My first conscious awareness of this last verse from majestic Psalm 19 comes from sometime back in my college years. The church in which I grew up had called a new pastor. This tall, impressive, deep-voiced, dramatic preacher with piercing eyes would climb the steps up to the central pulpit of our (really only a few years-old) sanctuary and ask the congregation to pray before he read Scripture and preached. He would stand completely motionless for several seconds, hands clasped in front of his bowed head, and then intone, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of [our hearts] be acceptable to you, O LORD, [our] rock and [our] redeemer. Amen.”
While I know I had read or heard those words before, hearing them as the prayer before the sermon each week imprinted them in my mind and on my soul. I even found a rock and used a model airplane brush and paint to create something in my dorm room to use as a daily prayer.
While I no longer have that rock nor pray that particular prayer each day, I do believe it to be a pretty effective prayer for us all. What might happen if each one of us—multiple times a day even—would pray this prayer? Might our actions be any different? Our interactions with others? Our behavior in traffic? Our words expressed to others? Imagine how different our world might be!