Harmony or Cacophony?

Four generations of my family taken on my
parents' 60th wedding anniversary

I've always loved music. In fact, my parents tell me that when I was a year old, I sang out so loud in church that everyone had to wait for me to repeat each line before they could sing the next.

As a child, I loved to listen to my mother and father sing duets, their voices blending together in beautiful harmony. As I grew up, I joined them in a trio.

Then I majored in music in college and met my husband singing in the Choir of the North at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. When we married, we sang duets together too. Now, our grandchildren are  making beautiful music as well.

Harmony is a musical term. It takes two or more instruments or voices to make harmony. A melody is made up of consecutive tones, but harmony occurs when two or more pleasing tones are sounded together.

Harmony doesn't happen by chance. When my young grandchildren "played the piano," the sound was dissonance and discord, not harmony. We covered our ears and demanded that they stop. When they first began to play musical instruments in their grade school band, we didn't want to discourage them, so we gritted our teeth and sat through their performances.

Soon, they learned how to blend together and play the intricate harmonies of the master composers. Nothing is more beautiful than a symphonic orchestra or an a capella choir singing in harmony.

For God's people to live together in harmony, we need to learn the lessons of harmony from an orchestra.

Courtesy Google.com

First, we all instruments must be tuned to Concert A. If even one violin string is slightly out of pitch, even if the musicians all play the right notes, dissonance, not harmony, is the result.

For Christians, Jesus is our "Concert A." He is the One by whom we must measure ourselves. If God's people all play in tune with Him, harmony is the outcome.

Another ingredient of harmony is timing. Not only must the right notes be played in the right pitch, they must be played at the same time. Have you ever heard an orchestra warming up? Each musician is playing the right notes in the right pitch, but in their own timing. Cacophony results.

We as God's people must operate in God's time for harmony in the Body of Christ. He is the Conductor. In order to make beautiful music, we must follow Him and those He has placed in leadership positions.

Courtesy Google.com

Composers and serious musicians spend years studying the fundamentals of harmony in order to write and play and sing well. So we as Christians must spend our lives learning from the Scriptures how to play in harmony with God's people. We must fellowship with one another as well.

Are you living in harmony with God's people? What do you need to do to facilitate harmony?