All of us crave satisfaction. We are built that way. Physical appetite, aesthetic taste, moral judgment, love—all alike cry out for satisfaction.
Often we get it, but often we do not. And when we do not, we feel frustrated, cheated, let down. We cannot reconcile ourselves to the idea that life was not intended to make sense. Reason will not be mocked by any such theory. Nor will our imaginations consent to be perpetually disillusioned. Science reveals everywhere the evidence of rational design and purpose. Imagination can see what a superb thing life could be if only people behaved reasonably and life went as it seems it was designed to go.
Then why doesn’t it?
[p 139]
The quest for satisfaction
Why do people so often behave so unreasonably? Why are our dreams and expectations and well-laid plans so often frustrated by illness, or war, or faceless economic processes, or the imposition of somebody else’s ideology? And come to that, why do I myself ruin my own chance of happiness by irrationally indulging in what I know will injure me and hurt those on whose love my happiness depends? Our very disappointment drives us to look for an answer. We cannot just resign ourselves to being constantly unsatisfied and progressively disillusioned. If we cannot be satisfied, then at least we look for some satisfactory explanation why not; why it is that life, so seemingly full of promise, so often goes wrong or sour. We want to know if there is any way of putting right whatever it is that’s wrong; whether there is any way to eventual satisfaction.
Sooner or later we shall turn to religion. We know, of course, or at least we suppose we know, what it is going to say.
It will say that our basic trouble is sin.
That’s perfectly true; but by itself it isn’t likely to help us very much. It is like telling a man with cancer that his basic trouble is illness.
We all know that we are sinners. The question is, how are we to change, to eradicate the trouble, to stop the moral rot that threatens to eat away our happiness and frustrate any sense of satisfaction?
Again we know, or at least we think we know, what religion is going to prescribe: try harder to be good; be [p 140] kinder, less selfish, purer; pray, deny yourself, discipline yourselves. All of it tough medicine. But then, if life is worth living at all, it is worth taking seriously.
So we make the attempt to take religion seriously, and attend scrupulously, perhaps over-scrupulously, to our religious duties.
Curiously enough, that does not always satisfy us either. And the reason probably is that we have simply been doing what we supposed our religion was telling us to do, but we have not stopped long enough to listen for ourselves to hear exactly what Jesus is saying to us, personally. He certainly can give us satisfaction, deep-running, permanent satisfaction, a well of living water within us, as he once described it (John 4:13–14), such that when we once have received it, we shall never lack satisfaction again. But to get this satisfaction, we shall first have to accept his diagnosis of our trouble, and then his treatment. Both are more radical than we may have imagined.
The satisfaction of being right with God
The basic dissatisfaction that underlies all other dissatisfactions that it is possible for the human heart to feel springs from this: our sins are an offence to Almighty God our Maker. They constantly fly in the face of his laws and provoke his wrath (Rom 1:18; 2:1–3; 3:19). He therefore withholds from us that sense of peace with God without which no creature of God can feel truly at ease or truly satisfied.
It follows that our first step towards satisfaction must be to be reconciled to God. The demands of God’s holy law must be fully met. He must be completely satisfied that [p 141] justice has been carried out, that never again will he need to direct his holy wrath upon us.
On our side, our sense of acceptance by God must be total, without reserve or uncertainty. Otherwise reconciliation is not true reconciliation.
To illustrate the point, the Bible tells the story of a reconciliation at the human level that was not full and unreserved, and was therefore unsatisfactory.
King David’s son, Absalom, murdered his half-brother, Amnon, and in fear of the king’s justice fled the country. Some three years later David’s friends persuaded him to overlook the offence and allow Absalom to return from exile. The king, however, was not really happy about the justice of the thing; so he tried a compromise. Absalom was allowed back, but he was not allowed access into the king’s presence; he was not allowed to see the king’s face, as the Hebrew quaintly puts it. But half a reconciliation like that is not true reconciliation at all; and on this occasion it only led to further pretence, alienation and eventual disaster (2 Sam 13:23–18:33).
By happy contrast, when Christ reconciles us to God, God accepts and welcomes us without reserve. We can come into the presence of God at any time (Rom 5:2; Eph 2:18). We do not have to wait until we die to discover whether we shall be admitted into his presence or not. We can come at once, assured that God’s wrath against us is a thing of the past (Heb 10:19–22), that there is no condemnation or rejection to be feared for the future (Heb 10:14–18; 1 John 4:17–19). The love of God casts out fear; the presence of God becomes our home. But the conditions are strict.
[p 142]
There must be on our side radical repentance towards God and faith only in what Christ has done for us and in nothing and no one else (Rom 5:9; 8:1; John 5:24). True repentance is not just admitting that things like pride and lying and impurity are wrong and sinful, nor simply determining to forsake these things. True repentance towards God means facing up to our true legal position in the light of the verdict which God passes on us in his Word. And it is at this point that it is so easy for us to be less than radical in our thinking, and therefore to be less than realistic in our attitudes, and therefore in the end to attempt superficial remedies that cannot bring satisfaction, because they satisfy neither God nor us.
We know we are sinners, and as such unacceptable to God. And so, with honest enough intention, we do what seems to us the obvious thing to do: we set about improving ourselves in the hope of eventually winning acceptance with God (Acts 20:21). Actually we are being seriously unrealistic in two respects.
First, the sins we have already done are in themselves enough to have deserved death and rejection by God. No amount of future improvement can wipe out the guilt of the past, or compensate for it, or buy off its deserved penalty.
Secondly, even if we started improving this moment (and let’s hope we do), experience itself, let alone God’s Word, warns us that by the end of life we shall not have improved enough to be accepted by God on the ground of our achievement. God’s verdict on us then will still have to be what it is now: we have all sinned in the past, and in the present still come short of God’s standard (Rom 3:23). [p 143] And that being so, God, for all his love, is not going to pretend that it isn’t so; is not going to be satisfied with our inadequate efforts. As Ronald Knox’s translation so plainly puts it: ‘Observance of the law cannot win acceptance for a single human creature’ (Gal 2:16).
That is very gloomy; but we might as well face reality. Satisfaction can hardly come by putting our heads in the sand. Our legal situation before God’s justice is serious in the extreme. That is why, in order to effect a satisfactory reconciliation, God’s justice had to take the extreme measure of handing over God’s own Son to suffer the sanctions of God’s law on our account. There was no other way. Had acceptance with God been obtainable on the ground of our improvement, Christ would never have died, would never have needed to. But it was not obtained that way, and Jesus had to die (Gal 2:20–21; 3:21–22; Rom 4:25; 8:32).
But from his death comes the greatest and most glorious news that man ever heard. What we could never have done, Christ’s death has achieved for us. He has satisfied God’s justice, he has paid the penalty of sin (2 Cor 5:20–21; Gal 3:13–14).
God can now accept, and with perfect, uncompromised justice accept, everyone who puts his faith in Christ and comes to God solely on the grounds of that sacrifice. God’s acceptance of every such person is without reserve. Indeed God almost labours the point to show how completely and permanently accepted such a person is. He calls attention to the fact that Christ’s death was followed by his resurrection, ascension and entry into the immediate presence of God. He then points out that Jesus came right into God’s presence not on his own behalf only, but [p 144] as the declared representative and forerunner of those who trust him. And God finally declares that all whom Jesus thus represents may know themselves accepted by God as fully and completely and finally as their representative himself (Heb 6:17–20; 9:11–14, 24–28; 10:1–18; Eph 2:1–10).
In that lies the secret of profound and permanent satisfaction. To know oneself accepted by God like that, fully and for ever, is to have peace with God. And peace with God is the only secure foundation for true and lasting satisfaction.
The satisfaction of becoming what we were meant to be
To be accepted by God solely because of the sacrifice and death of Jesus sounds to many people, when they first hear about it, too good, or rather too easy, too slick, to be true.
It sounds as if you could go on sinning and it wouldn’t matter: you could still be accepted by God simply because Jesus died for your sins and you said you believed in him. In other words, it sounds like a license to go on sinning with impunity.
Of course, it isn’t true; though, interestingly enough, it is precisely what people said when they first heard the apostles preach the gospel (Rom 3:8, 31; 6:1–2, 15)—which shows that we must be on the right track; and we know the kind of thing the apostles said in reply.
It isn’t true, because of what is involved in ‘believing in’ Jesus as Saviour.
Believing in Jesus does not mean simply assenting to the fact that Jesus died for our sins. It means committing ourselves without reserve to him as Lord.
[p 145]
More. It means receiving Jesus as a living person (John 1:12); it means becoming united with him by his Spirit (Rom 6:5); becoming ‘one with him’ (John 17:20–21; Rom 8:9–11); being joined to him (1 Cor 6:15–17) in a living spiritual partnership.
As we considered earlier (ch. 4), the nearest analogy to it in ordinary relationships is when husband and wife become ‘one flesh’, no longer completely separate and independent individuals, but a living union (Rom 7:1–4). And in this union with Christ lies the key to God’s way of making us into what we were meant to be.
There can be no heaven, no final satisfaction, without becoming what God our Creator meant us to be, and behaving accordingly. That, of course, we instinctively realize. But God’s way of making us into what we were meant to be is radically different from what we normally think it is.
We naturally think in terms of improving ourselves. We like to think of ourselves as basically sound, with a moral speck or two here, a bit of downright badness there maybe, spoiling the otherwise perfect decent apple. Our hope and expectation is that by the application of some religious discipline, perhaps even of some moderately severe spiritual surgery, we shall eventually become so improved as to be fit to enjoy, and make our contribution to, God’s heaven.
But God does not think that way at all. The New Testament never talks of improving us or our old life or fallen nature.
God does something far more radical.
He implants within the believer a new life (1 Pet 1:23–2:3), which carries with it a new nature (2 Pet 1:4; Col 1:27; 3:3–4), with new powers and instincts, and new [p 146] potentials. That is why in days gone by, when people became Christians, they took or were given a new name. Simon, for instance, was renamed Peter (John 1:42). The new name was not the expression of a pious hope that one day they might improve. It was the acknowledgement that Christ had given them a new life (Rom 6:4), a new power, a new nature, which they did not have before. The ‘new self’ or the ‘new nature’ (Col 3:10) or the ‘new creation’ (2 Cor 5:17)—these are some of the terms which the early Christians used for this gift of new spiritual life which they received through their union with Christ.
Receiving this new life did not mean that their old fallen nature disappeared and no longer made itself seen and heard. But receiving the new life was like dropping an acorn into a grave: it would not improve the corpse; but it would start growing a new life of its own which would gradually and eventually displace everything else.
So the believer in Jesus has no longer one, but two natures, the old and the new. He is called to constantly renewed decision and effort to ‘put off the old’ (Eph 4:22–23), to ‘put it to death’ (Col 3:5), not to ‘let it reign’ (Rom 6:12), and to ‘put on the new, which is constantly being renewed [for that is a feature of life] in knowledge after the image of God its Creator’ (Eph 4:24 own trans.).
It is, of course, the business and practice of a lifetime, constantly to put off the old and to cultivate the new. It is a struggle (Gal 5:16–17), a war in which we do not win every battle, but in which there is forgiveness for defeat (1 John 1:7–9), and certainty of final triumph (Rom 5:2; 8:29–30). In every believer the new life will grow and develop until it is finally conformed to the pattern of Christ himself.
[p 147]
What happens, we may ask, if, having received this new life, we neglect it, and instead encourage and indulge the old? And does it matter?
It matters indeed.
If we act in that way, God will discipline us. We must use our new spiritual powers to prevent the old fallen nature from taking control. If not, God will have to take more drastic steps. That may involve sickness, or even premature physical death. The matter is so important that Paul dwells on it at length in 1 Corinthians 11:23–32. The whole passage is important.
God’s disciplines are solemn and serious. He will not allow us, if we are genuine followers of Christ (Heb 12: 3–11; Phil 3:10–14), to become smug, or cynical. Nor will he let us be satisfied with ourselves until God is satisfied with us. But notice that even in the extreme case where a believer is removed under God’s discipline by physical death because of his careless living, the Bible explicitly says that he will not be condemned along with the world (1 Cor 11:32). The reason for that is that while our enjoyment of God, and God’s enjoyment of us, depend upon our cultivation of the new life we have received through Christ, our acceptance with God never has and never will depend on our spiritual progress but only on what Christ has done for us by his death. Our acceptance, therefore, remains eternally secure.
This, then, is God’s way of making us into what we were meant to be. It is the only effective and satisfactory way (Gal 1:8; Col 2:20–23).
[p 148]
The satisfaction of working as we were meant to work
It stands to reason that if God made us, and made us primarily (as the Bible says he did) to do his will and fulfil his pleasure (Rev 4:11; Col 1:16), we can never find satisfaction until we work as we were meant to work and fulfil the purpose for which God made us. That means, of course, giving up our own ways and thoughts wherever they differ from God’s; it means for ever saying, ‘Not my will, but thine, be done.’
Frankly, to many of us that sounds a bleak and dauntingly unattractive way of life.
We don’t mind being moderately religious; but to ‘take every thought captive to obey Christ’, as Paul puts it (2 Cor 10:5), to consult Christ as Lord about all that we do in life, and to accept his control in everything—well, only a born saint, we tell ourselves, could contemplate living life like that; and even he, we suspect, could hardly enjoy it.
It is natural enough to think like that, perhaps. But it shows how, all unsuspecting, we have formed quite slanderous ideas about God, as if he were, if not a tyrant, then a killjoy. Think what we will about God, of course, it does not alter the fact that as his creatures it is our duty to serve him. But serving him merely out of a sense of duty is again less than satisfactory, and even if we manage to do it, it tends to induce in us a martyr spirit, an obnoxious attitude of the ‘what a good boy am I’ variety.
The only satisfactory and satisfying way of serving God, is to serve him willingly and gladly with all our heart, mind, soul and strength; more out of love than out of duty.
[p 149]
But how can it be done?
You can force yourself to serve God if you try hard enough; but you cannot make yourself love him. What then is the secret of loving and serving God as we were meant to love and serve him?
Paul tells us himself. It is a mixture of love and logic. When we begin to understand what Christ has done for us, not only does our gratitude affect the way we feel, it also has powerful implications for the way we live our lives. Paul, with his overwhelming sense of Christ’s love for him personally, is compelled to see that:
And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Gal 2:20)
And again:
For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. (2 Cor 5:14–15)
Paul had, so he tells us (Phil 3:4–6), always been religiously minded, but he had not always thought like that. In his early manhood he had thought that serving God was a way of storing up merit, and that this was a way of achieving salvation. And so he had gone in for serving God with immense thoroughness and determination. But all it managed to do for him—and it is he who says it of [p 150] himself—was to pile up a load of religious works worth absolutely nothing and worse than nothing in God’s sight (Phil 3:7–8), and to turn him into a proud, hard, cruel man (1 Tim 1:13; Acts 26:9–11).
The change came when he discovered who Christ really was, what Christ had actually done for him, and why it was he needed Christ to do it for him anyway. He discovered that far from being the religious success he thought he was, he was a wretched, despicable sinner. His supposed merits were objectionable rubbish, his religious exercises valueless; the law of God which hitherto he had imagined that he had kept, only condemned him.
And then he discovered Christ. He discovered who he was. This Jesus whom he had resented and persecuted in the name of God, was none other than God incarnate.
The discovery was shattering.
It exposed Paul’s religiosity as being the expression of his own self-will; the boosting and serving of his own ego under the guise of religion, in actual (though hidden and unconscious) opposition to God.
Then he discovered something else about God’s Son, and the discovery revolutionized the whole motivation of his life.
He discovered that even while he was his enemy, this Jesus had loved him personally and had voluntarily died for Paul so that Paul need not die under God’s wrath.
The effect on Paul was unceasing gratitude.
But not just gratitude. Sheer logic made him see that had Christ not died for him, he must have died himself.
The life he now lived, therefore, he owed entirely to Christ. It was no longer his own; it belonged to Jesus, [p 151] bought by the death that had redeemed him (1 Cor 6:19–20). It must therefore be lived entirely for Jesus. And he willingly and gladly lived it that way. Only so could Paul’s love for Jesus be satisfied.
The next discovery that Paul made was that when in love and gratitude one submits one’s life to the control of Christ, Christ’s ‘yoke’ is in fact easy, as Jesus himself claims it is, and his burden is light (Matt 11:28–30).
Christ is, after all, our Creator. He knows how we were meant to work. His control and discipline is not a tyranny forcing us to live unnaturally; it is the control necessary to save us from ruining ourselves with the frustration of living perpetually at cross purposes with our Creator’s design for us. It is the only way to true self-fulfilment, to living and working as we were meant to live and work.
And the other discovery that Paul made was that there is a great reward in serving Christ (1 Cor 3:11–15). The reward is not salvation, of course, or acceptance with God. Reward is for work done (1 Cor 3:14), whereas salvation is never the result of work done; it is given as a free gift (Eph 2:8–10).
The reward for working for Christ is first the sheer joy and satisfaction of knowing we have pleased the Lord (Matt 25:23). It is secondly the satisfaction of achieving something worthwhile and eternally significant (1 Cor 3:14; 1 Pet 5:4). And thirdly it is finding we have developed our potential to do greater and more significant work (Luke 19:16–17).
If Paul had a motto, I think it must have been this: ‘For to me to live is Christ’ (Phil 1:21). And when he came to die there was not the slightest regret. Nothing but satisfaction (2 Tim 4:6–8).
[p 152] We might be tempted to think, of course, that Paul was such a saint that his experience is irrelevant to ours. But that is not so. He tells us himself that God designed his conversion as a pattern for everyone else’s (1 Tim 1:16).
The satisfaction of knowing what is going on
Not to know what is going on can be very frustrating. To be asked or compelled to work in some scheme without being told what exactly the scheme is; to be expected to struggle and make sacrifices for it, without knowing whether the scheme is succeeding or not, whether the sacrifices will in the end be justified, or whether the whole thing will peter out in failure or end up in disaster— that is a tantalizing and unsatisfying way of carrying on.
Unhappily, that is how many people live, work and die. With life’s lesser schemes and projects, their own plans and ambitions, they rightly try to define their goals, estimate their chances of success, decide whether success when achieved will be worth the effort put into achieving it.
But about the purpose of life itself, and what lies beyond life, and whether life’s toils and sacrifices will in the end prove to have served some worthwhile eternal goal, or whether the whole of life will end in eternal disaster, on all this they have only the vaguest of ideas and the most uncertain hopes. Some even suppose that living in uncertainty is how we were meant to live anyway; that this is what faith means: to live courageously with uncertainty. But of course, faith in the biblical sense is the very opposite of uncertainty. ‘Faith’, says the Bible, ‘comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ’ (Rom 10:17). [p 153]
Faith, in other words, is our response to what God tells us. And if God tells us anything, the last thing in the world that we should be about it is uncertain. When we listen to Christ, then, he banishes uncertainty.
We discover in him not only the one by whom all things were made, but the one for whom all things were made (Col 1:16). He will inherit all things: the vast revenues of history will be his; he is the goal of all things (Heb 1:2). What is more, he does not keep us in the dark as to what his purposes are, either for us personally or for the world at large. Obviously, as finite creatures there is much about the world to come that we cannot be told, since we could not, in our present condition, understand it. But we are told a great deal, and certainly enough to satisfy faith, and to fill life with meaning and purpose.
‘No longer do I call you servants,’ says our Lord, ‘for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father, I have made known to you’ (John 15:15). So we are given to know that Jesus who went away from us at the ascension is to return. ‘In my Father’s house’, he tells us, ‘are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also’ (John 14:2–3). Here then we have that sure and certain hope of resurrection at the second coming of Christ, which is held out to us for our comfort and encouragement (1 Thess 4:13–18).
Death is not the final word; it shall not have the final victory (1 Cor 15:54–58). It does not reduce life to nothingness and therefore to ultimate insignificance. Christ [p 154] will come again; and Maranatha—Aramaic for ‘the Lord will come’ (1 Cor 16:22) is the rallying watchword of every Christian.
Meanwhile, until that great event the individual believer is told what will happen to him personally at death. Like an expatriate who has been living away from home on business, but then when the business is done goes home, so the believer at death departs to be ‘with Christ’ (Luke 23:43; Phil 1:23; 2 Cor 5:6–8), to be ‘at home with the Lord’.
That is tremendously comforting for the individual. But, wonderful as that is, God plans to do far more than save and make perfect individuals. Christ tells us that the whole of creation will be restored. Nature is not for ever to be chained to the frustration of corruption and decay. ‘Creation itself’, we are told, ‘will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God’ (Rom 8:18–21). What that will mean in detailed practical terms we are not told, and doubtless could not understand in our present limited state. Nor does it matter. The great point is that the incarnation and the bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus combine to tell us that matter is basically good. The world of nature is not an illusion, not a meaningless cycle from which, if we are wise, we shall try to escape.
The material world is God’s own good idea. It has been temporarily spoiled by the rebellion of intelligent and morally responsible creatures against the Creator. But that condition is not to be permanent. Creation itself shall be reconciled and made to serve the Creator’s will (Col 1:20). Matter will eventually function perfectly to the glory of God.
[p 155]
There is, then, a purpose within history, hidden maybe, but really there. Human effort is not ultimately in vain. The resurrection of Christ is described as the ‘firstfruits’ of a harvest. That harvest will include the resurrection of those reconciled to God. If we are believers, this will give us confidence to live and work to the full. For we know that what we do is not meaningless (1 Cor 15:58). Here then is satisfaction.
Let none say it is escapism. It implies that every decision, every action here in this life, is of eternal consequence. For the Christian it holds out the promise of life that now is and of that which is to come (1 Tim 4:8). For unbelievers it means that this life will in the end for ever prove to have been all too significant (John 3:36; Rev 21:8; Matt 12:36–37).
The way to satisfaction
In these chapters, we have considered whether Christianity is merely a drug to dull the pain of existence or the very truth of God by which we might know the author of life. That query now brings us, necessarily, to another: If there is spiritual satisfaction to be had, then how can I get it? We should be trifling with things if in the end we did not bring the whole matter down to this personal, practical question.
The answer is simplicity itself. ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved’, says Scripture (Acts 16:30–31). But the very simplicity of it can be tantalizingly difficult. Do we not all, or most of us anyway, believe in some sense in Jesus?
In some sense, yes; but obviously, that believing which really receives from Jesus the satisfaction which he holds out to us, must somehow be a deeper, more real, more [p 156] intimately personal thing than a superficial, general kind of belief in Jesus.
True faith, says the Bible (Rom 10:17), comes from hearing Jesus speak. Not, of course, hearing voices out of the blue; but listening to Jesus speak through the Bible, and allowing him by his Spirit to make his word a living, creative reality to us. For that very reason he has left us a recorded conversation which he had with a woman on this very topic of receiving spiritual satisfaction. Here is that story. Read it. Read it more than once. And as you listen to Jesus speaking to a woman all those centuries ago, pray that he will, by his Spirit, speak to you now. And he will (John 6:37):
So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.
A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’ (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?’ (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink”, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have nothing to draw [p 157] water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.’
Jesus said to her, ‘Go, call your husband, and come here.’ The woman answered him, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You are right in saying, “I have no husband”; for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.’ The woman said to [p 158] him, ‘I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I who speak to you am he.’ (John 4:5–26)
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