Recently, our piano tuner, Mike Routh, retired. If memory serves, Mike had tuned our pianos ever since I’ve been here. He did really good work on the four pianos we have on our campus. I'm so grateful to Mike and to our new piano tuner who help keep these instruments tuned and up-to-date.
When I was a church music major in seminary in the mid 1990s, I took a class on piano tuning and maintenance as an elective. It seemed interesting but once I started into the meat of the class, oh my goodness. This is focused and, dare I say, tedious in tuning the piano. There are 88 keys on a piano, and that's what most people see. When you play it, you can tell if it's in tune or not. But when you open up the lid, what you will see are three different areas: the pin blocks, the hammer rails, and the strings. The strings wrap around the pin blocks that are a certain length and need to be the perfect tension so that, when the hammer strikes the string or strings, the proper note comes out, in tune. The higher the note, the thinner and more numerous the strings. This piano and pianos like it have approximately 220 pins holding 220 strings for the 88 hammers that are attached to the keys. Each of these areas must be maintained and tuned correctly to the tuning forks and to each key.
As we delve into Romans 6:5-14, we see Paul referring to us as “instruments.” Just as Paul showed that we are either walking in the path of Adam (under sin, facing condemnation, dominated by spiritual death) or Christ (under grace, receiving justification, dominated by spiritual life) (Romans 5:12-21). In this passage, we are talking about being “united with him.” Rankin Wilbourne wrote a wonderful, very readable book called, “Union with Christ"--a copy of which you can find on the shelves in the GLOBE. He brings this insight:
When we are in Christ, every part of Christ's life not only his death, has significance for us. We share in his life and obedience, his death and his resurrection, even his ascension! We participate in another's victory. All that is his becomes ours.
Just as we were united with Adam at birth and before Christ, so when Christ's justifying work takes place, and we surrender to His work, we are united with Christ. The curse of sin is reversed. Our hearts are tuned to Him and are continually tuned to him.