The focus of this lesson can be expressed in the following statement: the worshipping of the Father should be with the Son and in the Spirit (John 4:23-24). We worship the Father with the Son as the reality and in the Spirit who dwells within our spirit. John 4:23-24 can be fulfilled in our worship to the Father at the Lord's table meeting.

We need to consider the context of John 4:23-24 so that we can understand these verses properly. In verse 20 the Samaritan woman talked with the Lord, saying, "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, yet you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men must worship." This refers back to Deuteronomy 12, where God ordained that His people worship Him in the unique place chosen by God and with the rich produce of the good land so that they would not be empty-handed when they appeared before God. All of the Israelites had to come to the unique place with the rich produce, the rich offerings, of the good land.

The Lord Jesus indicated to the Samaritan woman that this worship was for the Old Testament age. Then He said, "An hour is coming, and it is now..." (v. 23). In other words, the Lord was saying, "Now the time has come." This means that the age had changed. Now in this new age God the Father is seeking after a kind of worship that is in spirit and in reality.

Here the spirit is our human spirit, and today our human spirit is the unique place where God's dwelling place is. This is based upon Ephesians 2:22, which says that God's habitation today is in our spirit. Since our spirit is the place where God's habitation is, our spirit is today's Jerusalem. We all need to worship God here. This is the unique place. If all Christians would worship God in their spirit, there would be no divisions. Our spirit is the uniting place, the unique center of God's worship, typified by Jerusalem.

We also need to worship God in truthfulness. Truthfulness denotes the divine reality becoming man's genuineness and sincerity (which are the opposite of the hypocrisy of the immoral Samaritan worshipper) for the true worship of God. The divine reality is Christ as the reality of all the offerings of the Old Testament. Christ is the reality of the rich produce of the good land for our offering.

In order to understand John 4:23-24 properly we have to look at the type in Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy we see the unique place with all the offerings. Now the Lord says that the unique place is our spirit, and the produce we offer today is not the produce of Canaan but all the riches of Christ. Thus, the unique place is our spirit and the reality is Christ Himself with all His riches. When we partake of Christ as our reality, He becomes the reality within us. This reality within us then becomes our genuineness and sincerity in which we worship God the Father with the worship that He seeks. When we follow the Lord to worship the Father at the Lord's table meeting, we worship the Father with Christ as the rich offerings in the spirit, that is, in our spirit mingled with the Holy Spirit. This is the real worship to God the Father according to His economy.