Read: John 4:19-26
During Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman in
Please notice that the phrase in
You can't get very far in a 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 nonmaterial. He does not have a body. Spirits don't have bodies (
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 of 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.