Stop Calling Singing at Church Worship!

Singing at church is praise and adoration. It's practicing community and unity with the Body of Christ. It's learning doctrine and Scripture through song. It's not worship. It is certainly a component of worship, but it is not worship.

Calling it worship might have been done in ignorance, but it still makes those bristle who know the biblical definition of worship.

Read Romans 12:1 for the meaning of worship: "Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship."

Dying daily to self and yielding to the Spirit of Christ for all you do and say is worship.

Please, read this devotional by Rev. John Piper:

Glorify God in Your Body

You were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Corinthians 6:20)

“Worship” is the term we use to cover all the acts of the heart and mind and body that intentionally express the infinite worth of God. This is what we were created for.

Don’t think worship services when you think worship. That is a huge limitation which is not in the Bible. All of life is supposed to be worship.

Take breakfast, for example, or mid-morning snacks. 1 Corinthians 10:31 says, “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” Now eating and drinking are about as basic as you get. What could be more real and human?

Or take sex, for example. Paul says the alternative to fornication is worship.

Flee fornication. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body. (1 Corinthians 6:18-20)

Or take death for a final example. This we will do in our body. In fact, it will be the last act of the body on this earth. The body bids farewell. How shall we worship in that last act of the body? We see the answer in Philippians 1:20-21. Paul says that his hope is that Christ would be exalted in his body by death. Then he adds, “For to me to die is gain.” We express the infinite worth of Christ in dying by counting death as gain.

You have a body. But it is not yours. “You have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.”

You are always in a temple. Always worship.