Pleasing To Him

Psalm 19:14
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock, and my Redeemer.

This prayer is humbling to me when I think about David asking it of the Lord. In this Psalm David spends most of the time praising the Lord by describing how wonderful He is. In this last verse David asks this miraculous Lord to help him maintain a heart that is pleasing to the Lord. This is humbling to me because David is the man that the Lord said was a man after His own heart.

We all know that David was not perfect. He stole another man’s wife and then had him killed (by sending him into the front lines of war). David was run out of his kingdom by his own son, because he had not dealt with his son’s rebellion earlier in life. There were other times when David felt extreme distance from the Lord. In some of the Psalms David even asks God why he can’t have intimacy with Him. Throughout these times David still longed for closeness with the Lord.

It is amazing to me that even after David had done so many sinful things the Lord would still call him a man after His own heart. If you look at the book of Psalms, no matter what happened, David came back to the Lord. This verse reminds me that my meditation should be on the Lord. It is easy to put my focus on worldly things, but the Lord’s desire is for me to be in continual meditation on Him. This means that I strive to worship the Lord in all that I do. If my meditation is on the Lord, the words of my mouth will also be pleasing to Him.

Like David, none of us are perfect. The encouraging news is that, like David, we can ask the Lord to help focus our meditation and words on Him. This is what the Lord asks of us. He knows that we will make mistakes. The Lord doesn’t expect us to do it on our own. That’s why He is our Savior. He desires for us to genuinely seek to be close to Him.