Providence Church

“You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.”

The “you” in the statement that Jesus makes here is plural in the Greek text. By “you” Jesus is referring to all Samaritans. Because the Samaritan religion rejected most of the Old Testament as Scripture they truly and quite literally worshiped a God whom they did not know. In contrast, the Jews believed that the Old Testament in its entirety was from God and that it was the primary source of the knowledge of God and the Law. Not only that, but the entirety of the Old Testament depicts the Jews as God’s chosen people, through whom all revelation had come. Later in John (Chapter 8, verse 31), Jesus tells Jews who believed in him, “If you abide in my word, you truly are my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” For the Samaritan woman, her worship, however heartfelt it was, did not have any power because it was not connected to truth. Her worship was false because it was in response to false religion. The Jews’ worship was genuine because it was in response to the Old Testament revelation that was the Truth. True worship always occurs in response to the truth of God and the truth of the Gospel. Simply put, you cannot genuinely worship what is not true, and you cannot genuinely worship what you do not know.

Worship is found in the truth of Scripture

At Providence Church, we teach that worship is a response. It is a response to the character of God and to the work of the Gospel in our lives. We cannot worship what we do not know and for this reason we hold the Scriptures very highly in our worship services. You will find that we sing songs that are rich in meaning and full of Scripture. We take great care in crafting every single service. The songs we sing are very deliberate. In fact, the whole of our service is deliberate, from singing, to praying, to the reading of Scripture, to communion, to confession and repentance. For the worshiper at Providence Church, knowledge of God is vital for genuine worship. Here is an example: A song we sing quite often is adapted from an old hymn entitled “The Wondrous Cross”. In order that we appropriately engage God with this song, it requires that we understand what exactly the cross entails. In a Christian-saturated culture such as ours, the majesty and shame of the Cross is sometimes reduced to a gold crucifix hanging around our necks. There is nothing wrong with jewelry … but sometimes our worship as Christians amounts to no more than that: decoration. Something pretty. The cross of the Bible is everything but pretty. It is a source of scorn and shame. It is bloody and painful. To study the cross in the Scriptures is to study the Old Testament system of sacrifice. As mentioned previously, a blood sacrifice was made each year to atone for the sins of the Old Testament Jews. In the same way, the only way for the sins of the whole of Christendom to be atoned would be through the purchase made by a blood sacrifice. This is the glory of the cross – that Christ would be the sacrificial lamb on our behalf. He died as our substitute. With this knowledge, the “Wondrous Cross” takes on new meaning. The singing of these words becomes an authentic response to the work of the cross in our lives. As believers in the truth, we must realize that the only direct and indisputable revelation of the truth of the Gospel is found in the Scriptures. This is why it is so vitally important to read them, to know them, to meditate on them day and night, as the Psalmist would say. At Providence Church you will see us “flip” our services around, where the preaching of the Word comes first, and worship through song comes second. We do this so that we can appropriately respond to the preaching of the Word by way of repentance, communion and song.