Phil. 4:7

And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Having encouraged his readers to pray about everything and worry about nothing, Paul offers them the peace of God as the positive outcome of choosing to pray rather than worry. Peace is something for which many of us long, but that seems to elude us for some reason.

The problem is like this: I pray about the things that are concerning me (a euphemism for worry), and then after I've prayed I tend to continue to worry! Okay, so sometimes I have a wonderful sense of the peace of God, but often times it's simply not that easy. I cannot get the peace of God via some mystical vending machine. Prayer in, peace out.

If all I do is to present God with a long and lengthening list of things, and if I fail to remind myself in prayer about the the ways in which God cares for me and loves me and has my best interests at heart, in other words his faithfulness, then I just return to worrying about things. I lay my burdens down only to pick them up again.

So how can I know the peace of God? It's not a complete answer, but one of the keys for me is trust. Do I trust God enough to believe that he has everything under control. When Daniel's friends stood in front of the furnace they made a statement of faith, a statement of trust. "Even if God doesn't rescue us, we will still trust him. Nothing changes," they might have said.

Peace, it seems, comes through trust, more so that it does through outcomes.