The original Korean text: https://blog.naver.com/stevision/50025357774
Jesus stopped by a village in Samaria for a while. Samaria was the capital of (the north kingdom of) Israel (in the days of Old Testament). When Israel fell, the conqueror, the king of Assyria, removed the people of Israel to a place in his empire and brought other conquered people to Samaria, so that the inhabitants of Samaria became a mixed people. Samaria was inhabited by them. Therefore the pure-blooded Jews were reluctant to associate with them, for they thought the inhabitants of Samaria were religiously unclean.
But Jesus, a Jew, was by a well in the middle of the day, and a Samaritan woman came there to get water. They talked about several things, and Jesus invited her to 'worship God in spirit and truth'.
What is a spiritual worship? It means that the worship should be spiritual rather than carnal. The spiritual worship is a worship where the Spirit of God and the spirit of man meet. That is, Jesus requests us to be conscious of the presence of God in the service. When Jesus died on the cross, the curtain of the temple of God was divided from top to bottom, which means that the sacrificial worship of the Old Testament which had been valid until then was now abolished. The worship of God in Old Testament is a ritual where the priest came between God and man. God didn't come to people, and no one except the priest could come to God in person and live. But now, by the merit of Jesus' death on the cross, the curtain between the sanctuary where God was present and the holy place where man was was removed. Now Spirit of God descends upon believers and they worship God in presence of God. The characteristic of church buildings is that there is no curtain, no obstacle, between the altar (the pulpit) and the place for the congregation. This itself is a profound gospel.
A worship in truth is a service where you offer yourself to God. The worship of the Old Testament is the ritual of the offering of beasts. It is an imperfect worship because people do not offer themselves but beasts. But, as Paul said, the worship in the New Testament is a service where you offer yourself up as a living sacrifice. This means that you must be a living sacrifice not only at the service but also at all times in your life.
We must pay attention to the fact that Jesus told the woman he met at the well of Samaria to worship God in spirit and truth. Samaria is an rejected land by Judaism. And the woman had met 5 men as her husbands. The word said to the worst woman, "Worship the Lord in spirit and truth," is indeed a gospel, a good news. This means a declaration that God would forgive all her sins, and a promise that she could be a member of God's people if she accepted this new form of worship of God. Jesus is now saying that God will accept her as his daughter. What a grace!
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