Quiet Confidence & Godly Peace

Grant, O Lord, that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by your providence, that your Church may joyfully serve you in quiet confidence and godly peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

A few weeks ago I reflected on one of the weekly collects and wrote about how disorder around me turns me the opposite of peaceful. This morning, as I read the collect again, I noticed the theme of God's ordering of the world—not just any order, but a peaceful order.
Peaceful order is evident from the very first page of scripture in the book of Genesis.

Creation follows such a clearly logical timeline. Light and dark first. Not animals---who would be running around in what I can only imagine would be chaotic darkness, or plants---unable to survive without sun. After each act of creation is completed there is a predictable refrain of order.  "And there was evening, and there was morning." (Genesis 1)

I love that the collect for the week reminds us that God didn't just thoughtfully order the world for our own sanity, (though he certainly was aware of the needs of a human brain when he created). He did so in order to equip us as the church to serve him in quiet confidence and godly peace.

Undoubtedly we can agree that a church serving with confidence and peace is a beautiful one. I think of a church full of people like Jesus' mother Mary, pregnant and unwed, choosing to trust the words of an angel and responding with "I am the Lord's servant, may it be to me as you have said" (Luke 1:38). Or the confidence and peace it must have taken for Simon Peter, James and John to pull their boats up on shore, leave everything, and follow him. (Luke 5:11)

May we be a church filled to the brim with the quiet confidence and godly peace to serve God out of the abundance of order He has bestowed on us! Not looking back like Lot's wife out of fear, but looking forward like Mary to the order of the coming kingdom!