The Gift of Order
Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
~Psalm 73:25–26
Happy January, 2026! As we begin the second half of the school year, we find ourselves focusing on the habits of neatness and order. Charlotte Mason wrote that order and neatness are necessary for habit training and are formed through an orderly, beautiful environment and the practice of putting things away. When pondering the concept of order, however, I began contemplating a more “heart-shaped order,” which is the ordering of our hearts.
We are all preparing to get back to the normal routines of our lives, whether in our homes or in our work. As I’ve been seeking God’s help in rightly ordering my heart, I was reminded of the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism:
Q. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.
When our hearts are ordered to be aligned with God’s purposes for us, we find joy in our work, homes, and routines. I recently learned that the Hebrew word that is used for “work” in Genesis 2:15, when God took man and put him in the Garden of Eden “to work it and keep it,” is the same word used for “serve and worship” in Exodus 3:12, when God spoke to Moses at the burning bush, saying: “Certainly I will be with you, and this shall be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve and worship God at this mountain.”
When we recognize that our work in our homes and in our vocations is a part of God’s good design for us and is one of the ways we can serve, worship, and glorify Him, that can, by God’s grace, transform our mindsets, help order our hearts, and bless others. This heart ordering, what rules our hearts, will, as Paul Tripp reminds us often, control our words and behavior.
As we step forward into 2026, let’s be reminded that we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10), and ask Him to remind us of the ways He has redeemed the desires of our hearts in the past and used them for His good purposes for us. Those reminders will help strengthen us as we ask for His grace in establishing the work of our hands, with rightly ordered hearts, for 2026.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands!
~Psalm 90:17
