Thank you. Jesus provides us with timeless and definitive instruction about what is acceptable worship.

First and foremost, he says, it needs to be grounded in the truth of God's word.

Today on Truth for Life, we'll find out how we go from merely attending a church service to encountering the living God.

Alistair Begg is teaching from the Gospel of John, chapter 4, beginning at verse 19.

Thank you. John chapter 4 beginning at verse 19. Very helpful if in terms of our declaring, our understanding of what God has done for us in Christ,

we actually use language that the New Testament can countenance.

Because then the people listening can then look and say, oh yeah, that makes sense.

Come meet a man who told me everything I did. Can this not be the Christ? So the testimony is,

I used to worship myself and I worship Jesus. Now, as Jesus makes that clear there, it's equally

clear in verse 20 that there is a measure of

confusion on the part of the woman. And the woman here speaks in a way that has a kind of

contemporary ring to it. She poses two alternatives, neither of which are ultimately acceptable

in that they are both inadequate. And around these two

options, all of our error and confusion is gathered. Our fathers worshipped on the mountain,

Gerezim, the Samaritan worship was sincere, it was even enthusiastic, but it was devoid of truth.

You Jews claim that you worship in Jerusalem. The Jerusalem worship was full of truth, but it was devoid largely of sincerity of heart.

Remember Jesus said, quoting from all these people draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

So she said, how do I make sense of this? Where do I go? Because up on Gerizim, they seem to be

really into it. But it's sort of shaky. Down in Jerusalem, it's really solid, but they don't seem to

be into it. One of my friends in London refers to the two extremes as the carnival on the one

hand and the crematorium on the other. So you go one place and it's a carnival, you go other

places a crematorium. And the great journey is to try and settle neither for the chaos of the

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