Right now, the Most High God is being worshiped by every kind of person the world has ever seen. Victims of suffering are finding peace and restoration in the name of Christ, and the powerful and comfortable are learning humility and obedience from the Spirit. Our Christian brothers and sisters are secretly meeting to study the Word in China, encountering Jesus in dreams in Iran, being healed by the Holy Spirit in Nigeria, and fighting for social justice in India. Let no one tell you this is only a white man’s religion, or a poor man’s, or anything like that. In fact, Christianity is the only significant movement in human history that has infiltrated every single global culture.
This is a radical change from everyone’s idea of worship before Jesus; people worshiped the gods of whatever land they were from. But the one true God is one, and people from two rival nations, and then from all nations, were about to turn to him together. This is what Jesus announced to the Samaritan woman at the well: the hostility between Jews and Samaritans was over, because they were about to unify around Jesus. And the same applies for true believers from hostile nations today—we, fellow true believers, are unified to them in one church!
So what makes us true believers? Hear it from Jesus: Spirit and truth. Our mind and our heart, our thinking and our feeling, our wisdom and our love, our academic study and our emotional singing, all come together and are given fully to the same God. One should not be emphasized over the other though! John Piper writes this: “Truth without emotion produces dead orthodoxy and a church full of artificial admirers. On the other hand, emotion without truth produces an empty frenzy and cultivates shallow people.” Instead, for every worshiper around the world, the same Word of God holds all things together in truth, and the same Holy Spirit stirs us to worship with joy.
What Jesus introduced to the woman at the well was a global family of believers who raise a joyful noise of worship to the Father, together with one voice. From the Pharisee to the tax collector, from the people in the high rises to the people under the highways, believers from every nation, color, background, and language, every believer is a member of that great family. This is who we are, and this is our calling: worship with truth, worship in the Spirit, and worship alongside your brothers and sisters from all around the world.
