About Worship

Admittedly, worship for the Christian believer can take many forms: our spiritual service, our outreach to those in need, sharing the Gospel, the offerings of our time and money, and many others. While all of these can an do take place during our worship services, today’s devotional blog is focusing on the general types of sung worship in both a corporate and private setting.

There are different types of Christian music, with different effects. There are what is know as “soaking music”. There are also what I would call “ministering songs”, and there are “worship songs”.

“Soaking songs” are where God can speak to us individually. Some of these are instrumental “Selah’s”. They may take place when the worship leader plays softly in the background during an alter call or another time between songs. They also can create a strong spiritual context in our personal worship time, to just experience the presence of God in the ‘Selah’ time that I spoke of the last blog.

“Ministering songs“, as I call them, are songs whose lyrics speak to our heart from God. Much of Christian music that we listen on the radio and YouTube is like this. It is God ministering to us.

“Worship songs” go in the other direction. They are us worshiping verbally and expressively to God. And yes, there are songs that we may have categorized as “Praise songs” in contrast to “Worship songs”, as we use the term as in “it’s time for praise and worship”. For the purpose of brevity, I have lumped these together in this as “Worship songs”: musically delivered outgoing (or up-going!) worship directed to God. For those of you who are worship leaders, I may be literally “preaching to the choir!” For pastors and people in ministry, it may be useful to consider what I’ve said here. And for all of us who are part of congregations, may we gain a better handle on the dynamics of corporate worship as we enter in. I’d like to point out as “a word to the wise”, not all good Christian music is singable in a corporate worship context.

Jesus himself said in John 4:24, “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”