Spiritual worship requires a living spirit!

“God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit . . .” John 4:24.

Charnock stresses that just as we must worship God, we must worship Him in spirit. Lack of worship denies His deity; lack of spiritual worship denies His spirituality. The spirit is God’s gift and it must “return to Him” in every form of service, just as it will eventually return to Him when we die. Charnock goes on in his argument to repeat several times that we must worship God with our highest faculties, not with the ‘brute’ in us.

While I agree with his bottom line, there is another point that Chinese Christian and author Watchman Nee would add. He describes the body, soul and spirit (as in Hebrews 4:12, etc.) as having three separate functions. The body functions are external and fairly obvious. He says, the soul is the seat of human intellect, emotion and volition. It is here that we think and learn, feel and make decisions. Most lives are powered and motivated by body needs and the faculties of the soul.

The spirit is different. It is the seat of intuition, conscience, and our ability to commune with God. The spirit has the capacity for biblical faith that ‘just knows’ something is true without seeing it (Hebrews 11:1). The spirit understands and senses right and wrong, good and evil. And only the spirit can connect with God.

The Bible clearly teaches that apart from saving faith in Jesus Christ, our spirits are ‘dead’ to God and cannot function in this manner. Nee says we can go through the motions with our soul. That is, we can think about God and that we ought to worship. We can even learn ways to worship, feel emotion toward God, and choose to sing hymns or praise Him with our mouth, yet if the spirit is dead, so is our worship.

Nee also says that all our worship must originate in the spirit. The spirit should motivate the faculties of the soul to think, feel and decide appropriate modes of worship which then find their expression through our bodies.

While not everyone would agree with the way Nee’s ideas play out in other areas of spirituality, his thoughts on the differences between soul and spirit help me understand why there are so many modes of worship. Even spiritual worship is run through the grid of our souls, and the experiences and knowledge of even the most sincere souls are never going to fit into one mold.

Even at that, spiritual worship is an incredible privilege. People in all the religions of the world desire to please and honor God with all their heart, soul and mind, yet without a quickened spirit, the worship God desires cannot happen. God is Spirit and seeks those who will worship Him in spirit, a spirit that is alive and fully connected with Him through faith and a clear conscience. The privilege is in the fact that He grant forgiveness, faith, life and that spiritual connection with Him — to sinners like me, whose efforts, apart from Him, fall so far short.