Lesson 6: The Lord’s Day Worship

After becoming a Christian through the process of faith by repenting of your sins, confessing faith in Jesus as the Son of God and Lord of your life, and getting washed in the blood of Jesus through water immersion, the NEXT step in your new life, is worshiping God in spirit and truth. Because you are grateful for salvation, and because you are commanded to worship in spirit and truth. And “in spirit and truth worship” is both a physical and a spiritual act. 

Worship is both a physical and a spiritual act because you are a physical and a spiritual being. 1 Thessalonians 5:23: “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

So, you are a physical and a spiritual being, and you must learn to worship God in your spirit, through your body, in the forms that God commands, or according to truth. This is why Jesus says in John 4:24: “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and truth. 

• In spirit means to connect with God through the non-physical rational part of your being.
• In truth means to conform to what is real, genuine, and free of lies and deception. 

And as the Theological Dictionary says, “We live in truth as well as worship according to correct doctrine or truth” (Kittel). With that said, let us take a look at the simple yet powerful forms of New Testament worship.

The day of worship.

The Jews were more accustomed to staying home on Saturdays to rest, as they were commanded to do under the Law of Moses (Exodus 16:22-30, 20). During the Babylonian captivity, far away from the Temple in Jerusalem, they developed the synagogue meetings on Mondays, Thursday and Saturdays. When Jesus was on earth, as a Jew, He often gathered with other Jews in the Synagogue on Saturdays (Luke 4: 16, John 9:22). But the Law of Moses, and all its laws, including the weekly sabbaths, served their religious purpose until John, Jesus and the Kingdom of God came (Luke 16:16, Colossians 2:16-17, Acts 2:42, 47). 

Jesus rose from the grave for our salvation on the first day of the week (John 20:1). After that, He met a few times with His disciples on Sunday, the first day of the week with His disciples (John 20:19, 26).

When the Holy Spirit came, in Acts 2, He started the church of Christ on the first day of the week.

• Acts 2:1: “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” Pentecost was a Jewish Feast Day that always fell on a Sunday.
• Acts 2:38-41, 47: “Praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved.”

After that, Christians gathered with their local congregations of the Church every Sunday to worship, just like we do now. In the beginning they did not have established “church buildings” as we are so blessed to have today, so they worshipped in their homes and in other buildings that would allow them to meet.

Decades after the beginning of the church on a Sunday, Sunday became known as the LORD’S DAY. This is because the resurrection of Christ was and still is the most important thing to ever happen on the first day of the week, after the first day of creation (Revelation 1:5-10).

• Revelations 1:5: “And from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To Him who loves us and released us from our sins by His blood.”
• Revelations 1:10: “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like the sound of a trumpet,”

Along with Sunday been His resurrection day, Jesus gives us two additional reasons why He commanded the church to worship God on Sundays. Both reasons are associated with Jesus, His resurrection and our salvation:

1. Jesus truly became the Son of God with power on the day of His resurrection: Romans 1:4.
2. Jesu became the chief corner stone of the church: Acts 4:11

For those three reasons, as you read the book of Acts and the instructive letters of Paul to the church, you will notice that the disciples gathered together on Sundays, at a time that they all agreed on.

• Acts 20:7: “On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul began talking to them, intending to leave the next day, and he prolonged his [a]message until midnight.”
• 1 Corinthians 16: 1-2: “Now concerning the collection for the saints, as I directed the churches of Galatia, so you are to do as well. ² On the first day of every week, each of you is to put aside and save as he may prosper, so that no collections need to be made when I come.”

And when they came together as the church on the first day of the week, we see them offering worship to God through 5 physical expressions of their faith.

• They ate the Lord’s supper together: Acts 20:7, 1 Corinthians 11:23-34.
• They gave an offering together: 1 Corinthains 16:1-2
• They sang praises to God together: Ephesians 5:19, Colossians 3:16
• They prayed together: 1 Corinthians 14:15
• They were uplifted by the word: Acts 20:7

These worship activities were ordered by Jesus for the church, so that each Christian could participate in every worship activity.

As a new Christian, you will notice that not all your new brothers and sisters in Christ take worshipping on the Lord’s Day as faithfully as Jesus commands. You must not follow their unfaithful example. This is why we are reminded in Hebrews 10:24-26: “And let’s consider how to encourage one another in love and good deeds, ²⁵ not abandoning our own meeting together, as is the habit of some people, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near. ²⁶ For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins.”

Please notice that Jesus will judge you as forsaking worship, when you willfully make plans to do things, other than gathering with the church on the first day of the week to offer praise and worship to God.

Yes, God understands that life will prevent us from gathering with the church in emergency situations. And so Jesus gives us three occasions that may prevent us from gathering with the church to worship. During those situations, Jesus will not judge you as one who is willfully forsaking the gathering of the church for worship.

In our next lesson, we will talk more about how to remain faithful to God in worship and what you actually do, when you worship God in your spirit, through your body.

Until next time, keep reading, keep praying, and keep learning and growing in Christ.

LESSON 5

Works Cited

Gerhard Kittel, Gerhard Friedrich, and Geoffrey William Bromiley, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1985), 876.

(c) Richard Nepaul 2023

THIS SERIES IS PRESENTLY ON A BREAK UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

Lesson 5: Learning to Worship in Spirit and Truth

If you can read and write, ride a bicycle, or cook, it is because someone taught you or you took the time to learn how to do it well. In similar ways, worshiping God takes some learning, because Worship is a learned response to God’s love. While you always felt a need to worship your Creator like the Athenians in Acts 17, you did not wake up knowing exactly who this God is, or how, when, and why He desires you to be saved and to worship Him.

It was when you learned from the Bible, who God is and when and how He wants you to worship and serve Him, that you finally begun to learn more correctly how to express all the feelings you were having towards God.

In similar ways, you will not know how to worship God in the ways that God desires, until you open the Bible and learn what the law of the New Covenant says about when and how to worship God.  Remember from lesson 1, that as a new creature in Christ, you will need to relearn a number of things. Perhaps you will have to relearn what is right about morality because the world taught you to accept wrong as right. So it is with even religious things. You may need to relearn what is right worship from the ways you were taught from a previous religion, from a previous church, or even from your parents.

So in this lesson, we will begin our study of “Learning to worship in spirit and truth,” so that you can become a true worshipper of God. We will begin by looking at the basics of what it means to worship God in spirit and truth from John 4:23-24.

John 4:23-24

“But a time is coming, and even now has arrived, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” (NASB). 

Let us take a look at the meanings of the words worship, spirit, truth and God. Then we will consider their relationship to becoming a true worshiper of God.  

Worship means “to express in attitude or gesture one’s complete dependence on or submission to a high authority figure, (fall down and) worship, do obeisance to prostrate oneself before, do reverence to, welcome respectfully.” (William Arndt, 882).

Spirit can mean a few things. According to the Greek-English Lexicon, spirit can mean life or soul. 

• Life. Breath is a sign of life, and by way of the idea of the breath of life, pneúma comes to be used for life or living creatures. 
• Soul. As the principle of life, pneúma means much the same as psychḗ [translated as soul]. Bound to the body in life, it escapes it with the last breath and returns to the ethereal sphere (James 2:26, Ecclesiastes 12:7).
• In spirit therefore means to connect with God through the non-physical rational part of your being. The spirit that God gave you to bring your body of clay to life. I like to think of my spirit as the person I talk to when I think to myself or even talk to myself. I know he is there, but I can’t see or touch him. He is my consciousness. He is always concerned about my relationship with God, and He is always telling me to please God. As Jesus told the disciples, “…the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41 NASB). Your spirit always wants to please God, and you will have to retrain your body to follow your spirit, even to worship. 

God is deity, the Creator of heaven and earth and all things (Genesis 1).  But it helps to always remember that God is Spirit. This means that God does not need to be represented by an image made with hands. It also helps to remember that when God created you, He brought you to life by blowing His spirit into you (Genesis 1:26-27). This is why we are also spirit beings. 

Truth: is “that which has certainty and force” as a valid norm (with a hint of what is genuine) (Gerhard, Kittel). He also points out that “The righteous base their attitude to God on incontestable truth and practice truthfulness as God himself is truthful” (Gerhard, Kittel).  

In truth therefore means to conform to what is real, genuine, and free of lies and deception. “We live in truth as well as worship according to correct doctrine or truth” (John 4:24,1 John 1:6) (Kittel).

Worship must conform to God’s truth. As the definitions show, worship is far more than expressing emotions in ways that you feel comfortable. Worship must conform to God’s truth, or what God accepts as valid “norms.” This is very important, because some religions and churches have trained the world to think that anything that makes you feel “spiritual” can be offered to God as worship. This is a spiritually dangerous way to feel about worshipping God. Because everything in life, from eating food to partaking in sensual pleasure, to driving a car, to running, makes somebody feel spiritual.

Under the first covenant with the Jews, the Law of that covenant, the Law of Moses, specified what the accepted worship norms were. Take some time to read anywhere between Exodus 25 to Leviticus 25 and you will see the “truth” of when and how the Jews were commanded to worship God. (Joshua 24:14, Isaiah 1:10-17).  The Jews needed to worship God sincerely in specific ways. They needed to worship God in their human spirits through the physical forms of worship that God authorized. But throughout their history, many of them wanted to “feel” more spiritual, so they tried to adopt the worship norms of idolatry into the worship of God, not fully realizing why they wanted to do that, was because they wanted to follow what makes them feel good about doing what pleases themselves and not God.

Where can I find the truth for worship today?  Recall from lesson one, that Jesus commanded the Apostles to teach all those who were baptized, all the things that they would need to observe (Matthew 28:20). And again, as we had discussed in lesson four, that the law of the New Covenant in Christ is called the Apostles’ Doctrine or the teachings of the Apostles. And the 3000 souls who were baptized on the day of Pentecost “continually devoted themselves to the apostles’ teachings” (Acts 2:42 NASB).

After learning what to do to be saved, and after becoming Christians, all the Jewish new coverts and the pagan new converts in the first century, had to relearn how to worship God the right way, differently from how they used to worship God or their gods. So please do not feel intimidated when you sit with your new church family and things feel a bit strange or different. Afterall, you are new in Christ, and as a newborn, you will have teething pains and you will feel uncomfortable as you seek to grow in Christ, and as you seek to become a true worshiper.

Again, Jesus says: John 4:23-24 “But a time is coming, and even now has arrived, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” (NASB). 

In our next lesson, we will begin our step by step study of when and how the first Christians worshiped God “in spirit and truth,” so that you can also learn how to worship God “in spirit and truth.”

Until next time, keep reading, keep praying, and keep learning and growing in Christ.

Lesson 6

Works Cited

Gerhard Kittel, Gerhard Friedrich, and Geoffrey William Bromiley, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1985), 876.

William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 882.

(c) Richard Nepaul 2023