Without our physical bodies we cannot serve the Lord. Unfortunately we often don’t make this connection. My readings from the Northumbria community took me to three verses in the Bible that commands us to use our bodies for worship, here are two of them:

I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands. Psalm 63:5

I want men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer, without anger or disputing. 1 Timothy 2:8

A few weeks ago we talked about honesty during the singing part of our worship. I challenged our group to think about the words we’re singing. Say we sing for instance “I lift up my hands” and yet we don’t lift our hands, then we’re lying! In that instance we shouldn’t sing those words, worship in “spirit and truth” would then ask of us to not sing the words.

Here’s what happens with us in that situation. We sing “I lift up my hands” and don’t lift our hands thinking by ourselves ‘in a spiritual sense I’m lifting up my hands – God sees my heart’.

Yet, a life trained by this ‘spiritualization’ will head into catastrophic departmentalization. With this rationalization in place our lives will slowly erode to a vast field of emptiness, a life characterized by inaction and eventually disobedience. Our bodies are the breeding ground for our spiritual lives. What are your thoughts?