Order Brings Peace

Peace never shows up by accident. It grows where lives, homes, and churches are arranged with purpose, and that’s the journey we take through 1 Corinthians 14—pulling order out of abstraction and into everyday practice. We start with a muddy backyard and a deck build that only moved forward once the team stopped, cleared space, and set things in order. From there, we trace the pattern back to God himself: the One who forms, separates, names, and blesses so creation can flourish. Order isn’t sterile control; it’s the condition for fruitfulness.

We open up Paul’s words on the gathered church and the home with care and clarity. You’ll hear why participation beats performance in worship, why self-control is a mark of the Spirit rather than a limit on him, and how planning and structure give room for every voice without letting any single voice dominate. We explore the often-misread section on men and women, showing how Paul’s call to weigh doctrine and guard truth lands as responsibility, not superiority—men initiating and protecting, women strengthening and calling forth courage. Along the way, we get honest about passivity, avoidance, and the “fake peace” that tolerates dysfunction, and we offer a path toward real peace: listening well, acting with love, setting boundaries, and taking ownership.

This conversation is practical: how to be a Berean who weighs teaching, how to organize ministry with clear roles and leaders, and how to build a culture where gifts are coordinated for the common good. It’s also deeply hopeful, because Jesus stepped into our chaos to restore order—rearranging disordered loves and teaching us to live decently and in order so shalom can take root. If you’re ready for a home that’s calmer, a church that’s healthier, and a life that’s more fruitful, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share with a friend, and tell us: what’s one area you’ll reorder this week?

Chapters

• 0:00 Reading 1 Corinthians 14
• 2:00 Order Creates Peace
• 6:30 Defining Order: Taxis and Creation
• 12:00 Culture’s Chaos vs God’s Design
• 15:45 Order in the Home: Roles and Responsibility
• 23:00 Applications for Women and Men
• 28:00 Order in Worship: Participation, Not Performance
• 33:00 Self‑Control, Planning, and the Spirit
• 37:00 Weighing Teaching and Congregational Responsibility

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

And for the rest of us, I'll invite us to stand for the reading of God's Word, 1 Corinthians 14. Beginning in verse 26, the Word of God reads this way. What then, brothers, when you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up. If any speak in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn, and let someone interpret. But if there is no one to interpret, let them uh let each of them keep silent in church, and speak to himself and to God. Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. If a revelation is made to another sitting there, let the first be silent, for you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn, and all be encouraged. And the spirits of the prophets are subject to prophets, for God is not a God of confusion, but of peace. As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home, for it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. Or was it from you that the word of God came, or are you the only ones that is reached? If any one thinks that he is a prophet or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord. If any one does not recognize this, he is not recognized. So, my brothers, earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues, but all things should be done decently and in order. This is God's word. Thanks be to God, you may be seated, and may God add his blessing to the reading and preaching of his word. If you are visiting with us today, the reason that we're teaching on this text is because we're Presbyterians and we just love teaching on verse 40 here, as we do it as often as we can. Now we have been in a series in 1 Corinthians, just walking through the book, and this is where we are today. This past week I had the opportunity to build a deck. It's one of my favorite things to do with a few friends, a few guys from this church and some others as well. And the first thing that you do when you're doing that is you dig holes. So we dug eight of them for our foundation. But the space that we're working in was very tight, not a lot of space. It was in in Clifton. Um and uh once we had dug those holes, the dirt from all of those holes was now everywhere, and navigating that space became even more difficult. You could hardly step anywhere without slipping on a pile of mud or um rolling your ankle on a big rock. And the best decision that we made in that whole project was at that point after we had dug up all that dirt, was, and this this occurred to me, it was one, you know, every now and then I get a good idea. But I said, I think that we need to slow down, stop what we're doing, and I think we just need to take half a day and load all of this dirt into wheelbarrows and bring it to the front of the house and put it in the dump trailer and haul it away and take it away. So we spent the time to do that. And afterward, we had this clean, organized, tidy, nice space where we could work. And because we took the time to create order and to make it neat and orderly, the rest of the job went quickly and smoothly and efficiently and peacefully, and we were singing in three-part harmony at points, um, and it was so easy. And that experience reminded me of something important. It reminded me that where there is good order, there is peace. Where there is good order, there is peace. But where order is lacking, life becomes inefficient, unprofitable, uh frustrating, stressful, and chaotic. And the same principle holds true in the life of the church and in our spiritual lives. If we want peace, if you want peace in your heart, in your personal life, if you want peace in your home, if we want peace in the community of the church and in worship, we need good order. In our passage today, Paul talks about the importance of order in the church and in the home. And the main point that I want to draw out is this: that you will never have peace without good order. If you want peace, you must have order. You'll never have peace without good order. So let's consider three kinds of order that Paul lays out for us here in this passage. Paul points us to an orderly God, an orderly home, and an orderly church. So we're going to think about it under those three three headings. So, first, an orderly God. God's order brings peace. God is a God of order, and his orderliness brings peace. So, first of all, what do I mean by order? What is order? Paul closes this passage with a simple sweeping command that all Presbyterians love. In verse 40, he says, all things should be done decently and in order. The Greek word there is the word taxis, not texus, but like taxes, taxis, taxis. In the ancient world, that word referred, could refer to a military formation where you have soldiers lined up rank and file, each one in its right place, working together toward a common mission. It could also refer to the order of the cosmos. When the Greeks looked up into the sky, uh they saw the steady movement of the stars and the predictable regular phases of the moon and the predictable rhythm of the seasons. They marveled at how the heavens declared order, Texas, and harmony and not chaos. And our English word shares this same idea. There's a few other related words that, you know, for example, uh to ordain, I'm ordained, but to ordain someone is to appoint someone to a specific task, to give them a job. You might ordain your child to go clean their room or to uh to clean out the fridge or something like that. To call something ordinary, that also comes from the same root word, ordinary is to say that it follows a regular in a predictable pattern. Ordinary. What about to coordinate? Another related word. To coordinate is to bring many parts into a single, united movement. In other words, order means things rightly arranged, each part in its proper place, working together toward a common purpose. The Bible begins at the very beginning with a picture of disorder. It tells us in Genesis 1, 2 that God created the earth, and the earth was without form and void. Or in other words, chaotic, unshaped, uninhabitable, without form and void. But then throughout Genesis 1 and even into Genesis chapter 2, as God speaks, as his word enters into that situation, order begins to emerge. And by his word, he brings structure and separation and definition. He divides light from darkness and waters from dry land. He sets boundaries, and he creates borders that the sea cannot cross so that there can be land to live on. He creates two ways to be a human, male and female. By the end of six days, what was formless and void became ordered and fruitful and at peace. Order is not a constraint, it's not something that's arbitrary, it's not something that's holding us back. It's actually the very condition for life and for peace and fruitfulness. And this is just who God is. This is part of God's nature. Order is not just something that he does, but part of who he is. As Paul says in verse 33, Paul writes that God is not a God of confusion, but of peace. And the idea of order is certainly contained in that. Wherever God is at work, he is at work restoring order to a disordered world. And when we step outside of his design, we experience disorder, disordered priorities and disordered loves, disordered relationships, and with that comes anxiety and dysfunction and pain. But where God's order is honored, peace begins to flourish. And not peace is just a mere absence of conflict or just quietness, but peace in the full biblical sense of the Hebrew word shalom, which expresses fruitfulness and harmony, everything in its right place, working as it should. I have a commercial farmer in my extended family, and I visited his farm once and saw his big machines and his fields. And one fall during the corn harvest, I asked him a question. I said, why is it that the practice has become, you know, in the Western world, why do we plant corn in these nice, neat rows? You know, could why don't we do it another way? Why is that the way that we do it? And he explained to me that the spacing is very intentional and the machines are carefully calibrated to plant each seed at a specific distance from the others. Because if it's not planted with order, if the corn is planted too close, then all of the plants will spend all of the energy that they have competing with the others to survive. So they'll just grow up to try to get the sunlight and not get blocked out. And because they spend all of their energy doing that, they will never produce a single ear of corn. Because they're spending all of their energy just trying to survive. A disordered field will produce very little fruit. But when the field is planted with good order and with organization, giving the plants what they need, every plant has the space that it needs to thrive, and the field becomes fruitful and the harvest can be abundant thanks to good order. And the same is true with you and with us together. When our lives are crowded with confusion and disorder, when there's too much going on, when we spend all of our energy just trying to survive, just trying to reach the sun, we are similarly frustrated and fruitless. But when God has his way in our lives, when every part of our lives finds a place in his design, we can do more than just survive. We can become fruitful. We can become what God intends for us to be. And the result of that is peace, the peace that comes when everything is working as it should. Our culture teaches that peace comes from freedom from constraint, that we'll be at peace when we can escape from the neat cornrows that we've been planted in, and when we break out of the box that society has made for us, when we answer to no one and we can do whatever we want. But how's that been working out for Western society? For over a century, we have been busy casting off restraint in all kinds of ways, seeking to escape from our more Christian past in the Western world. We've redefined marriage, we've blurred the boundaries between male and female, we've abandoned the Sabbath, we have done so many things in our culture to cast off the restraints from the past and to exalt self-expression above everything else. But have we found peace as a society in doing that? Have we found peace as individuals? Or do we see more confusion and anxiety and division and mental health issues and prescriptions for these things than ever before? The scriptures offer to us a better way. Peace does not come from casting off restraint, but it comes from finding the right restraint, from finding the right parameters and the right order to submit ourselves to, which is the order that comes from our Creator. It's God's order. So the more we submit our lives to God and allow his word to bring order to our lives, to rule our thoughts and our loves and our habits and our behavior, the more we will experience the peace that flows from his good design. So the the only point I'm trying to make in point one is that God is a God of order in that his order brings peace, and it's not your enemy. And we need to strive in all things to submit ourselves to God's good order. Point two, an orderly home. Order is necessary for peace in the home. Now, this is a difficult text that we've read here. In the midst of Paul's discussion about good order, he turns to the order between men and women in the church, and by implication in the home, and he writes these words in verses 33 through 35. He says, As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home, for it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. We don't have it yet, but we have it on order, a neon sign that we're going to put down at the entrance that says, women should keep silent. Just so they know that when they come into church, these are difficult verses. They're difficult verses, but notice what Paul is saying and what he isn't saying. In chapter 11, which, if you are just joining us, you missed us walking through chapter 11. But in chapter 11, Paul already affirmed that women can pray and they can prophesy in the public worship gathering. He says, when a woman prays or prophesies in church, this is how she should do it. So he's already affirmed that. So what is he talking about here when he says that they should not speak? This silence cannot be a total silence, but it must refer to a particular kind of speech that Paul has in mind. And what would that be? Well, just a few verses earlier, Paul wrote this in verse 29. He said, Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh or consider what is said, to sift what is said. In Corinth, rather than just having one preacher like myself, multiple people would speak in the gathering, and the congregation was called to listen carefully and to discern and judge what they were hearing, those messages, and to measure them against the Word of God. They are to weigh what is said. And Paul is saying here that in the process of public evaluation and correction, the responsibility, excuse me, the responsibility in the church for guarding doctrine and for confronting error rests especially with the men. That it is the job of the men to guard doctrine and to confront error. And that's the kind of speech that Paul is talking about here. If a woman, or a wife, rather, had concerns or questions or disagreements with something that was said, Paul instructs her to discuss those things with her husband at home and encourage him to do something about it. Encourage him to take the lead. And this is not about superiority and inferiority. This is about the good order that God has established, a pattern of male responsibility and female partnership that mirrors creation itself. Paul grounds this instruction, he says, in the law. He says, this is what the law says, referring back to the entire Old Testament, I think especially to the creation order of Genesis 2. That just as God made the world with distinct roles and differences for all of creation, that he made men and women with different callings, with complementary callings. And specifically, God calls men, and he has done this from the beginning of creation, God calls men to lead, to bear responsibility, to protect, to provide, to initiate spiritual direction. And he calls women, wives especially, to support, to strengthen, and to encourage that leadership. Not passively, as if she does nothing, but very actively and very wisely. One author captures it like this. This has always stuck in my mind, maybe it'll stick in yours too. He said, Men are called to enter the dark cave and drive out the bear. Women are called to rest in the strength of that man and to call forth that strength by their encouragement. And I'll just read that one more time because we're going to keep going back to that. Men are called to enter the dark cave and drive out the bear. Women are called to rest in the strength of that man and to call forth that strength by their encouragement. And as countercultural as this sounds, which it does sound countercultural, but deep down, I think that all men, even men in our culture, long for a worthy battle to fight. And they want to give their lives to fighting a worthy battle. And deep down, women long for men to be willing to fight. And they want to encourage them to do that. So here's the principle, and this is applied especially for husbands and wives. Wives should encourage their husbands to lead, and husbands should lead, listening to their wives. Every single word that I said there is important. Wives should encourage their husbands to lead, and husbands should lead, listening to their wives. When that happens, there is peace in the home. And when that breaks down, there's confusion and frustration and pain. And I want to provide an illustration just to help make that a little bit more concrete. My wife and I are walking through a season right now with some difficult conflict in both of our families of origin, both of our extended families. Both of us come from non-Christian homes. Both families that we come from carry a measure of dysfunction. Our family, thankfully, is not dysfunctional at all, but the families we're coming from carry a measure of dysfunction. And recently, my wife reached a point with her own family and with mine where she no longer wants to tolerate it, and she's ready to have hard conversations and to set boundaries and to call people to accountability. And what she wants me to do is she wants me to step up and to stick up for our family to protect our home and to address things that are unjust or unfair, things that are going wrong. In her words, she's saying, Billy, enter the dark cave and drive out the bear. That's what I want you to do. And as we've talked about it and processed it, as I've listened to her, as husbands, you need to listen to your wives, I've realized I've learned something about myself. I've learned that I am often too willing to tolerate dysfunction. When it happens in my church or directed at me personally or in my family, wherever it is, I am too willing to tolerate dysfunction. And I've told myself, oh, I'm just patient. I'm magnanimous. It's just water off a duck's back. It's no big deal. But in reality, a lot of the times it's just avoidance, avoidance of the problems. And that avoidance does not bring real peace, but it keeps a fake peace and allows for dysfunction to continue unchecked. And God's design is that I would listen to my wife and that I would lead, not as a tyrant or a bully, but as a servant, and that my wife would strengthen me with her encouragement and her wisdom and make sure that I am fighting the good fight for our family. She sees a problem, she's encouraging me to do something about it, and I must listen to her and enter the dark cave and drive out the bear. And that's what Paul is talking about here in 1 Corinthians 14. And when that order is embraced, peace begins to take root. So just a few points of application before we move on to our third point. To the women, sisters, if you see a problem in your home, in your marriage, in your community, your calling is not necessarily to take matters into your own hands, but to encourage the men that God has placed in your life to take godly action. And that might be really hard, especially if your husband has been passive or unreliable in the past, or if he hasn't been a good listener, if he's ignored your counsel or what you have to say, and if he's failed to lead well, that can be really hard and painful. But that's what you're called to do. Rather than stepping into a role that is not yours, a role that God has designed for your husband, God calls you to build him up, to hype him up, and to call him to become the kind of man who will enter the dark cave and drive out the bear. If you don't do that, he will never become that man. He needs you to encourage him and to push him to do that. And if you're unmarried, young ladies, sisters, if you're unmarried, you can still live this out. You can still encourage the men around you, your brothers in Christ, your pastors, your elders, your brothers and your fathers. You can encourage them to be bold, to fight for the truth, to lead with courage. This is what Deborah did in the book of Judges. She did not pick up the sword herself, but she was a holy troublemaker, and she saw a problem, and she encouraged Barak, the strong man with the sword. She said, Barak, do your job. Do what you're supposed to do. Go to war for the sake of God's people. And that it's a shameful thing. Paul says that it's a shameful thing for women to speak in church, and he's talking about this correcting doctrine kind of speech. It's not shameful because women are incapable or because they're lesser in some way. It is shameful that a woman would have to do that because there is no man who is willing to do that. That's why that's a shame. So, women, your strength lies not in replacing godly leadership, but in calling it forth and resting in it when it appears. To the men, brothers, if you're married, listen to your wife. Listen to your wife. Listen to her frustrations, listen to her fears, listen to her wisdom, because she sees things that you don't. She sees things that you don't see. And then, after you've spent a good time listening, do something about it. God has called you to shepherd your family. And a shepherd is gentle with his sheep, and he treats his sheep with care. But he also carries a rod. And he does that to confront any threat that would disturb the peace of the flock. So you have to have both. You have to have the gentle touch of the shepherd, but you have to carry a big stick and know how to use it. Your wife needs your presence and your courage and your action, not your dominance, not your silence, but leadership rooted in love. And if you're unmarried, young men, brothers, you do not have to wait in order to live that out. You can even now fight the good fight, stand up for truth, protect the vulnerable, serve with courage and humility, become the kind of man who enters the dark cave. And when you do, the more you do that, you will be building the kind of life that a godly woman would gladly want to join. You have to now become the man, the kind of man who enters the dark cave to drive out the bear. Order is necessary for peace in the home. When each person lives within God's good design, men leading with courage, women strengthening and encouraging, peace takes root, and the home begins to reflect the peace of God. That's point two, peace in the home. And then point three, an orderly church. Order is necessary for peace in the church. The Corinthians were eager to participate in worship. Paul writes this in verse 26. He says, When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. And he's not sad about that. He says, That's great. Let all things be done for building up. That's a good thing. Worship, we believe, should be participatory. Every member of Christ's body has something to contribute for the building up of all. But somewhere along the way in our culture, modern evangelicalism has taken worship and shifted it into more of a performance. So in a lot of churches, I'm glad we don't have one, but there's a stage where a performance occurs and there's a difference between the audience and the stage. There's professional lighting, there's polished production. As you can see, we don't have any kind of polished production at all. Theater-style seating, sermons that are more motivational than they are biblical. It's not inviting you to follow along together with God's Word, but is uh more of a TED talk. Well, why is that such a problem? I like TED talks. I like to listen, I like to go to concerts. Why is that a problem for worship? I think it's because it trains us to it trains us that worship is something that we watch rather than that we participate in together. But true worship is something that we do together. And that's why we don't have a stage at our church. We're all on the same level. That's why our music is simple, so that we can emphasize congregational singing, so that we sing together and hear one another's voices. And that is why in our preaching we strive to be exegetical, where I don't want you to just believe whatever it is I have to say. I want you to follow along with me in the scriptures to see whether or not what I'm saying aligns with God's word. We don't come here to be entertained, but to do work, to do the good work of worship together. The problem in Corinth was not their enthusiasm, but their lack of organization. Their gifts had become chaotic, and some were dominating others and taking too much of the show. So Paul calls for structure. He says two or three prophets should speak. He says that if you speak in a tongue, you should only do it if there's an interpreter. Otherwise, don't do it in worship. Why? Because the church must be ordered for participation. Everyone should have a voice and be able to contribute, but no one person should take over and dominate in an unfair way. And when worship is organized this way, it produces peace instead of confusion. The second mark of an orderly church is self-control. Paul writes in verse 32, he says the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets. Some in Corinth assumed that being spirit-filled, or wherever the Holy Spirit is present, meant losing control, meant being carried away as if the Holy Spirit enters into a room or into a person's life and they completely lose their ability to control themselves. But Paul says the opposite. He says that spiritual inspiration and self-control go hand in hand. Throughout history, Christians have sometimes thought that the Holy Spirit and careful planning don't go together. That the more structured or planned something is, the less room there is for the spirit. To work. And so the more unplanned or unstructured something is, the more room there is for the spontaneous leading of the spirit. Spontaneity means freedom and organization means restriction. But scripture says that the Spirit brings order and not chaos. That when the Spirit enters, he brings organization and order. If the Spirit gives you a word or an insight or conviction, you can wait and you can discern and you can find the right time and the right place to share it. Churches become disordered when passionate people lack discipline and when zeal outruns wisdom. Spirit-led worship is not a completely unstructured free-for-all. It's a fruit of the spirit worship, marked by self-control, by organization, and by planning. And then finally, orderly worship requires personal responsibility. Paul writes this in verse 29. Again, we've read it, but just reviewing it. He says, Let two or three prophets speak and let the others weigh what is said. In the Corinthian church, rather than one sermon, there might have been two or three or several speakers, and the congregation was expected to listen carefully and to weigh what they heard. And that's your role too. The sermon is something that we do together. I'm preaching, but you're listening and you're weighing what is said. When you listen to a sermon, you are not a passive audience, you are an active participant, like the Bereans in Acts 17, where it says that they received the word with eagerness, examining the scriptures daily to see if these things were so. So you should not just take my word for anything that I preach, but everything that I say, you should test by the word of God. You should discern is that truly what the scriptures say? That is your job as a Christian. A healthy church is one where everyone is getting to know, coming to know the Bible well enough to discern truth from error and to hold one another accountable to Scripture. Many churches fall into disorder not because of gifted leaders, but because of uninformed congregants. Because the massive amount of people that are sitting in the congregation don't know the scriptures at all and have no ability to discern what is being taught. An orderly church is a thinking church where the word is central and every believer is engaged. So order is necessary for peace in the church. And that means they were organized enough for everyone to be able to participate, whether it's in worship or just in the life of our church, that we're self-controlled enough to let the Spirit work in an orderly way, and that we're responsible enough to know the word and to test what we hear. When that happens, the church can become a place that Paul describes, a place where God's peace reigns, where the character of God is reflected in the people of God, and where every member takes their proper place in the beautiful order of his design. The reason that we all speak English today rather than French is because Napoleon was disorganized. I'm going to tell you a story. Napoleon led the largest and most strategically advantaged army that the world had ever seen. At the height of his power, he controlled almost all of continental Europe, either directly or they were paying tribute to him. No one in Europe could stand against him. But then he decided to invade Russia. And his army was larger and stronger and better trained. Yet the Russians did not meet him head on. But as he invaded their country, they slowly retreated, drawing his forces deeper and deeper into their own country. And as they retreated, they burned their own fields and they burned their own towns and cities, leaving nothing for the French to eat or to use to maintain their army. Napoleon's supply lines were stretched thin and there was no organized system to resupply the army. So by the time they reached Moscow, which is where they were headed, over half of his 600,000 soldiers were gone. Lost to starvation or to desertion or to disease. The greatest army that the world has ever seen was not defeated in battle. They were undone by poor organization. And the same is true in the church. It does not matter how wealthy we are, it doesn't matter if we've got a huge nest egg sitting in the bank. It doesn't matter how gifted we are or how great of a preacher or preachers we have or how talented our musicians may be. If we lack good order in organization, none of it will be effective. Good order is necessary to make these things effective. It's necessary for peace in the church. Without it, even the strongest community will fall apart. So, who's ready to do all things decently and in order? Can I get an amen? I believe that God has blessed us and he's given us a good foundation for our church and for the future. But if we're really going to take the next step as a church community, it is going to be a step of organization and of order. That's really where we need to grow. We have ministry teams, but we need more. We need ministry teams that are taking responsibility for making things happen. We need people ordained to specific tasks and people coordinating to accomplish those things. Those teams need leaders. If you want to be a part of a church where you can be anonymous or you can be asked not to serve or participate, this is probably not a good church for you. I love you, but that's you, it's just not going to happen here. But I think you know that. And I think that you want to participate and you want to use your gifts, and that's why you're here. So when someone taps you on the shoulder and says, hey, we need some leadership here or in this area or here, can you help us make this happen? Take that very seriously. Even if it's maybe not the role that you will ultimately be in for the rest of your life, but it's just something that we need for now, take that seriously. Or if you see a need that we're not seeing, bring it to the elders. Not with a problem, but with a solution. Don't come to the elders with a problem. Come to us with a solution. That's the good corporate speak right there. And you know what? You are the solution. Your participation helps bring peace to the church. God is a God of order. Where his spirit is, there is order and peace. Men and women participate in that order, and where good men shirk their responsibility, everybody suffers. The church should be a place of order and peace and participation. And even our Lord Jesus left the perfect order of heaven to condescend to our messy and disordered and chaotic world and to get involved with someone like you, who is so messy and disordered. He left his peace in order to enter your chaos and to take your sin and take it to the cross and be completely undone by the guilt of our sins, so that he might put it away from us and begin to restore order to our lives and our families and our church and ultimately to all of creation. So let's look to him and let's follow him in that. Join me in prayer. That you restore peace to disordered lives, lives that are wrecked by the fact that we have not listened to you and we have cast off restraint, and now we are suffering. Lord, you enter into that mess and you don't abandon us, but you put us back into place and put the pieces back where they should be, and you restore us, and you you lead us on to something far greater than we ever were. And that's just the process of salvation and sanctification, and we thank you for that. So as that is happening, God, we pray that that that would bear out in our lives, and in our marriages, and in our homes, and in our church community, and into our neighborhood, and into our world. Would you use us in that? Would you help us with that? Help us to submit to you. We ask all this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.