In Mark 12: 30, Jesus says we should “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” This encompasses much more than just bringing an offering to the temple; it was a command to love the Lord with everything in the person.
In our worship services, we’re very familiar with using our minds to understand what God is saying, applying our hearts to the truths of the Gospel, and serving with our strength. The soul is a little trickier, but part of it is loving God with our emotions – not just with our heads.
I’d like to propose that we can also worship God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength as we sing songs of praise and adoration. This is more than repeating the words to a song. It’s engaging with those words, making them our own, and using it to glorify, love, and worship God.
For example, if you worship God with your heart, you draw worship out of your will. Worshipping God with our soul is more of an emotional experience, as well as drawing worship from places we can’t explain in human words (Romans 8:26, 1 Corinthians 14:4). Engaging our minds makes us meditate on and intentionally speak the words of the song, meaning every word. Worshipping with our strength means that we get our physical bodies involved – for example, dancing before the Lord (2 Samuel 6:14), lifting our hands (1 Timothy 2:8), etc.
The great thing about using all of these different methods in our worship is that we do spiritual warfare over these parts of our beings by using them in worship. For example, worshipping with our minds does warfare over our minds. Worshipping with our souls makes warfare over our souls. And so on.
Every part of our bodies and spirits were made to worship God. So if you’re having one or another part of your being that is tormented, try using that part of your being to worship – you might be very blessed by the results!
