Denominational Disputes

John 4:19-24 (NIV)
"Sir," the woman said, "I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem."
Here Jesus is reaching out to the woman at the well, and after speaking into her life, she now brings up a spiritual question: "What is the appropriate WAY to worship?"
This is nothing more than what we would call in our vernacular denominational disputes. She had her own preconceived idea about what was acceptable worship. We all have these same ideas in our minds. Some believe that worship is only hymns and an organ, others say add a guitar and drums and a rock-style song with two verses, a chorus, and a bridge with an intro and ending, and guitar solo. Others say worship should include icons and incense and prayers and scripture or others still emphasize that the gifts of the Spirit must all be manifested or the worship was “dead” today. We all can look at the different flavors of different churches and see what people prefer. But my desire is to get beyond that to the words of Jesus that come next:
21 Jesus declared, "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.
Jesus is telling her that this is not important, what is important is what the Father truly desires in a worshiper. And what is that? Jesus explains in verse 23:
23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."
Spirit and truth. There is a balance in worship. A balance of the experiential, and the biblical. Let me repeat that: worship should always have a balance of the experiential and the biblical. And the experiential should always be biblical!
If you emphasize the experiential, but leave out the Biblical, you start doing things that are wild and in the flesh, and not of the Spirit of God. They get progressively weirder and weirder, and cause confusion and deception in the end.
Church and worship of God then becomes all experiential, but not Biblical. That is worshiping in Spirit but not in TRUTH.
But on the other side of the pendulum, you have ALL biblical, but no experiential. This is people who worship in TRUTH, but not in Spirit. There are many churches that are completely dead, with lips that move but hearts that are not engaged. Jesus said to the church in Sardis in Revelation 3: I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. 2 Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of my God. 3 Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; obey it, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you.
So we need to be balanced, to worship the Father in Spirit AND in Truth. There is nothing wrong with denominations, as such, but when we begin to think we have the edge on worship of God, we may be misled.
The real key is to make sure we are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks: those who have a balance of worshiping Him in Spirit AND in Truth.