In John 4 the worship to the Father, the worship in the dispensing of God, is related to drinking the living water (vv. 10, 14). To contact God the Spirit with our spirit is to drink of the living water, and to drink of the living water is to render real worship to God. To expound John 4:24 we need John 4:14. We need to drink of the living water to worship the Father in spirit and in truthfulness. If we do not drink the living water, we do not drink of the Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13), we have no experience of God, and God is not dispensed into us.

Without drinking the living water, we cannot have a subjective worship in the divine dispensing. We can have only the Jewish kind of objective worship to an objective God as the Creator. Today our worship is subjective in the dispensing of God. Our worship is our experience of drinking the living water, the Spirit. In order to have the worship in the dispensing of God, we need to drink of the Spirit so that God may dispense Himself into our being. This is the new worship revealed in the New Testament.

Even today much of the worship in Christianity is actually in the principle of the Jewish worship, the worship of the Creator who is far away from them. Our worship, however, is not merely to the Creator but to the Father, who has regenerated us and who has put Himself into our being. Now our worship is subjective with God—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit—dispensed into us.

This kind of worship can be practiced mostly in the Lord's table meeting, because in the Lord's table meeting, after we partake of the bread and the cup, the Lord takes the lead to bring us to the Father. The Lord leads us back to the Father in the Spirit. Here we must remember Ephesians 2:18, which reveals that our worship is through the Son, in the Spirit, and to the Father. This is fully portrayed in Luke 15 with the parables of the shepherd, the woman, and the father. It is through the Son's seeking as the shepherd and through the Spirit's enlightening as the woman that the prodigal son comes back to the Father. Therefore, this coming back to the Father is in the divine dispensing of the Divine Trinity. The Son and the Spirit are wrought into the returning son. This is the true worship in God's dispensing.