A Word in Season: The Heart Before Heaven (Psalm 19:14)

A lot of us are very concerned about how other people see us, and perhaps we spend a lot of time and energy trying to ensure that we present ourselves in the way that we would like to be perceived, whether that's in the conversations that we have or the social media that we post, we're concerned to ensure that people see us in the way that we would prefer.

David’s Prayer in Psalm 19 for Acceptable Words and Thoughts

But when David wrote Psalm 19, his conclusion was not so much about how men perceived him as about what he really was before God. The great Puritan theologian John Owen said that what a man is when he's on his knees before God, that's what he really is and nothing else.

And so it's striking that having spoken of the glories of God in creation and his revelation of himself there and in the beauty and the glory of God's written revelation and the things that we see of him there, David's conclusion, his plea as he closes the psalm, conscious of the fact that he so often and so easily trespasses against God's law is this, let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.

It is the eye of God, it is his heart before heaven that David is genuinely concerned about. He wants the words of his mouth and the meditation of his heart to be acceptable in God's eyes. And you'll notice that David joins together there what is in his heart and what comes out of his mouth.

The Heart and the Mouth Must Match

Our Lord Christ himself would make very plain that it's out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks and David's very conscious of that and he wants to ensure that there's a proper match between what's in his soul and what comes from his lips.

He doesn't want to be a hypocrite, he doesn't want to polish up a filthy heart with some nice sounding words. He's concerned primarily that both the inner and the outer man are consistent with one another, that what he appears to be and what he really is are in step with one another and that the whole is acceptable to God.

He knows that this is his great concern. Up to a point he has less regard for what men think and more concern with what God truly knows and that ought to be our great concern too. And you'll see how David relates to God in this sense, very conscious of how easily he can go astray, very conscious of the glory and the purity that is revealed in God's revelation of himself in the world at large and in the scriptures in particular.

Strength, Redeemer, and Acceptance in Christ

He identifies his God here as the Lord who is his strength and his redeemer. He is even in his prayer to this holy God, expressing again his dependence upon him, acknowledging that God is his strength in order to think and feel and reason and will and then speak and act in a way that pleases him and conscious too that God must be his redeemer if David's heart and David's words are to be acceptable in his sight.

That's the consciousness with which we need to live, that if we are going to be accepted with God we must be accepted in his beloved, that we need a God who makes us clean and keeps us clean, who sustains us in the path that he set for us and who enables us to act from within and to demonstrate without as those who truly belong to him.

It is out of that relationship with God, not just as God but our God, the God who sustains us upon whom we rely, the God who cleanses us and who continues to keep us clean through the blood of that great sacrifice, the Lord Jesus Christ.

It is only in him that we can be acceptable with God and so, redeemed by blood and strengthened by grace, we think, we feel, we reason and then we speak as those who know that before anything else we truly live before God and it is his approval, it is his good pleasure that we seek, that we have no higher desire than for God himself to smile upon the things that we know and the things that we do and to watch over us and to guide us and to sustain us.

Is that your goal? Do you desire that God above all things would see the words of your mouth and the meditation of your heart and that they would be acceptable in his sight?