When I was first learning to play the violin a few years ago, I watched quite a number of YouTube videos from various violin teachers. Anything I could pick up from them was gold, because it brought me one step closer to sounding halfway reasonable (hey, at least I already knew a lot of music theory – now I just had to figure out out to make it work in perfect pitch!) One of the teachers told about how he would spend his summers as a teen traveling to one US city or another to learn from the best violin teachers available. Some of them would spend weeks with him working on nothing else besides his bowing (as in, the violin bow – not how to bow on the stage after a performance!) He figured that since he’d been playing for years, and was quite advanced, he would know one of the most basic parts of playing a violin. But no, this teacher worked with him, week after week, on how to hold the bow, how to move the bow, how to control the bow, and much more.
While he might not have appreciated being told that he didn’t really know how to bow correctly, he quickly changed his mind to gratefulness for this teacher’s perspective. They were making him a better violinist, and it would reap the fruit of his labor in years to come. As a violinist, he had learned to love the ways of being a great violin player – even if it meant he had to change his perspective and relearn the basics to play well.
When we love the ways of God more than anything (read Psalm 119 if you want to know what I’m talking about), our perspective changes when God reveals something that needs to change in our lives. Instead of feeling threatened, we get to feel joy – we’ve just discovered a new part of His ways, and we get to participate in it by changing our perspective and our life. Instead of feeling like we’ve let people down, or that we should be ashamed, we can get excited because we’ve just discovered a way to serve people better and more like Jesus.
I believe this fixation on the ways of God could help us all evade the trap of habitual sin, or even soft-selling sin in our own lives or others’ lives. When we know God – the genuine – the copy just doesn’t satisfy, whether that copy is in our own lives or the lives of people around us.
I’m reminded of an old song, one I used to play often in my early days of leading worship. “They shine like dawn on an open psalm, a knowing smile from something You said. I hunger for the daily bread of Your ways,” goes the first verse. The more we get to know God – the real – the more we get to love His ways and keep our eyes fixated on Him.
The ways of God keep us from self-righteousness. They keep us on the narrow path. And they are a fast route to true repentance because they keep our values aligned with heaven’s value system.
