Deflecting Us From Receiving Abundant Life

Good morning, friends. Good to see you guys. Thanks for joining us. If you're new, we're glad you're here. If you're not new, also still glad you're here.

Happy Sunday, you guys. Friends, one of my all -time favorite books is entirely about demons, which at first like, oh, hold on, pastor, like demons, don't worry, hang with me on this. The book, it's called Screwtape Letters. Anybody read the Screwtape Letters? Couple in the room? Yeah, it was written back in 1942 by a guy named C .S. Lewis.

It's a fictional depiction of a series of letters written by a senior demon named Wormwood to his nephew Screwtape, who's just a junior tempter demon in the hierarchy, or as the book puts it, the lowerarchy. Hell is depicted very much like a bureaucracy, which for anyone who's worked in a corporation is like, yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense to me. But at its heart, really, the Screwtape Letters is a touching story of mentorship.

That's what it's really about. Wormwood passes down his best wisdom on the world. On how to be a great demon. On how Screwtape can be living his best demon life now. It's inspiring self -help literature, honestly.

And Wormwood's mentorship takes on the form of tips and strategies on how Screwtape can secure the destruction of his assigned human. The human is called the patient throughout the book. So each letter contains a particular way that a modern, western human, a patient, might be distracted or drawn away from spiritual life and walking with Jesus.

They're always conversing about how to be a great demon. They want to pull the patient away from things like sacrificial love or forgiveness or peace and towards things like pride or resentment or self -pity or materialism and so forth. Which means that each letter has some truly piercing insights into different parts of our human condition.

And there are two letters in particular, two chapters in the book that I think focus on an area of our life that most of us don't spend a lot of time reflecting on but is pervasive in us. It's the habit of deflection. The habit of making excuses or diverting our focus to deviate from what's truly most important. Which sounds kind of ambiguous when I describe it. So I want to dig into a couple of these letters where the tempters use this idea on the patient.

We learn in chapter two of the Screwtape letters that the patient has become a Christian and has started going to church, which you'd think would be like a big fat L for the demons, but they actually see it as an opportunity. See, they see in their eyes that religion, when used rightly, can be one of the greatest tools to pull people away from life with Jesus. Church and religion can stoke all sorts of ugly things. Self -righteousness, envy, hatred of enemies, and so forth.

And so they say, hey, church isn't the end of the world. You just need to learn how to deflect your patient's attention to the wrong things when they go to church. Get them to focus on specific things and not about encountering Jesus. Here's how it goes in chapter two.

When the patient goes inside the church building, he will see the local grocer with a rather oily expression on his face, bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing the words, meaning a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks around him, he sees just that selection of his neighbors he has previously avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbors. Provided that any of them sing out of tune, have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.

Work hard on the disappointment or anti -climax work hard on the disappointment or anti -climax work hard on the disappointment or anti -climax In other words, deflect. Deflect his mind off the subject at hand. Get him off the idea of encountering Jesus or knowing Jesus and get him thinking instead about all the people who annoy him or distract him or are unimpressive to him or are beneath him.

The demons keep going with this strategy. In chapter 17, they say, hey, we're going to deflect when it comes to religious language, too. They say, if the patient must go to church, get them obsessed with theological concepts and ideas. is. High -minded philosophies that have very little to do with actually following Jesus in your day -to -day life. Make them a critic or an expert on all things church. Here's how it goes in chapter

17. Make your patient a taster or connoisseur of churches. The perpetual search for a suitable church makes the man a critic, where the enemy, that's God, wants him to be a pupil. So bestir yourself. Send this fool around all the neighborhood churches as soon as possible. And then, if your patient can't be kept out of the church, he ought at least to be violently attached to some party within it. I don't mean about any real doctrinal issues. About those, the more lukewarm he is, the better.

The real fun is working up hatred between those who say mass and those who say holy communion, when neither party could possibly state the difference in any form, which would hold water for five minutes. And all the purely indifferent things, candles and clothes and whatnot, are an admirable ground for our activities.

Deflection, deflection, deflection. Get the patient's mind off of Jesus and onto distractions, onto non -essential theological differences, especially the ones that they don't really know that much about. Onto personal preferences, or onto what makes them right and everyone out there wrong. And when you've done that, you may very well have someone who goes to church every Sunday who is far from Jesus. Because the thing they're showing up for is themselves, their preferences, their comforts, their small theological boxes.

You guys, I think we're going to have a lot of people who are going to be like, I think Lewis was onto something in the screw tape letters. Understatement of the year. Lewis was onto something in the screw tape letters. See, the truth is that all of us, in our own ways, fall prey to deflections, distractions. We are constantly captive to thoughts and words and patterns of behavior that ultimately serve to deviate from the main point. The main point is knowing Jesus and becoming like him in community, and oftentimes we deflect that.

They look like excuses sometimes in our lives. Well, my mom was Catholic, my dad was Protestant, so I grew up confused and never really found my way, and now I'm trying to be a good person like everyone else. Deflection. Well, I grew up Lutheran, but then my sister invited me to a Baptist youth group, which was awesome because they had pizza and movies every week, and then our family moved to a new city, and nothing really impressed me, and so I just stopped going to church. Deflection.

Well, Jesus himself sounds great. It's just that the church is full of such corrupt and bad people, and besides that, I've got all these doubts and questions. It's probably better if I keep my distance. Deflection. Well, you know, this season of life, it's just so busy with kids or sports or wedding planning or work or school, and all that Jesus stuff, prayer and scripture reading and loving the poor, that sounds great. I just don't think I have enough time. So maybe if you give me a book, I'll read it at some point. Maybe I'll listen to a sermon, and then maybe next year when things calm down, I'll start following Jesus again. Deflection.

Well, we tried this church. It was just so big and impersonal, and then we tried another church, and it was so small and intimidating, and we didn't love the sermons and the music, but then we found a pastor we really liked online who was wearing sick, new $700 nightgowns. And then we got into this thing called Avocado Toast and Sunday Brunch on Sundays. If you haven't tried Avocado Toast, you need to. And then we kind of just stopped going. Deflection.

We are expert deflectors, friend. We are professionals at diverting attention away from the main thing in Jesus so that we don't have to deal with him. Or maybe so he doesn't have to deal with us. We are well trained in avoiding Jesus and his personal, powerful claims on our lives and in the world. And deflecting to our comfort. Or our pride. Or our preference.

Wormwood and Screwtape are alive and well today. And the result for many of us, including Christians, is a dried out, weary soul. Our deflected attentions have made us scattered, inconsistent people. We, on the one hand, really do want some deep, spiritual, vibrant life. But on the other hand, we have a litany of all these excuses that prevent us from actually engaging that thing.

It's not that we have anything against God or depth or spiritual life and practice. It's just that we've got so much else to do. We've got so much else going on. Or we're too preoccupied with other things. Or we're not so sure about those people at church. Or we're not so sure if we can go in with this theological point or doubt. Or, or, or, or. We are deflecting ourselves into spiritual oblivion.

Henry David Thoreau put it brilliantly in Walden, The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Few of us would say that we have a prayer life that just drips of joy and peace. Few of us would say we have a habit of connectedness to God that feeds our soul no matter what circumstance we're in. Few of us would say we see every moment as divinely gifted for loving and serving others. We are people in the middle of all of our deflecting and distracting who are longing for living water in desert lives.

And that's one main reason we've started this series here at Midtown. We're calling it The Search, Living Water in Desert Lives. As Daniel mentioned earlier, we're spending four weeks on Sunday mornings examining a remarkable story found in John 4 where Jesus encounters a woman at a well. And the topic that keeps coming up in this conversation is fascinating. It's living water. Jesus keeps bringing it back to the idea of living water.

And last week we explored the first part of their conversation. Today we return in the middle of their back and forth. And what we find is that this woman has opted, like so many of us, to deflect in her encounter with Jesus. She comes face to face with him and draws her attention away from what is most important. But we also find that Jesus is graciously inviting her into a different relationship. He responds. Graciously inviting her into a life that is actually vibrant. That actually does bring true joy and peace and satisfaction in the deepest parts of who she is.

He's offering that same thing to us today if we'll listen. So friends, if you have a Bible, I invite you to open it with me to the Gospel of John. It's the fourth book in your New Testament if you're flipping there. John chapter 4 starting in verse 19 is where we're going to be and reading through verse 26. If you don't have a Bible, by the way, that's okay. The words are going to be behind me on the screen so you can follow along there. Also, if you don't have a Bible, my love language is giving away free books. So I would love to give you a Bible. Let me know. I want you to be able to have a Bible to read on your own. John chapter 4 starting in verse 19.

The woman said to him, Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that where people must worship is in Jerusalem. Jesus said to her, Woman, believe me. The hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know. We worship what we know. For salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. For the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. And the woman said to him, I know the Messiah is coming, who is called Christ. When he comes, he'll proclaim all things to us. Jesus said to her, I am he, the one who is speaking to you. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Would you pray with me, friends?

Father, we are expert deflectors.

We don't love when things get exposed in us. We don't love when things get brought to the surface that we'd otherwise like to keep buried and shove under the rug. But we also know that a life of fullness, a life of health, comes when those things actually do rise to the surface and when they can be healed, redeemed, forgiven, restored. And so I pray for all of us in this room that your spirit would move us to get rid of those deflections. Any distraction or deflection or objection or rebuttal, would you let those melt away? And would you simply melt our hearts to see you for who you are, the one bringing life and goodness to us. And peace and joy to us in the world. Would you let us receive those things today through your word? In Jesus' name, amen.

From the start of John 4, we've learned that the Samaritan woman wasn't big on metaphors. Remember, she showed up to this well, we talked about this last week, at the hottest part of the day and was alone because she'd been ostracized by her community. She only expected this day to get her errands done. And yet when she showed up at the well, she found a single Jewish rabbi sitting there, which surprised her. And then it was even more surprising, nearly offensive for her, that he asks her for a drink because Jews and Samaritans didn't share things. They weren't kosher with each other at this time. Yeah, that one's for Jordan.

And then this man who's at the well started to spout off something about living water that he could give her, which just confused her more. She didn't get the metaphor. She actually thought that maybe he was offering her some sort of water that could be running that she wouldn't have to come to the well for. Like indoor plumbing. You can bring that to me? Great. This makes my life so much easier. Can you come and bring that to me? That sounds awesome. She's missing the point.

And so to help her get what he means, Jesus makes things a little more personal. He points to her five husbands and the man with whom she now lives, which is not her husband. He wants her to see that she's been looking to satisfy her deep spiritual longings. Longings for things like identity and meaning and significance and love. She's been going to the wrong water to quench those longings. She's drinking from the wrong sources.

And so suddenly this simple conversation about water turns into a spiritual conversation about deep longing. When you spend time with Jesus, that tends to happen. Simple things turn into profound things quickly. In essence, what Jesus has done with this woman is given her a pathway to repentance, what Christians would call turning around. He's helped her see that her life isn't working out the way that she had hoped and that she needs to stop drinking for life from the wrong places. needs to receive a different type of water.

And when she hears that, she responds the same way that we often do. When our stuff bubbles to the surface, when things get a little too personal, she deflects. She doesn't ask for forgiveness or acknowledge she's been chasing the wrong things. She doesn't say, oh, living water, now I get it. Thanks, Jesus. She changes the subject. She raises the Jew and Samaritan divide with Jesus here. She says, sir, I see you're a prophet, which is a funny way of deflecting away from the very personal comment that Jesus just made. Oh, yeah, clearly you're a prophet. But I'm going to deflect to religious conversation. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, and you say that the place people must worship is in Jerusalem.

Really? Jesus just laid bare the depths of her dried -out, thirsty soul, and her only response is to raise the question about ancient worship practices. She might as well have said, what do you think, Jesus? Should pastors wear robes or not? Should we only sing hymns, or should we sing Good, Good Father for the 42nd time this year? What about raising hands and dancing in church? Where do you stand on that issue, Jesus?

She's functionally saying, all right, this is getting a little too personal. Let's get this off my life, because if it's on my life, I've actually got to address what's going on. I have to address my heart. And I'd rather argue about broad theological issues than deal with Jesus' claim about my parched soul, which is a classic move for every one of us, friends. Rather than dealing with the way that Jesus speaks to us personally, we'd prefer to keep things more broad. So we spend, in the church, hours upon hours arguing about communion, or baptism, or about a building, or about different religious debates around the Bible, or church, or high -minded philosophical or theological concepts like ecclesiology, and eschatology, and pneumatology, and soteriology. Some of you are like, what is happening? I don't know any of those words.

See, most of

the time, our arguments aren't about how we can know Jesus more deeply and be transformed by his living water. Most of the time, our arguments are not attempts to navigate how justice might roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever -flowing stream, as Amos taught us they should. Most of our arguments are not consumed with how we might love the least of these, or serve our enemies, or forgive one another. Most of our arguments are just deflections that prevent us from actually dealing with what Jesus needs to expose in us, or what Jesus is calling us to. Just a couple of years ago, I heard of a massive church in Texas. It's true, everything is bigger in Texas. And this massive church in Texas spent ten months going back and forth in their elder meetings on how much they should spend on their Sunday morning cookie budgets. Ten months. We are all deflectors. And not just in the church, friends. Many of you know we have a skeptic study at Midtown here. It's one of my favorite things we do in our community. I look forward to it every time we gather. We have that because in our culture, many people don't feel like the church is a safe place for their questions, or relay their experiences, or their challenges, or their doubts, or their difficulties. And so we want to provide that space here at Midtown for spiritual wanderers, and skeptics, and deconstructors, and those sorts of folks. And I love all of the people who have passed through those groups. They are my people. I love those groups. But in all my conversations with spiritual wanderers over the years, I also have noticed a trend. Sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes, they're more interested in some broad theological debate than they are in finding living water. Sometimes they have huge water balls built up with finely tuned arguments that they got from their incredibly deep research on TikTok and podcasts.

And while all of those topics are important to discuss, if you've been with me in those groups, I love it. It's a joy. They're also sometimes a deflection. They're a way of responding to Jesus by not dealing with him, and dealing with the church, or dealing with people who I disagree with. They're not a way of responding to his claims and person and power. They're a way of avoiding what our souls really need. And as I was thinking about this woman showing up to this meeting, and thinking about myself and our community, I was trying to get at, like, what are the reasons that we do this? What are the primary reasons we deflect in the ways we do? And there's a few that I think are true for most of us. Sometimes we deflect because we aren't actually that interested in knowing and following Jesus. Sometimes we like the idea of being spiritual more than the lived practice of it. We love running to a good theological debate or a spiritual book to feel good, but we're more interested in ideas than practice. We want the dessert and not the vegetables. So things like daily prayer or real commitment to community or real sacrifice of our desires for the sake of the others, that's not really what we're into. We just want to explore some interesting ideas where it fits into our schedule. We get things off the person we deflect. Other times we deflect because we're actually just really comfortable where we are, because we're habit -based creatures. And especially in America, we don't like when our lives are shaken up too much. So sure, we can talk about Jesus from a distance, so long as it doesn't really force us to change. So give me five keys to a healthy marriage or five tips on living my best life now. Give me something that I can just add in to my already comfortable way of being because God forbid I need to change. We deflect away from lives that are entirely shaped by Jesus because we kind of just like where we are. And ultimately, I think the major reason that we deflect, friends, in our lives is because we don't want to do the hard work of self -evaluation. We don't really want to uncover what might be in us, the false idols that we're consumed with or the areas that might need to change. We love a distant Jesus, a theoretical Jesus, because that Jesus won't confront us. That Jesus won't get too personal. That Jesus won't show us how he might need to change. And there's just one problem with that Jesus, friends. He doesn't exist. He's not real. He's a figment of our comfort -obsessed culture. And the real Jesus, the one who is alive and working, living and active right now, that Jesus who loves us, he will call things out sometimes. He's gonna graciously expose things in us like a great friend would or like a great spouse or sibling or parent would. He's gonna go with us to the depths of our souls and see what's there. And he's gonna walk into the dark parts of our hearts that we might even want to forget about. And he only ever does that because he longs to see us grow into the people we're made to be. He only ever does that out of love, to see us thrive. That's what he's doing with this woman here. And remember, he's doing it graciously. When she deflects the conversation of worship, Jesus actually goes there with her. He knows it's a deflection but he says, okay, you wanna talk about worship? We can talk about worship. It has nothing to do with whether you're worshiping in Jerusalem or here on Mount Gerizim. It has nothing to do with Hillsong or denominations or liturgies or what you do with your hands. Those are all the wrong arguments. They may be important, they're not the main thing. True worship, Jesus says, is always done in spirit and truth. That's what's core. That's What Jesus is saying, friends, is that all our deflections are actually getting in the way of us receiving living water. And he says that the way we can really deeply be transformed by him, the way that our lives can really change into these vibrant spiritual ways of being is by true worship. And worship is a word that's been muddied in recent years. I know it has for me and I think in the US in particular it has. For most of us, we think of worship as a very niche genre of music and music. You guys know the genre. Four chords, a generic storm analogy mixed in, some spiritual sounding track playing in the background. We, in America, have turned worship into a marketing tool, an enterprise. And the result is that many of us think worship is very narrowly about singing a song from that specific genre. But the truth is that worship is so much more than that. To worship means to make someone or something the very center point of my life and to allow that person or thing to shape my thoughts and words and behaviors. To worship means to make someone or something the very center point of my life and to allow that person or thing to shape my thoughts, my words, my behaviors. In short, what you worship is what you give the most worth to in your life. That's actually where the word comes from. In Old English, it was a mashing together of worth and ship. Ship is a suffix which denoted authority or status. Worthship. It's like saying worship with a lisp. Right? Worthship. It's the thing that has highest worth in our lives. Which means that everyone, every human, whether they're religious or not, is worshiping. Everyone makes something the main thing in their lives. And you don't actually have to listen to a pastor to hear that. There's a great agnostic author named David Foster Wallace, brilliant guy, who wrote about this. He said, in the day -to -day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. So friends, if you want to see what you worship, don't just look at the songs you sing. Look at what is most core in your life. Look at the life you live. Our money shows us what we worship. Our work shows us what we worship. How we treat our neighbors and the poor shows us what we worship. In fact, throughout the scriptures, this is emphasized. There are lots of people who sing worship to God, but whose lives sing worship to another person or thing. The prophet Jeremiah actually writes about this. In Jeremiah chapter seven, he's speaking to the people of Judah who have gone completely off the rails in their understanding of God and practicing of the way that God has called them to live. And so he stands outside of the temple, their church, and is yelling at everyone who are flocking in to sing songs. He's saying, don't trust the deceptive words you're about to sing because you are neglecting the poor, the refugee, the orphan, the widow. That is, you may be singing to God in here, but your lives are not worshiping because worship without justice isn't worship. They're worshiping nation or religion or their own security, something else. They're not worshiping the God of the universe. As Tim Keller put it, the world is not divided between people who worship and people who don't. The world is divided into people who worship things that will distort their life and people who worship the only object worthy of the adoration of our soul.

See, Jesus actually is using this woman's deflection to worship as an opportunity to draw her into deeper self -reflection. He's just exposed, just before this, that she is worshiping men, placing her worth and identity and value into what men say about her and their approval of her. And not only that, she's using her religion, now, her place of worship, as a cover to bury what she's really worshiping. She's missing living water and everything and she's covering it up with her religion. And so, like the good prophet that he is, Jesus directs this woman beyond her false worship, beyond her excuses, to true worship. That's what prophecy does. A prophecy is criticism based on hope. A prophet will point out what's wrong, but never to push people into despair. Prophets always point out what's wrong in order to point them to a new, right way of being. And so, in his conversation with this woman, that's what Jesus does. But he also points her to the right way of being. He points her to true worship. I think there's three quick things we see. If we want to become people who actually can receive living water, we've got to learn what Jesus has to say about worship in our lives. There's three things we see about what worship is and isn't in this passage. The first thing we see is that worship is holistic, not selective. In verse 22, Jesus points out to the woman that the Samaritans have not really practiced a form of holistic worship. And to be fair, Jesus also had some strong words about his own people on this subject. But here, he's talking to her. He says, you worship what you do not know. That is, you worship incompletely. You worship in ignorance of the truth. And historically, that was actually true of the Samaritan people. They took portions of the Bible and history that they liked and affirmed their biases and they kind of threw out the rest. They came up with all sorts of deflections and excuses to avoid actually fully committing to this way of being that God had called them to, that Yahweh had called them to. And they used the Bible to affirm their own views. They meshed together with some other views that didn't really work that well. And friends, the truth is that we often do the same things in our spiritual lives. It's actually a really common trend in our day. We live in a world of coat rack spirituality. We come to religions and we see a bunch of the beliefs kind of hanging on a rack and we say, well, I like that one and that one feels good to me. And so we put on an outfit and we create our own faith. Coat rack spirituality. So, the result is an outfit that actually really worships ourselves. Our biases, our preferences, our present cultural outlook. And religion has to come to our terms. Selective worship, friends, is really worship of self. And it's at the expense of God's holistic, transformative presence. And the dangers of that approach throughout history are manifold. It's really hard for us to see it kind of in our tunnel vision cultural space. But we need to look through history to see how dangerous this sort of selective worship is.

So, with the early American slave owners, for instance. Back then, they actually liked when their slaves read the Bible because it inspired their slaves to work harder. But there was just this pesky thing about God's liberation of slaves all throughout the Bible. It's like a running theme. Super weird. So, they're like, well, we don't want the slaves to read that sort of thing, right? We want them to keep working but we don't want them to read about God's liberation. So, let's just cut out those parts. They cut out the entire book of Exodus, which is a story of God liberating his people from slavery. Those were called slave Bibles. The slave owners were saying, I worship God just selectively. I worship a God that benefits my economic and racial advantage. Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers in the U .S., did something similar. He was kind of a classic naturalist enlightenment thinker, which means he didn't believe in the supernatural realities at all. He believed that God maybe created the world at the beginning but then kind of stepped back and let it all go. But he really liked some of the moral teachings of the Bible. He was like, how do I square these moral things that I really like that Jesus said with the miracles that I think couldn't have happened? And so to solve the problem, he took a pair of scissors and cut out all the miracles. Those didn't happen. I'm just going to take what I like from this. You can actually go and see Thomas Jefferson's Bible in D .C. right now. He said, I worship God just selectively. I worship a God that already aligns with my predetermined views. That's coat rack spirituality. That's not true worship. True worship of God receives the fullness of who God is. Just and merciful. Loving and clear. Ultimate and intimate. It allows the fullness of God to shape who we are, which means true worship will constantly return to the scriptures and particularly to Jesus. We know that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. So if you ever wonder what God is like or who God is, just look at Jesus. Spend time with Jesus. That's where true worship will be born for us. It is holistic, not selective. The second thing, it's expansive, not limited. Notice the Samaritan woman's emphasis on place in this passage. You worship there, we worship here. But Jesus' response is telling. He says, Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. A little note on John's Gospel for you. When Jesus uses the term the hour, he's often referring to his own life, death, and resurrection and what those things actually spark in the world. So, that hour was all about the kingdom of God. That's what Jesus said he had come to bring. His mission was to bring lasting peace and joy and justice to our world so that we might experience them now and into eternity. That's what eternal life, living water, meant for Jesus, for us and for all people. He was bringing the kingdom of heaven to everyone everywhere, which meant that when he arrived, things like a holy place, holy mountain, holy location, holy object, they weren't the main point. And that, by the way, wasn't actually a new insight. Back in the Old Testament, when Solomon dedicated Israel's temple, he made it clear that no location was big enough to house God, that this was a specified place, but God was moved far beyond the temple. The real truth is that those things are signposts to God. That's why Jesus here says that God is spirit. God is not confined to things, which means if we limit our worship to a thing, like work or relationship or worldly comfort or our theological framework, we actually degrade God and harm our soul. Finite things cannot quench our infinite desire, and the tragic results of our worship of things are all over our world, friends. Broken life after broken life after broken life. Worship your money and you'll find yourself never quite satisfied with what you have or you'll become anxious about losing what you have. Worship your body or beauty and you'll die a million deaths with every new wrinkle and every joint that aches. Worship a relationship and you'll find yourself eventually let down. We need to remember this especially in the church because the church has a propensity to elevate relationships sometimes, to elevate marriage to a degree that it shouldn't be elevated. Friends, if you ever want to tear down the myth of the idol of marriage, just go ahead and have a conversation with my wife about being married to me. It will tear that myth right down for you. Worship cannot be limited to things, but it also can't be limited to places. Worship is not just about a church or finding God in nature or in a particular area of our homes. True worship to encounter and nearness to God does not require a place. True worship finds God in every place. Which means in Christ we should expect to experience God anywhere at any time. We can worship God in every interaction we have because it's in loving our neighbor and being loved by our neighbor that we experience the love of God. We can worship God in every seemingly tedious work day because we know that God's kingdom is breaking into the world at every moment and that our work actually helps steward that kingdom. We can worship God in even the darkest places of our lives because we know that God has gone to the darkest places to bring redemption and restoration.

Worship means walking through our lives in wide -eyed wonder of where God might show up, of where Christ might be leading us in love with the expectation that my ordinary, everyday life is where God will reveal himself. A great poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it this way. She said, Earth's crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God, but only he who takes off his shoes. The rest sit round it and pick blackberries and dab their faces unawares.

And so, because God is spirit, friends, because he's not confined to things or places, our worship, Jesus says, should be in spirit. The way we worship God is through the giving of the whole of our spirit to him, not just material things. Worship is the giving of the deepest parts of ourselves, our deepest affections and longings to God. It means letting our dreams be shaped by his dreams. Letting us long for what he longs for. Loving the way that he loves. Maintaining such a deep and intimate friendship with God that we become changed into people who live like Jesus did. Worship is having the iciest parts of our hearts melted by the character and the work and the person of Jesus. Which means a great prayer of worship every day, friends, is immediately upon waking up. Just say this. Good morning, Jesus. What are you up to today? Where do you want me to join you? Good morning, Jesus. What are you up to today? Where do you want me to join you? We give our deepest desires, our deepest affections to him and allow him to shape us. But notice, Jesus says true worship is in spirit. But it's not just in spirit. It's in spirit and truth here. And that second part, worship and truth, points to Jesus' final claim about what worship is and isn't. Worship is urgent, not negligible. At the end of their conversation, they've had this big, winding talk about living water and worship spaces and the woman comes up with one final deflection. She's heard all the things that Jesus has said, all these remarkable claims about who God is and who she is, and her final comment is telling. She says, I know the Messiah's coming. When he comes, he'll proclaim all things to us. Even after all of that conversation, she's still keeping things at a distance. She's saying, look, this is getting a little deep and it's probably beyond either of our capacities to really fully grasp any of this. After all, none of us can really know truth. So we'll just have to wait for the Messiah. He'll come and sort it out and until then, we can't really know what's true or what's not true, what's right, what's wrong. That's her final deflection. She says, it's all just a mystery because she wants to avoid having to actually make a decision to change her life. She's putting off her decision. She's deferring to a later date. She can't really know until the Messiah comes. Oftentimes, friends, that's our posture when it comes to giving our lives to God. We defer making Jesus the central thing in our lives because you can't really know what's true. It's all just religious speculation. You've got your truth. I've got my truth. Or, you know, I can figure that out next week or tomorrow. That's not quite urgent now. So I'll stick with my nice, convenient life that I built for myself. I'll keep my spirituality nice and speculative and I'll let religion be a therapeutic addition to my own life. But notice Jesus' response to her. His words won't let this conversation become negligible. His words demand a response. When she says, the Messiah will show us all things, Jesus replies without hesitation, I am he, the one who is speaking with you. Messiah, you say? I'm him. Greek scholars point out here that Jesus actually just simply says, I am, which is a callback to God's revelation to Moses of his name and identity in Exodus, the God of the universe, ultimate truth and reality, simply saying, I am. This is the radical claim of Christianity. Truth is not some distant, unknowable idea that we can only speculate about. Truth is a person. Truth has entered the world. Truth is knowable in flesh and blood in Jesus. Which means worship is never something we can just defer to tomorrow. It's not negligible. It's urgent. It's urgent because the truth has come. Deflections, theological disagreements, preferences, lack of knowledge, none of those can be excuses for us any longer because the truth, the I am, has entered the world. The one for whom our souls deeply long. The one that you've been searching for without even realizing you've been searching for him is here. And he speaks patiently to every one of us just as he does to her. He says, my beloved, those other things you worship, those things you made the top priority, they're not going to quench your thirst. You've got an infinite inner thirst that can only be quenched by an infinite spring of life. So enough deflecting. Enough putting it off. What you need is here. I am is here.

Friends, don't deflect any longer. Don't delay any longer. Set aside your selective picking and choosing, whatever it is for you. Set aside the limited objects of worship that will let you down. And make the top thing the top thing again. Come to Christ to satisfy your longing. It's in him that your heart can truly, deeply sing. It's in him that we get a drink of the life we're looking for. Come and drink with me, friends. Let's pray.