we were created by God and for God, then only the water he provides—only in valuing him above all things and allowing your life to be shaped by your enjoyment of him—only worshiping him can leave us forever satisfied. Like the early church father Augustine said in his Confessions:

You stir man to take pleasure in praising you because you have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it rests in you. —Augustine, Confessions

We were made to be worshipers, and our deepest satisfaction comes in living out of a worshipful response to who God is and what he’s done. But how do we do that? How do we become that? How does God create a true worshiper when we naturally exchange him for so many other things in our lives?

We see him do this in the life of the woman at the well. If we look ahead to our passage next week, she even runs back to her town and tells everyone about who Jesus is as the first recorded evangelist. How did that happen?

Here in these verses, we see how God creates a worshiper by

• Showing us our need,

• Handling our objections,

• Changing our hearts, and

• Revealing our Savior.

Whether you’re first coming to Jesus or already following Jesus, this is the same path of true worship each of us are invited into today. Let’s start with how he shows us our need. Read with me verses 16-18.

John 4:16–18 ESV

¹⁶ Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” ¹⁷ The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; ¹⁸ for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”

On face value, this seems like a weird pivot. Back in verse 15, the woman had just asked for Jesus to give him this “living water” so that she would no longer be thirsty or have to come back to the well to draw more water. Sure, she’s missing the symbolism of what the living water is—that the gift of God is Jesus himself—but she’s interested in what Jesus is offering.

If this woman was in our modern churches, we might assume at this point it’s time to close the deal. Jesus mentioned he has living water, and she wants it. Let’s get her to pray a prayer giving her life to Jesus, and she’s good to go.

But that’s not the case for Jesus. Because we don’t just become his followers for his benefits. We don’t turn to him as our genie; we turn to him as our Savior. Before she could ever experience the living water from Jesus, she had to see that she fell short of the righteousness of Jesus. She had to see her need for Jesus.

In verse 16, Jesus asks her to call her husband to come here, fully knowing her backstory. One of the perks of being God. The woman thought she knew what she needed from Jesus, but Jesus throws the ball back in her court, so her focus could be shifted to her actual need—her deepest need.

She answers honestly enough: “I have no husband.” And this is where Jesus starts to reveal his hand. He knows about all 5 of her past husbands. He knows about the man she’s living with now who isn’t her husband. Rabbinic opinion disapproved of more than three marriages, and neither the Samaritans nor the Jews approved of common law marriages.

Now, we don’t know what the story is with each of these men in her life. We don’t know if she was widowed multiple times or what role she played in any divorces. We don’t have the full picture of the man she was currently living with or what their relationship was. But there’s a couple of hints here. First of all, Jesus brings them up. And you don’t really make a rhetorical statement without trying to make a point.

If I pointed to you right now and said, “Oh, you probably shouldn’t sit in that seat”, you wouldn’t think I was just being random. You’d think there was a reason. You’d be checking the cushion to see if it was sticky or looking up above you to see if there was a precarious pirate skeleton that looks like it might fall.

Clearly, the nature of the statement leads us to believe there’s a point to it. And this also helps us understand why the woman was traveling to the well alone (which wasn’t customary) and getting there at noon during the hottest part of the day when no one would be around. She wasn’t just trying to draw water. She was trying to avoid being seen.

Whether she was ashamed or was afraid of being put to shame, the woman is hiding from the very part of her story that Jesus calls out. That could be why she seems to change the subject in the following verses rather than continue talking about her love life.

Have you ever had a friend doing something you knew wasn’t good for them, but struggled whether or not to say something? You didn’t want to come off harsh, but at the same time, sharing difficult truth with someone can be one of the most helpful ways we love them.

Jesus isn’t shaming the woman here. He’s not being heavy handed; he’s being loving. He’s already shown her that he knows what she needs. Now, he’s showing her that he knows her. He’s aligning her understanding of her need for living water with his, so he can provide for her need in a way that she cannot on her own.

The gospel tells us that the way to avoid shame in life isn’t by hiding our failures; it’s about trusting the Christ with them. In most other relationships, that takes time. We have to get to know the other person and experience how they care about us before we’ll be that vulnerable with them. But Jesus does a great service to the woman at the well. He doesn’t let her hide in her shame, but he also doesn’t reject her for her sin. He makes her need visible while he offers her salvation from it—while he offers her the living water.

Don’t let the ways you’ve fallen short of God keep you from coming to God. Just like that friend that you’re willing to share your deepest struggles with because you’ve experienced how they care about you, Romans 5:8 says, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

He’s shown that he knows your need even more than you do. He’s shown that he loves you in your need more than you ever hoped. And he’s shown that he’s able to do more about your need than you could ever imagine. True worship is sparked by our need.

But just like we see with the woman, having our needs exposed often comes with objections as well, and Jesus handles hers in verses 19-22. Let’s keep reading.

John 4:19–22 ESV

¹⁹ The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. ²⁰ Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” ²¹ Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. ²² You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.

The woman’s first response here is to perceive that Jesus is a prophet. That doesn’t feel like a big stretch considering that he just told her private things about her life that she hadn’t shared with him. But rather than continuing to engage on that, she moves on to a religious question: Where’s the right place to worship God? Is it where the Samaritan temple had been on Mount Gerazim or is it in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem.

Remember, ever since the Assyrian empire exiled Samaria around 722 BC and inter-married with the Jews there as they re-settled the land, the Samaritan culture had gradually shifted to become more of a hybrid in their traditions and religious practices, combining the Jewish God with the idea of foreign gods.

Because the Samaritans only affirmed the first five books of the Jewish Scriptures, they didn’t believe that Jerusalem was where God had told his people to build the temple. They read passages like Deuteronomy 12:5 and thought that they were supposed to discover the proper place themselves. Mount Gerazim was described as where the blessings of God were to be proclaimed to his covenant people, so they believed that must be where proper worship takes place.

That’s the context of the two claims the woman puts before Jesus. But what is she really doing? Maybe she’s trying to avoid talking about her sin and shame in her love life, so she uses religion as a way to hide. Maybe she doesn’t want to get more personal, so she brings up an interesting question that takes the focus off her. Maybe she’s curious about Jesus as a prophet and is trying to test him to see whether he’s legitimate. Maybe she just likes the topic but only as an intellectual exercise.

Whatever the case may be, Jesus told her something about herself, and she’s either not ready or not willing to lean into the direction that Jesus is leading. So, she objects in the form of a detour.

Our three year old is really good at. If you ask him if he pushed his sister, he might say, “I need to go pee pee.”

Maybe your challenge isn’t a detour, but every objection to worshiping Jesus is a matter of either our head, our heart, or our hands. You might struggle with something the Bible teaches. You either don’t understand it, or the way you understand it, you don’t like it. So, you have a theological objection. It’s a matter of the head.

Or your objection might be a matter of the heart. Maybe you’ve been hurt by the church in the past, or the struggles you’ve experienced in life have led you to believe either God doesn’t exist or he doesn’t care. Or finally, it could be a matter of the hands. You just don’t see how Christianity is practical. Maybe you tried it when you were younger, you went to church with your family, and whatever it was you tried didn’t seem to work for you.

Even for those of us who are Christians here this morning, we all still deal with objections. If the Bible reveals who God is, and he’s perfect and we’re not, then as long as we’re here on earth there are going to be parts of Scripture that rub us the wrong way. Even if we don’t want to object, we might find something difficult to understand, believe, or obey.

As followers of Christ, we are increasingly being made like Christ. But we haven’t been united with him and glorified in eternity yet. We are still being sanctified. So, if you never find the Bible disagreeing with you on some things that you have to wrestle with, then there’s a good chance that you’re not being made more like Jesus as much as you’re assuming he’s more like you. And that’s just idolatry wrapped up in the clothes of Christianity as you’re conforming your understanding of Christ to fit the life you have or the life you want.

We’re going to have objections. There’s going to be things we struggle with, and here we see the woman at the well issue a theological challenge while trying to detour from talking about her personal life.

But I want each of us to be encouraged this morning that the way Jesus handles her objections is the way he’s able to handle each of yours as well. Even though Jesus brought up one thing and the woman detoured toward something else, he didn’t leave her in the conversation just because it wasn’t about his topic. No, he went with her where she wanted to go. He continued to meet her where she was at.

But even though he followed her direction, he still handled her objection. Not by falling into a category she expected but by subverting her assumption altogether: “Are the Samaritans right or are the Jews right? Where do we properly worship God?”

Jesus doesn’t respond with a liberal answer or a legalistic answer. He doesn’t say all forms of worship are acceptable to God, but he also didn’t say only worshiping God in this one exact place is acceptable. The Samaritans were certainly sincere, but they had confused the God of the Bible with these other various forms of worship. They were attempting to worship a God they didn’t know, and that’s not worship.

I can send a romantic message to Macie Russell as a DM on Instagram, but if I tapped on the wrong profile and sent it to a different Macie Russell than my wife—then my message won’t be romantic; it’ll be creepy because I don’t know that Macie. We can only worship God for the true things we actually know about God.

But Jesus also doesn’t say here that the Jews had the right form of worship just because they knew God. Simply doing the right actions with the right knowledge doesn’t mean the outcome is worshipful.

I can give Macie flowers because I know she loves flowers. But if, as I’m giving them to her, I make sure to let her know, “Those cost me $50, so you should extra grateful,”—do you think that’ll make Macie feel more loved? Of course not. Me trying to give her something out of hope that it gets me something in return makes the gift about me and not her. And when we do that with God, that’s not worship either.

Jesus doesn’t say anything and everything pleases God in worship, and he doesn’t say your right behavior earns you something from God in worship. No, look with me in verses 23 and 24. He replies,

John 4:23–24 ESV

²³ 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. ²⁴ God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

Jesus answers her objection by shifting her understanding of worship from being primarily a question about the place or the process to first being about a person. We worship God through Jesus, who the beginning of the gospel of John describes as “the Word of God”, the revelation of who God is. Later on in John 14:6, Jesus is going to describe himself as “the way, and the truth, and the life.” He is the true revelation of God because he is fully God who was made flesh and dwelt among us. That’s why he’s the only way to the Father.

And how do we come to know him? How do we move from looking to fulfill ourselves to now resting in the fulfillment of Jesus and worshiping God by submitting and orienting every part of our life through him? We do it through the sovereign work of his Holy Spirit, who draws us, changes our heart, and continues to point us to Christ.  

That’s the “new birth” that Jesus spoke about with Nicodemus in John 3. And now, with the woman at the well, we see it’s both the flame that creates a true worshiper and the fuel that sustains our worship. That’s why the Holy Spirit is referred to as the “Spirit of truth” in multiply places throughout the gospel of John.

Verse 23 tells us that God creates a worshiper by addressing their heart, and then in verse 24 he clarifies why that’s needed. It’s because we don’t get to choose who God is in how we worship him. We have to worship him according to his nature, not ours. And we can’t just change our own nature. God is spirit, like the verse says, so our worship of God is only true if it’s by the work of his Spirit to change us and in response to the truth of who he is for us.

Have you subconsciously bought the lie that in order to be right with God and for him to be pleased with you that you just need to try harder? That you need to earn God’s favor? That on days you feel like you have your act together that he’s pleased with you and on days that you feel like you’re struggling that he distances himself from you?

That is impossibly heavy for us to hold. So, let Jesus’ words to the woman at the well free you from that burden this morning. Yes, our behavior matters. Jesus is going to touch on that more in our passage next week. But the way we live is meant to flow out of God’s work in us, not to earn God’s work for us. Our lives are meant to be an act of worship that are shaped and sustained by being satisfied in the truth of God and the work of his Spirit in our hearts.

When Jesus brought up each of the woman’s past husbands and the man she was currently living with, he was helping her face the truth of who she is. Like Romans 3:23 says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” Now, Jesus is drawing her to understand the truth of who he is, and that order matters.

Because when we don’t acknowledge our own need and inability to properly worship God on our own, then we’ll only see what Jesus has done for us as an example to follow instead of first a gift to enjoy. And that’s either going to make us prideful when we believe our behavior’s better than others or shameful and defeated when we feel like we don’t measure up.

But that’s not the gospel. It’s trusting in what he has done that we couldn’t do that changes us. We can be right with God, and we can truly live a life of worshiping God, because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus for us. As verses 25 and 26 point out, the final and decisive way God creates a worshiper is by revealing our Savior. Look with me one more time in our passage.

John 4:25–26 ESV

²⁵ The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” ²⁶ Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”

The woman has picked up on the prophetic nature of Jesus’ words, so in verse 25 she rightly anticipates that one day the Messiah will make all these things clear. And like being served a delicious meal that you’ve been craving all day, Jesus presents himself as the one who meets all of her desires: “I who speak to you am he.”

Jesus isn’t just a proposition about your life to believe. He’s meant to fulfill the desires of your heart. Desires you’ve looked to countless other places for satisfaction. For the woman, it may have been in each of these past relationships. For you it could be something else.

But Jesus isn’t meant to be an addition to your life. He’s meant to fulfill your life. To make sense of it. To give a united purpose that aligns every part of it. To meet your deepest needs in it. He reveals God to us, he rescues us from our sin, and he restores us to worship God in spirit and truth with all our lives.

Now that we have the full picture of his conversation with the woman at the well in place, I want to close by reading one more time the invitation Jesus offered her all the way back in verses 13 and 14.

John 4:13–14 ESV

¹³ Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴ but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Come, find your satisfaction in Jesus. Let’s pray.