Give me any of the great compositions written by Bach and let me sit down to the piano and I can play every note of the piece. Hand me Marriage of Figaro by Mozart and I can play every note on the page. That’s right, I won’t miss a note. When I play the songs for you, there will be only one problem with my effort.
I can’t play the notes on the page in the order they are written. In other words, I can only sit down and bang on the piano, hitting every note at practically the same time to ensure that at some point I will have struck every key on the piano keyboard.
Can you envision me doing what I’m describing? Banging on the piano like a small child? What I said initially is true. When I’m finished, I will have played every note written by the composer just not the way he intended. That fact creates a problem. What I would be doing isn’t really making music. I would be making a mockery of the composer’s original intention.
Sometimes we all have a tendency to live our lives that way. We believe that God has a plan for our lives so we set out to make it happen. We think that if we just know the plan God has for us, we can make it play out. However, when we try to do it on our own, instead of making music we create a discordant mess.
The Patriarch Abraham did that exact thing when God told him that He was going to give him a son through Sarah. The song didn’t have the tempo he expected. It moved too slowly for him, so Abraham decided to take matters into his own hands by going to Hagar. Nine months later a sour note called Ishmael was born.
The nation of Israel often found themselves off key when they tried to live independent of Him. One day they determined that they would defeat Jericho on their own terms instead of following the direction of the Composer/Conductor and they soon found themselves singing the discordant dirge of defeat.
The early disciples were told to wait in the upper room until they were endued with power from on high. Instead Peter took the baton and led the whole group in a stanza of “Let’s Elect A New Apostle.” Somebody named Matthias ended up as the new note in the symphony of early church history, but he didn’t really fit the piece. In fact, he played that one measure in church life and then pretty much was never heard from again. In God’s time, Paul became a sustained note He played who harmonized perfectly with His Salvation Sonata.
There’s a lesson we need to learn and then learn again. We can’t make the music. Only God can. He wrote the melody and He alone is the one who can conduct it.
How does this practically apply to your life? It means that it is important to wait. Don’t grow impatient because you believe the things God wants for your circumstances aren’t unfolding as fast as you think they should be happening.
God is the composer of your life. He writes the notes and He leads the playing of the composition. When we try to take matters into our own hands, we’re acting like a child banging on the piano. There’s no way we can turn our circumstances into music.
Impatience breeds problems in life. The Bible often encourages patience in our grace walk. The psalmist wrote, “Commit your way to the Lord, Trust also in Him, and He will do it. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light And your judgment as the noonday. Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him” (Psalm 37:5-7) He will do it, the psalmist assures us. We don’t’ have to make anything happen. Our only responsibility is to commit it all to Him and then trust that His timing is perfect.
Saint Augustine said that patience is the companion of wisdom. Most of us have unwisely created needless frustrations for ourselves by refusing to wait for God’s timing. We later regretted it. The question is, “Did we learn from our mistake?”
If you patiently wait on the Lord, you will discover that His timing and His order will create a melody in your life that you could never create. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you have to make something happen. Just keep your eyes on the Conductor and He will tell you when to hit the notes and which ones to hit. When you follow His direction, you will be amazed at the tune of triumph you will hear coming out of your own life. Anything else is nothing more than the flat notes of a faithless lifestyle.
