It was not a new song to us, but it may as well have been. As a group, we started singing the old familiar words of the song, only to find out it didn’t flow as we remembered it. Had we learned it wrong? The answer stared us back in the face. Along with the title of the song was the number two in parentheses. Ah, so that told the story. It had been rewritten. The notes were different than we were used to. What should have been an easy song which most of us could have sung by heart, turned out to be a song that we had to closely watch the music on. 

For the most part, I hit the right notes, but once in a while the strains of that old song came so natural to me that the notes on the page were replaced by the notes in my memory. I had to struggle a little to get back on track. As we sang, it reminded me of what it’s like to follow Jesus.

We all learn how to live life. We learn to walk, talk, and run. But while we grow and learn to do all these things, we also have an inherent sinful nature that learns how to sin. Sin, in even its simplest form, is second nature to us, and we can sin without even really thinking about what we’re doing.

But comes the time when God rewrites our story. And if we look closely we will see a number two written beside our name. The first version was the old us and the second version is the new us. We can no longer sing the song of our life by memory. He is writing the new song on our hearts. He changes the notes. He may even change the words a little. We find the notes we are so used to singing do not match the ones on the new page He has given us. We watch a little more carefully as we try to hit the notes He now wants us to sing. They don’t come as naturally to us as the first notes we learned. 

But the more we sing it and the more we practice, the more this new song rings in our hearts. We hear it more often in our memory and as time passes by, we find this is the only one we really want to sing. The old song is still there. Our hearts and minds still try to remind us of the notes. And sometimes we start singing the old tune without realizing that this isn’t the music anymore. 

The notes of our singing that night faded to silence. The shuffle of feet stepped away from the mic. But the memory of it lasted a long time after. I might never again sing the old song without recalling the night we sang the new. And just like that song, we will never be able to sing the old notes the way we used to sing before God called our name. For ever after, even if we return to those old notes, we will remember the night we saw the title to our song with the number two behind it, and learned the new notes of Him.