Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis - What is Worship? Jesus Explains

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

What is worship, really? Most people say "singing" — but Jesus has a very different answer.This episode is brought to you by our ministry partner Accountable2You. Join thousands living in freedom with nothing to hide, and visit https://accountable2you.com/dialin. Use our unique code DIALIN to get 25% off your first year of an Accountable2You Personal or Family Plan In John 4, Jesus sits down with the last person anyone expected: a Samaritan woman with a broken past. And in that conversation, he gives the clearest definition of worship in all of Scripture — in spirit and in truth.Here's the problem: most churches pick a lane.Some go all-in on the spiritual experience — the emotion, the atmosphere, the "encounter." Others go all-in on doctrine and truth — deep teaching, sound theology, the Word. And both camps look at the other and think they've got it figured out.But Jesus says they're two sides of the same coin.Spirit without truth leads to hysteria. Truth without spirit leads to stoicism — more morgue than a meeting with the living God. Real, biblical worship refuses to separate the two.In this episode we unpack:✅ Why worship is far more than a song✅ What "spirit" and "truth" actually mean — and why you need both✅ How superficial teaching always produces superficial worship✅ How the most rejected woman in the story became the first evangelist✅ What God actually thinks about your worship📖 John 4:16–42

How you feel in worship is less important than how God feels about our worship and he wants to be in spirit and truth. The response to someone being changed by God is worship. And we know that it is possible to go through the motions without any passion of our heart. So worship that Jesus is after, and we see this in Malachi, is from the depths of our soul. And yet, unlike much of the worship in the contemporary church today, true worship, is never manipulated. I hear the word encounter a lot these days, but no one encounters God without encountering the truth,

both at the corporate level and the personal level. And I think sometimes people kind of pick their lane. We're gonna be the truth church, or we're gonna be the Spirit Church, but you have to be both of those things with gusto in order for it to be a biblical one. Hank, how we doing? I'm doing great, Johnny.

How are you doing? As you know, because you're wearing it, we are featuring New Dilein merch that's gonna be available June 15th. is that? How are you like? This is the best version yet. Yeah, and we got hats. Come on, camo. This one will put your head. A hundred percent. Come on. Hey, well, we're picking up in a conversation where we left off in our previous episode. In John chapter four, Jesus is having a dialogue with the last person on earth you would ever expect him to talk to. In John chapter three,

Jesus has a conversation with the most respected and the most religious man in Israel. And then the scene shifts in John chapter four as Jesus has a conversation with the most respected and the most religious man in Israel. And then the scene shifts. as Jesus has a conversation with the most immoral, rejected, despised, shameful person that you could possibly fathom, and that is a Samaritan woman. Now remember, the Jews despised Samaritans. The Samaritans were a group of racial and religious half-breeds. They had forsaken the true worship of Yahweh, and they had formed this syncretistic way of worship, of combining Gentile worship with the worship of Yahweh, and to insult someone was to call them a Samaritan. One of the common prayers that the Jews offered at the time was, Lord, do not remember the Samaritans in the resurrection. You mentioned it last time, but this wasn't Auburn, Alabama.

This was deep-seated animosity and hatred, but there's something you ought to know about Jesus. He isn't confined and jump in here to the so-called racial or religious barriers of expectation, meaning that, as we talked about last time, there's people in our life that we go, hey, they're right for the gospel. All they're missing is Jesus. They're just one click away, and after that,

the whole life will be perfect. But Jesus goes to the last person on earth you would expect to receive the message of the gospel, and he says, this is the exact person I have to talk to. Absolutely, and we're moving quickly here, but this is kind of part two of a prior conversation. We're jumping into the story midpoint. But an important distinction as we dive in is Jesus,

us when we pick up this story, his humanity and his godhead is on full display. So even though he's hungry, he's tired, and he's in need of a drink, he pursues this lady intentionally, thoughtfully, with conviction, and confronts her in the interest of her long-term salvation. You're right on. So this woman comes to the well alone. And one of the things that we talked about last episode is that most women would travel to a well together.

The well was like a community center. They always travel in packs. Yeah, they travel in packs. Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, they all met their wives at a well. So if you're a single guy listening to this episode and you're looking for like, hey, where's the woman that got it? A well, potentially. But this woman is alone.

And you have to ask the question why. Well, it's because of her shame. All Samaritans were rejects. But this is the reject of rejects. And her sin, her immorality, her promiscuity, it's no secret. Her shame is public. And she wants to be alone. And this is really, honestly, Hank, what sin does.

It drives you to greater and greater degrees of isolation. And let me just tell you this. That's exactly the type of person that Jesus came to save. Jesus says, as a great physician, I did not come to save the healthy, but the sick. And when you are brought low to the end of your rope, at that point, when you realize the emptiness and everything else that the world has tried to throw in your way to offer you satisfaction and fulfillment, at that point you are right. for the offer of salvation. Now, salvation in this passage is referred to as living water. Water in the Old Testament was known as a cleanser.

It was a purifier, but not only that, it's also a satisfier. And if I just was going to ask you the question, when or what's the best water that you've ever tasted? Oh, it's when I was thirstiest. Yeah, thirstiest. When I was the most thirsty. No, but you're thinking about like either a football two a day in the hot summer sun, you're coming off the turf

or in the middle of the desert out in Arizona after driving around on a four-wheeler. And that's exactly where this woman is at. She's searching for satisfaction. She's looking for fulfillment, and she's looking to all these other lovers to find something that no individual can give to her. And that's the world that we live in.

Remember that quote by C.S. Lewis, we're all playing in mud pies when the sea is available to us. And so Jesus offers her living water that can satisfy her soul, and he himself is the only one, one that can provide this, and we're picking up in the conversation where we left off. So in verse 16, Jesus tells this woman, go call your husband and come here.

And the woman answered and said, I have no husband. And Jesus said to her, you have correctly said, I have no husband. Now, at times in the Western Church, I think there's a propensity to chase numbers. You know, like this many people came to know the Lord, more than we often declare the whole council of God. Sometimes we want people to pray a prayer and they're in. We'll count them. but before this woman can ever experience the water that Jesus is offering,

she must first be confronted and convicted and repentant over her sin. It's not just that her soul is thirsty. It's that it's sinful. And Christianity begins with an understanding of our need for a savior. And so Jesus is going to reveal the true ingredients of her sinful condition. He says, go and find your husband. And her response is, I have no husband. Now, technically, she's not lying, but she's also not telling the whole truth.

but Jesus displays his omniscience here by saying, okay, you're right. Verse right, verse 18. For you have, he says, you have correctly said, verse 17, I have no husband. For you have had five husbands. And the one whom you have is not your husband. This you have said truly. So he shines the light into the darkness of her soul. And at this moment, all of her ambition to conceal the nature of her true identity were vanquished

in the light of the all-knowing one that she was having. a conversation with. And one of the things that we touched on the last episode that is necessary to repeat here, when Jesus exposes our sin, he's not trying to embarrass us. He's not trying to embarrass or shame this woman just to kind of like... Rubber face. Yeah. He is revealing that he knows what no one else knows. And only when the wound is open here, can he apply the balm that only he can as the great physician. Some people claim to come to Christ all while hanging on to their idols, sex, greed, ambition, materialism, worldliness, whatever it may be. But Jesus is not going after the symptoms here. He's going after the root causes. And so he's going to uncover what maybe

no one else knows, but he himself does. I like what Warren Weirsby says. He says the only way to prepare the soil of the heart for the seed of the gospel is to plow it up with conviction. So she has to come to terms with her morally messy lifestyle. And Jesus is confronting her in that. And he's not trying to just bring her down. He's trying to bring her to himself. Well, and it's kind of an obvious observation when you make it, like we're not going to be ready to see the answer until we admit there's a problem. Like that's a pretty self-evident fact. And yet, I'm thinking personally about all the times I'm not thinking that way when I share the gospel of like, no, but actually I kind of want to skip over that part, the confrontation part, and just hop right into the good news.

Your best life night. Yeah. Absolutely. And even when we're talking about the way that Jesus Jesus talks to different sinners. We mentioned this last time, but as the great physician, Jesus provides different remedies for different diseases. He has a totally different conversation with Nicodemus in John Chapter 3, as he does with this immoral woman in John chapter 4. There are probably a few different types of sinners that the gospel confronts. First of all, the outward rebel, the hedonist.

This is someone that is plunging and jumping and diving into the iniquity of the world. You have, secondly, probably the self-righteous moral person. This is someone that's shiny on the outside, thinking that maybe they can earn their way to God. This is someone that has high moral standards and yet they fall short of the righteousness of God. Then you have someone that's maybe somewhere in the middle. They indulge in iniquity secretly,

but then on the outside, they still appear to be the righteous individual. And maybe there's a line they won't cross. Yeah, there's a line they won't cross. So they justify their goodness and they justify their badness. Some are the prodigal and they're in the pig pen. Some are the older brother thinking, that guy is terrible.

Yeah, totally self-righteous. And then some people who are listening think they are neither. But the point of the scripture is that you are condemned, regardless of the moral bar that you set for yourself. And God sees behind every mask, every single motive, every single individual, and he exposes us in our sin, once again, not to push us away, but to bring us near. As you had into the summer, one of the things that I would highly encourage you to have is some sort of digital accountability on your devices.

The Puritans used to draw our attention to the reality. that an idle mind is the devil's playground, meaning that when we are idle and we have time, we are more vulnerable to temptation. In this regard, I would highly recommend to you accountable to you. It's a purity, accountability software that I use personally and other members of my team do as well. You can go to accountable to you.com slash dial in

and use our code dial in to get 25% off your first year. And you can find out more information there. Find an accountability partner. And as my friend says, accountability is the friend of integrity. And that's our goal to on. honor the Lord when we're alone as we would in front of other people. And so check out accountable with you.com.

And so Jesus says, hey, you're right. You don't have a husband. You've had five. I mean, that's a lot of husbands. And the man that you're now sleeping with, the man that you're living with, he's not your husband at all. And she responds by saying in verse 19, okay, sir, I see that you are a prophet.

So she's not necessarily evading him. But she's starting to think in the realm of religious lines of worship. She's basically saying, okay, I get it. You're a pastor. Verse 20, our fathers, the woman says, worshipped in this holy mountain or worshipped in this mountain. And you people, she's talking about the Jews, say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.

So this type of line, Jesus says, I know everything about what's going on in your life. And she says, okay, I see that you're religious, you're a pastor, you're a prophet. Our fathers used to worship here. She's basically responding, like if you're sharing the gospel with someone who's living in an immoral life, and they say, yeah, I haven't been to church in a while

as the type of thinking that she's saying. So she's basically confessing, I'm not doing what I maybe should, and I know that people used to worship, but I've not really been in my rhythm lately. Well, it's super helpful, because that's actually, at first reading, that's kind of a confusing response to me.

Like, if someone confronted me and told me things that they would have no way of knowing, my instinct wouldn't necessarily be like, oh, yeah, but my ancestors worship on this mountain. But actually, when you put it that way, it is, she's kind of still grasping for a straw of justification. It almost feels like we're panning into this moment, and she's totally caught off guard and wrestling with like something divine is happening here, but she's not totally ready to repent. Yeah, I find out that you're sleeping with a woman and you live in an adulterous lifestyle and you're immoral and you go, I actually grew up in the church and I haven't been in a while. That's the way that she responds.

And Jesus responds to her in verse 21 said, woman, believe me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. Now what's he saying? He's saying, hey, the hour is coming when he dies, the hour of his death, the veil in the temple is going to be torn

and the earth is going to shake. And then God himself is going to highlight with bright colors that the worship of God is no longer relegated to a specific place at a specific time with specific people like the priest, but anybody can worship God. And then he says in verse 22, you worship what you do not know. Now, he says, we worship what we know for salvation is from the Jews.

The Samaritans, they only believed in the first five books of the Bible, so they didn't believe in the prophetic literature nor the Psalms. And so he's saying you're literally worshipping God out of ignorance. You're following God with limited revelation. And he's not attacking the sincerity of the worship that they offer. He is saying that the object of worship, that being God, is unknown to them because they have limited revelation of that God. Contrastly, he says here, the Jews worship inside the stream.

They were worshiping in light of all of the revelation from God and His Word. And this is why Jesus says, salvation is from the Jews. Because even the Gentiles that would come to faith, they had to effectively become a Jew in the sense that they would offer the same sacrifices. They would trust and depend on the fact that God would receive the various sacrifices performed for them by a priest. So they had to become a part of the Jewish system. And then Jesus says this, and this is where I really want to camp. He says, God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

Now, if I was to ask you the question, what is worship? What would you say? I would say singing. Singing, yeah. I mean, that's probably what comes into your head, you know. Guitar, four chords. Yeah, come on. Lord, I lift your name on high.

100%. Jesus is going to talk about worship. And this is important because he's having a conversation with a woman whose life is in the process of being changed. The response to someone being changed by God is worship, and here Jesus is going to define what that even means. It is the same thing as praising God or glorifying God, but it is, and we know this, it is far more than singing. It's our very lives. Now, if you were to ask the question, what is Christian worship? The biblical answer would be it's worship in spirit and truth. Now, this is not two different things that need to be combined. These are two sides of the same.

coin. And so I want to break that down and look first at worship in spirit and then worship in truth. And maybe before we hop to that, I want to make the observation as we keep moving. It's fascinating to watch Jesus's interaction with this lady because, again, I'm just confronted with his directness and clarity of she, oh yeah, I haven't been to church in a while to your earlier point of like putting this in the common vernacular. And he brushes aside, like the religion she's ascribing, she's still missing the mark. And he's driving at the spirit and truth that we're going to talk about here in a second. But I'm just the observation that Jesus isn't being unkind while he's being clear. Yeah, he's being very direct. So Jesus says worship and spirit and truth. Let's talk about that.

First of all, worship is in our spirit. It means to worship God with all that we are. Psalm 103, bless the Lord, all my soul, oh my soul, and all that is within me. That's what it means to worship God in spirit. Mary, the mother of Jesus, articulates this reality in her, Magnificat in Luke 1, she says, my soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit has rejoiced in God, my Savior, meaning everything that's inside of me. Many people worship God with their body. They go to certain places physically and do certain things. They sing a hymn, they pray a prayer, they open a book, they sit in a pew, they light some candles, they do certain things with their body. But true worship, biblical worship engages the spirit, meaning every fiber is wholehearted

and it only happens when our hearts are attuned to the greatness and glory of God. Jesus says that in Matthew 158, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. This is the worship that God is after. And we know that it is possible to go through the motions without any passion of our heart.

So worship that Jesus is after, and we see this in Malachi, is from the depths of our soul. And yet, unlike much of the worship in the contemporary church today, true worship is never manipulated. It's always in response to the other side of the coin, which would be what? Truth. Truth. So our worship needs to be in spirit and truth.

And only when our worship is truthful, can our spirit be rightfully directed? This is, I think, fairly obvious. and yet it's becoming a cultural abnormality. The fount of true worship is not feeling its truth. Sometimes people say we go to this church because their worship is great, but their teaching is meh. But I want people to know something.

If the teaching and preaching of the Word of God is meh, then the worship will never be great. I understand what people are saying when they say that. The music is excellent. But the worship is only going to go as high, as the people go deep in their study and appreciation and love for the truth of God's word. One pastor says superficial teaching produces superficial worship. And I love music.

I started college as a music major. But in a church service, when I preach, we are worshiping. When we read the scripture, we're worshiping. When we're worshiping. When we pray, we're worshiping. Worshipping God and truth means that our worship is in alignment and in accordance with his revelation. And I think sometimes people kind of pick their lane.

We're going to be the truth church or we're going to be the Spirit Church. But you have to be both of those things with gusto in order for it to be a biblical one. And this is, I would just point out, like, this is not a Johnny Art of Annas or, like, a hobby horse. And so far as, like, really high, exalted view of Scripture. And so we always have to kind of shoehorn the importance of Scripture into every other conversation. I would say practically, like biblically, if we think back, there is no precedent throughout all of scripture of God's people, worshipping them, worshipping him with all abandon, detached from his truth. And like even, I'm thinking through the Psalms of part of how they're so potent is

they're declaring these amazing, theologically rich concepts about the Lord. And yet David is doing it with gusto, with every fiber of the spirit. Yeah. And I think there's so much truth in that. I think one of the things that every church needs to realize is that failure in worship doesn't ultimately get traced back to a misplaced chord or a pitchy singer, but wrong thoughts about God. Now, what's the primary objective on a Sunday morning at church? Well, it's for the people to be filled up with the Word of God. Now you might be saying, well, I thought it's to be spirit-filled.

Well, of course it's to be spirit-filled, but you will only ever be spirit-filled if you are scripture and truth-saturated. Worship is never mindless. It can be expressive. I tell people, hey, you don't have to be Mr. Standstill. You can raise your hands. You can close your eyes. You have some liberty and freedom there.

That's great. But worship is never mindless. It is always moored to and anchored in the truth of God's Word. And I just mentioned this, but a lot of churches are in one spectrum or the other, meaning that you have a church that is full of the spirit yet without truth. And if you're full of the spirit without truth, you get hysteria. and yet if you're contrastly full of the truth and void of the spirit, you know, you get stoicism, a boring environment, and you have what seems to be more of a morgue than a meeting place with the living God.

And Jesus says it has to be both of those things. Yeah, and I think the challenge would be even as you're saying, like, churches have a tendency to fall. I would make it more personal. And it's like to me, I need to, like churches are made up of a bunch of individuals that belong in the the family of God. And so we need to respond with vigorous worship and a deep abiding desire to be saturated by his truth. Yeah, and I think sometimes we throw out both individuals and church has kind of judged the authenticity of someone's worship by how electric or experiential the environment may seem. I hear the word encounter a lot these days, but no one encounters God without

encountering the truth, both at the corporate level and the personal level. Alternatively, You could have the right truth, like the Jews, and have dead religion. No awe, no wonder, no adoration, no love. We have a service planning meeting every week for our church. We talk through the week to come. I ask the guys, how do you gauge a successful service of church? And I one time heard it frame this way, well, how do you gauge a good shoe? Well, you know it's a good shoe when you're not conscious of it, meaning it's there.

C.S. Lewis says, as long as you notice and have to count the steps you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don't notice. Good reading becomes possible when you are not consciously thinking about eyes or light or print or spelling. And then he says this, the perfect church service would be one when we were almost unaware of it. Our attention would be totally on God. We should pray that God will use any form of church service in which we happen to be participating to that great and essential end. Meaning, you're not constantly thinking about what's happening on stage or what's happening around you. about God and you become unconscious of your surrounding and your hearts tuned there.

But ultimately, and this is the big idea, how you feel in worship is less important than how God feels about our worship and he wants to be in spirit and truth. And then the conversation continues. And Jesus says, the woman said to him, I know that the Messiah is coming. He who is called the Christ, then when he comes, he will declare all things to us. And then Jesus says this. He says, I who speak to you, am he. And it's an amazing, you know, first time we read of Jesus using this ego and me in John's gospel.

He's telling the woman. And she's saying, hey, I know the Messiah is going to come, the one that Moses prophesied of. And that anointed one is the same God that appears to Moses at the burning bush. And she says, I mean, just to think that this is the first time Jesus reveals himself, it's not to the religious elite. It's to sexually impure woman. and he says, all right, I'm the God that talks to Moses at the burning bush. That's who I am.

And I find that amazing. One of the things that we'll see, you know, if we continue on in the story, is that this woman goes on and becomes the first evangelist in John's Gospel. She goes back to her town and says, come now, come see the man who told me everything I've ever done. First of all, the love that God extended to her while knowing the worst about her, absolutely floored her with gratitude. One of the reasons Jesus exposes this woman says, I know everything about you,

and I'm here to save you, is you realize that God didn't save you based on a postured version of you. And when you understand that, you go, I got to tell other people about this God. And she goes out to her town and tells everybody about, come, verse 29, see a man who told me all the things

that I have done. This is not the Christ. And then it says this. in verse 42, that they're all flocking to Jesus. It is no longer because of what you said, they say to the woman that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves and know that this is indeed the Savior of the world. A couple questions just as we close. Have you ever repented like this woman in the sense of turning from your sin? And the true response of someone that's met God in an appropriate sense,

encountered God in a real sense, is worship. And that's why it's so important that Jesus defines it. Have you ever worshipped God? I'm not asking if you've sung a song. I'm asking if you've ever fallen on your knees literally or metaphorically in your heart, an appreciation and awe for God, and had your heart be filled with passion

in response to the truth. And Jesus says, as you see with the woman, this is the basic response of a sinner who's been not only cleansed but satisfied. by Jesus Christ. It's just an amazing reality to reflect on and to savor of that. This story has been saved for us to read so that we could identify with this woman of known as Beyond Salvation.

To your point, Jesus sees everything from our past. And he's standing, presenting, I am the one. I'm the one who can save you. And even we can talk about worshiping and spirit and truth. And it's so easy to listen with your intellectual thinking cap on of like, yeah, I understand this worldview and the logic behind it and its coherence. And actually lose in that entire conversation that it's this man, Jesus, who's talking to her relationally, the God of the universe. And it's that same man that's making the same call and command to come to him, to us. Yeah. One thing just finally as we close is sometimes we overcomplicate the proclamation of the gospel.

I don't know what to say. I need to take an evangelism class. Here's the first great evangelist in John's gospel. Come see a man who knew everything I've ever done and saved and satisfied me. And just through that simple message, the town is rocked because they see a woman who previously had been living in isolation and shame to going to joy and the woman that was avoiding people is now running up to them and grabbing them by the caller saying come see this man and i think that's just an amazing way that god works and you may be identifying with this woman and it's so it's so amazing to just remember that god not only saves people that are wicked he uses them and this woman was used by god and it's to go back to your earlier analogy it's you might be the prodigal son you might be the self-righteous brother, you might be the observer who thinks they are neither and is actually both.

And the beauty of it all is it's not you at all. It's what he's done on our behalf. That's correct. Thanks. Thank you, Johnny.