The God Who Is Spirit

"God is spirit; and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth." John 4:24

During Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan women in John 4, He made a very important statement about God's essential nature. They were talking about worship when Jesus said, "An hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers." (vs. 23)

Please notice that the phrase in John 4:24 has no article. God is not "the" Spirit; God is spirit. That is, spirit is His essence. That's who He is. This phrase is put at the front of the sentence in Greek for emphasis, so what Jesus is saying is, "I want to emphasize why you must worship God in spirit and truth."

You can't get very far in the quest to know God without talking about worshiping Him. And you can't worship God the way He wants to be worshiped until you understand that "God is spirit."

What does it mean to say something is spirit? First of all, it means that God is non material. He does not have a body. Spirits don't have bodies (Luke 24:39). You say, "But Jesus is a body."

Yes, but that's because He became man, not because that's who He is in His eternal essence. In God's essence, He is immaterial. Now the Bible knows we have trouble with that because we are material beings in a material world.

So, the Bible speaks about God in human terms: "the hand for the Lord" or "the eyes of the Lord." These human descriptions are used to help us relate to a spirit being we could not relate to otherwise.

But when it comes to worship, God says, "You must worship Me in My essence" - that is, in spirit. That's why we don't make images of God and bow down to them. He forbids it, because nothing on earth could represent our awesome God properly.

That's also why worshiping God is a matter of what you do in your inner being, your spirit. What you do in your spirit is God's first concern, because everything else will flow out of that.

Think about it: The great God is spirit is actually looking for people to worship Him in spirit and in truth! Want to join up?

By Tony Evans, taken from "Time to Get Serious"