The verses that begin Proverbs 2 are a familiar encouragement to me: (from the NKJV, v. 1 – 5)
But I read them again in the New Living Translation the other day and verse 2 especially jumped out at me:
The word Tune brought new life (seems funny saying that since it came from the New Living Translation) into this Scripture for me. When I can picture something with a tangible illustration, it often makes a heap more sense.
We just moved into a new home that boasts a beautiful baby grand piano in the living room. I only know how to play the piano a little, but no matter how I might try, this piano will only look pretty — and will not sound pretty — until someone takes the time to tune it. But with a tuning hammer and mutes, minute adjustments to the tension of the strings will properly align the intervals between the tones so that the piano is in tune. Fine tuning, which requires an assessment of the interaction between the notes, is different for every piano.
With the birth of satellite radio, something my kids might never understand that I certainly remember is trying to tune a radio — traveling in the car over a distance, you begin to lose the signal for a station you want to listen to, so you adjust the radio to check and see if it is coming through better with a slight adjustment to the frequency. Or, you might try adjusting the frequency you’re receiving to see if the same program is coming through on a different frequency in that area.
Whether it’s the guitar I’m hoping will make its way here in our shipment from South Africa, or the radio in our car, tuning requires intentional and consistent effort. My guitar might’ve been in tune when I packed it into its case and the movers collected it along with our boxes back in June, but by the time it arrives here, it’ll need to be tuned again.
The radio might be in tune so that you’re picking up the station you’re after right now, but thirty miles down the road, you might have to tune it again.
In either case, the potential for something beautiful is consistently available. This grand piano has the potential to serve its purpose of making beautiful music, but we’ll have to decide to tune it, and to play it.
There are dozens of radio waves floating up over our heads, all of them a signal with a message — words, music, commercials — but we will have to adjust the receiver to ‘tune in’ to hear the message.
Similarly, it takes consistent effort to tune our ears to wisdom. We have to be willing recipients.
We can listen for wisdom in the words of people we respect. We might find it in an encouraging book or on an inspiring website. We are most likely to find it by burying ourselves in God’s Word — hiding it in our hearts, and tuning our ears to hear it, understand it, and make it a part of our lives.
There are so many voices and messages floating around our heads all day, every day. It’s plain to see that a lot of them claim to have wisdom, but don’t.
The book of Proverbs consistently instructs us to look for wisdom, to cry out and ask for wisdom, to love wisdom more than gold or silver. Personified as a woman who calls aloud outside and raises her voice in the open square, we are supposed to pay attention to wisdom and seek to understand her words.
If, day by day, we seek out wisdom, and compare the “wisdom of the world” against the Truth of God, we’ll fine-tune our ears and hearts to recognize true wisdom — and when we hear her voice, it’ll be music to our ears.
