With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray, 9

‘God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him, must worship Him in spirit and truth.’ The first thought suggested here by the Master is that there must be harmony between God and His worshippers; such as God is, must His worship be.  This is according to a principle which prevails throughout the universe:  we look for correspondence between an object and the organ to which it reveals or yields itself.  The eye has an inner fitness for the light, the ear for sound.  The man who would truly worship God, would find and know and possess and enjoy God, must be in harmony with Him, must have the capacity for receiving Him. 

Because God is Spirit, we must worship in spirit.  As God is, so His worshipper. And what does this mean?  The woman had asked our Lord whether Samaria or Jerusalem was the true place of worship.  He answers that henceforth worship is no longer to be limited to a certain place: ‘Woman, believe Me, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father.’  As God is Spirit, not bound by space or time, but in His infinite perfection always and everywhere the same, so His worship would henceforth no longer be confined by place or form, but spiritual as God Himself is spiritual.  A lesson of deep importance.  How much our Christianity suffers from this, that it is confined to certain times and places.  A man, who seeks to pray earnestly in the church
or in the closet, spends the greater part of the week or the day in a spirit entirely at variance with that in which he prayed.  His worship was the work of a fixed place or hour, not of his whole being.  God is a Spirit:  He is the Everlasting and Unchangeable One; what He is, He is always and in truth.  Our worship must even so be in spirit and truth:  His worship must be the spirit of our life; our life must be worship in spirit as God is Spirit.

This post continues what is intended to be a series of excerpts from With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray. I thank the Christian Classics Ethereal Library for making this public domain work available. To see their post of the book, go here. The previous post is here. As usual in this blog, long quotations are in this color.