Aspiring To Be Acceptable

Ps. 19:14, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your
sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer.” The prospect of being acceptable to God
can act upon us with great force. But if we wish the words of our mouth and the meditation of
our heart to be acceptable to Him. We must redefine what is acceptable to us. We must learn
to love the same things that He loves and conform ourselves to His character.
The lives we end up with are determined, to a large extent, by the things we aim for. For this reason, the things we aim for should be carefully considered. Paul wrote to the Christians in Philippi, and in 1:9-11, he said, “And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment, that you may approve the things that are
excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ, being filled with the
fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.”
a. Isn’t this the great goal that should entice us and attract our minds? Isn’t learning to
“approve the things that are excellent” the key to all the other success in Life?
2. To approve the things that are excellent, our minds must be trained to recognize the excellence of those things that are excellent by God’s standards. So Paul says that we
must grow “in knowledge and all discernment.” Just as an art critic must learn how to
recognize artistic greatness when he sees it, we must learn how to recognize the greatness
of that which is morally and spiritually excellent when we come in contact with it.
(A) Day by day, our judgment must come to coincide more closely with God’s, so
that ( the things we approve of are the same things that He approves of. Spiritually
speaking, our tastes must be refined.
(1) David did not discover a way of life that was acceptable to God without learning to think in ways that were acceptable to God. And neither will we make much progress in our spiritual quest if we don’t send our standards of acceptability to His school of excellence. May our meditations be acceptable in God’s sight!
(1) I like Thomas Aquinas’s statement on this, “Grant me grace, O merciful God, to desire ardently all that is pleasing to thee, to examine it prudently, to acknowledge it truthfully, and to accomplish it perfectly, for the praise and glory of thy name.”
(2) Acts 20:32.

Spur - 07/07/2002 pm