John 4:24

John 4:24

The Worship of God, the Personal Spirit

It is when we get into the midst of practical life, out of abstractions of thought, that we realize our need of a heavenly Father, that we turn to Christ as the revealer of that Divine and blessed truth. And of how we are led to do that I shall illustrate from the cases of those whom I have already dwelt on as needing to conceive God as impersonal.

I. The idealist, who contemplates and worships God as Thought, and sees Him as essential Truth, Love, Justice, and Beauty, is satisfied with that idea as long as he can live apart in his study and separate himself from the strifes of the world. But when such a man, at some great crisis of human history, is thrilled with the excitement of humanity, and, going forth to take his part with men in fighting for freedom or his fatherland, or for any of those truths which are the saving ideas of mankind, finds himself one of a great company, all moving with one thought, all breathing the same passionate air; yet, though united, each having their own personal inner life, their own separate way of feeling the same emotion, their own especial worship in the words of their own heart, their own personal need of One on whom beyond man's help they may rely think you that then his conception of a God who is infinite Intelligence, essential Love and Truth, impersonally conceived, will be sufficient? No; when Fichte, idealist of idealists, left the classroom as the drum went by, and marched with his soldiers to the War of Independence, he did not abandon his ideal conception of the great "I Am," whom he abstained in general from clothing with the attributes of personality; but he added to it the conception of a Father and Lover of men, who went with each of them hand in hand, as man with man to battle. In such hours the idealist worships the personal Fatherhood of God.

II. And the natural philosopher, one who loves and honours God as the living energy of the universe, and worships Him as such honestly and rightly, though he conceive Him as impersonal, when one of the great sorrows of life besets him, and the sorrow makes him feel the absolute personalty he himself has, and which he had almost lost in ceaseless contemplation of an absolute Force does he then only see the Impersonal bending above him? Is not the passionate longing of his heart for One who can be his Father, a Friend a human God to him, grasping his hand, and saying, "Be of good cheer, for I am thine, and those thou hast lost on earth are Mine for ever"? Many may resist these things, but they are there vital, powerful, impassioned desires. Whence do they come? What do they say? They come from, and they tell us of, our need of the personalty of God.

III. How shall we worship God as the personal Father of the race in spirit and in truth? Why, in that truth, your life must become a worship of love spirit being that it is of love of men, and God, because He loves men. Love of man is easy when we believe in that idea of God. We cannot help loving that which God loves so well; we cannot help being proud of our fellowmen, for are not all ennobled in His love? We cannot help loving that which is destined to be so beautiful; for we see men not as they are, but as they will be. We look not at the poor worm that crawls from birth to death, nor at the chrysalis that seems to die. We see the beautiful creature that is to be, the winged Psyche of humanity; and every soul grows precious as beauty in the vision. To hasten the coming of that day we put this spiritual love into a spiritual life of active righteousness.

S. A. Brooke, Sermons,2nd series, p. 406.

It was not an utterance unknown to the heathen world before the coming of Christ, that God was Spirit. The Greeks, the philosophic Hindus, the later Platonists of Alexandria, and many others in many nations had said it, and said it well. Then what was there new in it on the lips of Christ? How was He more remarkable when He said it than the teachers who had gone before him? It is a question often on the lips of the opponents of Christianity, and it arises from their ignorance of that which they oppose. For where do they find that Christ put Himself forward as giving especially new truths? A new method He did give; new commandments, new inferences from ancient truths. A new centre for them He did give; but He was far too profoundly convinced of the consistent and continuous development of religious truth to dream of creating anything absolutely new in truth.

I. Consider now the truth here taught, "God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." I approach one part of it, or God as a Spirit in all men, by dwelling on Christ's act in giving this truth to the Samaritan woman as a representative act. In giving it to her He gave to all in her state of intellect and heart. He proclaimed, in giving it to her, that it was not only for learned and civilised people, but for all people, however ignorant, savage, and poor; and if for all, then the spiritual life, or the indwelling of God, was possible to all. But if it was possible for all, it could only be so by a previous kinship between all human spirits and God the source of spirit. To give it to all was, then, to proclaim that God as Spirit moved in all.

II. Believing this, what should be the result on our life? We should (1) ourselves worship God in this truth, and (2) in its spirit live among men. For ourselves, to worship God in this truth is to live one's whole spiritual life in it and by it, believing that God is in it. We may have been reckless, godless, because we heard our nature pronounced to be corrupt in all its ways; we now turn with a thrill of joy and recognise, led by the light of a new faith, the very Spirit of God in us speaking, living, impelling, working with us for our perfection. Secondly, worship God not only in yourselves in this truth, but live in it and in its spirit among men, and your outward life will then be it worship of God in spirit and truth.

S. A. Brooke, Sermons,2nd series, p. 339.

I. Consider what we mean when we say "God is Spirit." We mean by it that He is the essential Being of all those things invisible, immaterial, impossible for ever to be subjected to the senses, which we therefore call spiritual ideas, such as truth, love, righteousness, wisdom; and that He is their source in us, or rather their very Being in us, that in having them we have God. Take any one of these ideas trace it through its various forms at different times, under different circumstances; it will always preserve certain external elements that will enable you to collect all its forms into one expression truth, or justice, or love. The natural philosopher does similar kind of work when he collects all the phenomena which belong to any one form of force, and unites them under one expression heat, light, or electricity. And just as he finally takes all these separate forces, and, seeing that they are correlated and pass into one another, declares that they are different modes of one constant force that they are all motion, dynamic or potential that the source of their motion is always one and the same; so do we, contemplating the spiritual ideas, and knowing that they are spiritual forces, recognise that they are correlated and interchangeable that Truth is Justice, and Justice Love and finally reach the conception that there is one spiritual force of which all these are but modes the force of the spiritual will. That is God God as Spirit. God is Truth, Love, Justice, Purity, and the rest; and all these are one in Him.

II. We are to worship these ideas as God, in spirit and in truth; to give a life reverence and devotion to them; to be true in every thought, word, and deed; to be pure in the deepest centre of our being; to be loving as Christ was loving, in our national, social, and private life; to be just in thought in our relations with men, in behalf of the weak against the oppressor. To do these things is to worship God. (1) First, then, we must do this worship in spirit. To worship in spirit in this case is to have perfect freedom in the matter of forms for our ideas, keeping our love for the ideas as the first thing. If that is the case if we love these ideas of God then the life which is in love will freely make its own form first for the thoughts, secondly for their worship as best suits its needs; worshipping now in the church, now on the lake or in the crowded street; now praying as we walk, now kneeling to pray; now keeping a Sabbath, now abstaining; now following no observances, now sedulously keeping them up exactly as we feel that the Divine spiritual life in us needs expression. Always at perfect freedom, always in the spirit, because, through the ever-felt presence of God, all times, all places, all things are holy unto us. (2) Secondly, the worship of spiritual ideas must be in truth. Christ used that phrase in opposition to a worship of them through doctrines, opinions, creeds, confessions, and the like things which veil the truth. To be able to live spirit to spirit, heart to heart, without any need of formulating, in intellectual propositions, the ideas that appeal to the heart that would be the highest life. To worship in truth is to care more for truth than creeds; to harmonise our spiritual life and thought, not with doctrinal symbols, but with the very light and truth of Divine ideas; to hold oneself free to take from all religions and forms of faith thoughts which may extend the range of our ideas, and give us a greater and nobler view of God; in one word, to keep ourselves in the worship of the living things themselves that are in the spirit, and not of their intellectual forms that are in the letter. This it is to worship God as Spirit in truth.

S. A. Brooke, Sermons,2nd series, p. 354.

God in Spirit: Personal and Impersonal

I. To represent God as the essential Truth, Love, and Righteousness is to give, so far as it goes, a just idea of Him. But it would be, taken alone, a wholly inadequate idea. We should have to connect with it the ideas which we possess of absolute Being, of Absolute Power and Knowledge, of Infinity and Eternity. But these are also spiritual ideas; and even when they are added, the idea of God still remains inadequate for us,because it can be still conceived as apart from the Personal Man. If we were pure intellect or pure spirit, the conception of God as absolute Truth, or absolute Knowledge, might be sufficient for us; we might then, abiding in truth or knowledge, conceive of them as perfect and infinite, and call the conception God. But we are not pure intellect or spirit: we are limited on every side of our nature, and in realizing our limitations we find ourselves possessed of that which we call Personality. Having an intense conviction of personality, we find, when we come to conceive of God, that it is one of the strongest tendencies of our thought to bestow on our idea of Him a personality similar in kind to our own. We impute to Him will, character, affections, self-consciousness. We make Him a Person; we say, He is, and knows that He is. He wills, thinks, and makes will and thought into form and action.

II. Again, supposing the reality of God and that we are His offspring. It stands to reason that He would wish to give some tidings of His nature to us. He would then give a revelation of Himself, as we were able to receive it. And we should say, à priori,arguing from our wants and our nature, that such a revelation ought to be a personal one. And it is so from beginning to end revelation assumes that we want a personal God, and satisfies that want. As revelation went on, the idea of God as a personal God was expanded and strengthened. In elder times He had not been brought very near, as a Person, to the heart of man. That work was fulfilled by Christ. He called God our Father, and the word established the Christian idea of God, as a Being who has personal relations and dealings with us, as a father has with a son; and in thus likening Him to us in the common round of our affections, it made the whole conception of God's personality infinitely stronger.

III. When the notion of God's personality was strengthened in Christianity, even then (though it was combined with the other thought that He was Spirit) the human personal element became too strong, and often extinguished the other. There are two results which follow. (1) God is less and less conceived as the spiritual essence of Truth and Love and Justice, and the purity of our conception of these spiritual ideas in Him is violated at every step by this exaggerated dwelling on His personality. (2) The idea of God as an all-pervading life in mind and in nature, an idea which goes with the conception of Him as Spirit, fades away also, and is replaced by a vast Personality outside of man, not in every man; outside of nature, and leaving it to the action of blind laws, not in nature as its living spirit. Because God had been conceived of as too personal, men drifted into conceiving Him as impersonal. But it chiefly arose out of man's necessity for such a conception. And here we answer the question whether it is enough for our wants to conceive of God as personal? I answer that it is not, and that the theory of Pantheism ought to be taken up into our idea of God. The conception of God must share in the personal and the impersonal; Pantheism is true, but not true by itself. Personal Theism is true, but not by itself. It is only when they are both rolled together and both brought into our idea of God, that they lose their several evils, and that we possess an adequate conception of His nature, fitted for the whole of our lives, fitted for the different characters of men.

S. A. Brooke, Sermons,2nd series, p. 372.

The Worship of the Impersonal Spirit

I. The man who possesses that poetic feeling for beauty in nature, and that intense sense of a life in nature, which, combined without the formative power, cause him the same pleasure as the artist has what is his state of mind when he looks, in the stillness of the hills, or lost in some woodland, or by the solitary banks of the sea, upon the infinite beauty of the world? He feels a thrill of emotion so intense that he forgets the whole of his life, and is lost in the moment in which he lives. Having lost the consciousness of his personality, there is nothing that touches him from that landscape that he does not become, and become in ceaseless change of his indwelling. He has become impersonal. Now if the man be religious, or wishes to worship, is it possible for him to connect a personal God with that? He has himself lost for the time that sharp self-consciousness which leads him at other times to claim and need a personal Father in heaven. He cannot worship a personal God as long as he feels thus, and no modern poet when speaking of nature can make God in it personal to his feeling. Now what these men feel is precisely that which, modified by different capacities for emotional pleasure in beauty, and for emotional perception of life, all men who have anything of the artist character feel in contact with nature. We cling with all the power of men who are utterly desolate without it to the idea of God as personal Fatherhood when we live in our own hearts or in those of our fellowmen; but when we live alone with nature, and humanity has died out of our field of thought and feeling, we cling equally to the idea I have given above to the infinite impersonality of God.

II. Now, what is the true and spiritual worship of God, as impersonal, in the work of art and science when they are at work on nature? In the first it is this adding to our conception of God the thoughts of unlimited life, beauty, and harmony to adore these in nature as the all-pervading God, with all the life, sense of beauty, truth, and melody of nature that we ourselves possess. It is to see in all things universal love as their living but not necessarily self-conscious essence, and to love it in them with all our strength of emotion, and to hold, and rejoice in holding, that in doing so we are worshipping God in spirit. (2) As the natural philosopher looks at nature he becomes face to face at last with Force alone, active or latent, and the characteristic of it is intense impersonality. What is this force? Say it is only motion in matter, and the philosopher has no God, or only a God divided from the universe a conception becoming more and more impossible in our present stage of thought. But let him say that matter is nothing but Force a perfectly legitimate theory in natural science and he may answer the question, What is Force? in a way which will enable him to find God in the universe. He may say that force is really will, active as thought, a universal will, a will free, resembling that which we possess, but which in us is limited by the bounds which constitute our personality. Remove those bounds of which he is conscious, abstract from it the confining elements of personality, and he has the conception of an infinite omnipotent will in which he may find God as He manifests Himself in nature. He will not find the impersonal God whom we worship as personal, but an impersonal God seen in Force as Will, in Action as Thought. It is, indeed, not matter, but spirit, that he touches, and his worship is the worship of a spiritual life, conceived of an ever-acting will.

S. A. Brooke, Sermons,2nd series, p. 391.

This text gives us the sum of the whole matter; the grand principle of all true worship. The law of acceptable Christian worship is briefly this: that it must be the worship of the heart. The text leaves to men, in the exercise of the faculties God has given them, and through experience of the working of their own minds and of the minds of others, to find out what kind of worship is likeliest to be so. It does not follow, of necessity, that a very simple worship is to be the most spiritual and hearty. To some minds it may be so, while others may find that it is easier to worship in spirit and in truth with the help of a stately worship and a noble church. And each, as before God, must find what suits him best. Outward variations in form are of infinitely little importance, if only the soul as before God is worshipping Him in spirit and in truth.

I. And yet, looking to the whole teaching of Holy Scripture, and weighing the matter in our own best judgment, we may, perhaps, arrive at certain principles for our guidance as to the external circumstances most favourable to true and spiritual worship. Probably all intelligent Christian people would be agreed to go as far as this: that we are doing only what is right when we remove, as far as we can, all distracting circumstances, all outward hindrances to spiritual worship. Little outward annoyances, notwithstanding the most earnest prayer for the presence of the Blessed Spirit, may greatly abate spiritual enjoyment, and neglect of external decency and order is to very many a great hindrance in the way of worshipping in spirit and in truth. Surely then it may be accepted as certain, that it is fair and right to carefully remove whatever may hinder and distract us in our worship of God.

II. How can we think on the question of helps in worship? The enjoyment of noble architecture and music is not worship, and may be mistaken for it. The rest which falls on us, walking the aisles of a church of eight hundred years, the thrill of nerves and heart as the glorious praise begins, whose echoes fall amid fretted vaults and clustered shafts, all that feeling, solemn as it is, has no necessary connection with worshipping God in spirit and in truth. On this question of aids in devotion I can say no further than that each Christian must, as before God, judge for himself. Only remember, that here you are on dangerous ground. You may fancy you are worshipping in spirit and in truth when you are doing no more than enjoying a sentimental excitement, fruitless and unprofitable.

A. K. H. B., From a Quiet Place,p. 73.

References: John 4:24. A. P. Stanley, Christian World Pulpit,vol. x., p. 129; Ibid.,vol. xvii., p. 82; W. G. Horder, Ibid.,vol. xxxi., p. 131; J. M. Wilson, Ibid.,vol. xxxiii., p. 124; G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons,p. 18; S. Clarke, Church of England Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 163; Ibid.,vol. xiii., p. 37; Ibid.,vol. xviii., p. 156.