Worship & Wonder

In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw the Lord — high and lifted up, the train of his robe filling the temple. Above the throne stood seraphim, each with six wings, calling to one another: "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory."

The threshold shook with the sound. The house filled with smoke. And Isaiah, confronted with the absolute holiness of God, did not feel inspired or energized or pumped up. He felt undone. "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts."

Then a seraph flew to him with a burning coal from the altar. It touched his lips: "Your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for." And then God spoke — and Isaiah, the one who had just been undone, said: "Here I am! Send me." True encounter with the holiness of God does exactly this: it shows you what you are, removes what disqualifies you, and then sends you.

The text says Jesus "had to pass through Samaria" — but Jews did not go through Samaria. They went around. Yet Jesus led his disciples through a region most of his people avoided, and stopped at a well in the heat of the day, and waited. When the woman arrived — alone, at a time when no one else was at the well — he asked her for water.

The conversation that followed covered her whole life: five husbands, a man she was with now who was not her husband, the religious controversy between Jews and Samaritans. Jesus did not flinch at any of it. And at the center of it all: "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." He was not just making a theological point. He was making a personal one. He had come through Samaria to find her — this specific woman, this specific story, this specific moment of encounter.

She ran back to the city and said: "Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?" A whole village went out to see him. The Father was seeking one genuine worshiper, and through her found a whole community.

When David brought the ark of the LORD into Jerusalem, he danced. Not a stately royal processional. Not a controlled, dignified expression of celebration. He leaped and danced before the LORD with all his might, wearing a linen ephod — a priest's garment rather than royal robes. He had stripped off the trappings of his status and danced.

His wife Michal, watching from a window, despised him in her heart. When he came home, she said: "How the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servants' female servants, as one of the vulgar fellows shamelessly uncovers himself!" David answered: "It was before the LORD, who chose me above your father and above all his house... and I will celebrate before the LORD. I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in my own eyes."

David was not performing for an audience. He was worshiping before the LORD, and his spirit was so genuinely engaged that it carried his body with it. This is worship in spirit: when the inner reality overflows its containment because the God it is responding to is too great to sit still in front of.