Why is this blog called Learn by Singing? Part One

Colossians 3:16
16 Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

As a praise team servant I am humbled, challenged, excited, and thankful for this passage. It essentially defines the who, what, when, where, and how (well, not really when and where, but we can take some liberty in applying the passage to our lives. More on that later.) of biblical singing. While the Bible doesn't have many passages specifying exactly what such singing looks like, we should never stray from the centrality of this verse. Before we dig into this verse, let's define a couple of terms that we often deal with in this context.

First up, "worship." In the church this term is often thrown out by people when they are talking about the time of singing. While singing is a form of worship, it does not completely define worship. True worship is anything that is a proper response to God. Speech, heart, action, motive, etc.  The next verse actually gives us a great definition of worship.  It says that whatever we do (and "whatever" encapsulates everything), do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father.  So we see that a proper worship needs 4 things:

1. Genuine believer - in the name of the Lord Jesus
2. Genuine attitude - giving thanks
3. Genuine vehicle - through Christ
4. Genuine audience - to God the Father

Anything we do should entail these things.  That is worship.  Romans 12 calls us to live lives of holy sacrifice unto God in response to the great and amazing grace we have received as believers.

The other term I wanted to define was "praise."  This also often gets used synonymously as singing, but biblically "praise" is simply the fruit of our lips, according to Hebrews 13:15.  I know I'm being nit-picky, but I just want those things to be clarified.

Now, back to the title of this post and the blog: Learn by Singing.  Why in the world did I choose that?  Well, I think from the verse at the top of the page, as well as at the top of this post, it should be clear.  I want to devote the rest of part two of this post coming soon.