Just over one year ago today, our moving truck pulled into Village Manor apartments (amazingly with our car still in tow) and we began our life in Louisville. In some ways it is hard to believe that a year has passed, and in other ways it seems like we have been here a lot longer.
God brought us to Louisville to learn to trust him more. A year ago, while I knew we were trusting in God when we came down here without a job, we still had so much to learn. God has used the past year to teach us a great deal about trusting him. One of the biggest lessons that I needed to learn was that this lesson is one that never goes away. Trusting God is meant to be a continual occupation of the Christian. This is something that really struck me as I studied for the lesson that I taught last Wednesday night at church. We are going through the Psalms and last week we were on Psalm 62. In this Psalm of David, we find David reminding himself that God is his all (v. 1-2). Then David deals with his current struggles as he is being attacked and dealt with falsely (v. 3-4). In verse’s 5-7, David returns to the theme of the beginning of the Psalm demonstrating our need to be reminding ourselves over and over again about our need to trust in God alone. It is very encouraging in verse 6 to see David grow in his trust as in verse 2 he says “I shall not be greatly shaken” then in verse 6 he writes, “I will not be shaken.” What a great encouragement we have from David as he demonstrates for us the proper way to trust in God alone. How great is it to be reminded that in God our trust is strengthened as it goes through adversity. Living faith grows. Adversity helps us bring what we know of God to bear on our everyday circumstances. David also shows us that living faith is personal. Throughout the Psalm he speaks of God as being my salvation, my rock, my fortress, my refuge, etc. God doesn’t just want us to know about him, or to know facts about him. It isn’t enough that we can ace our doctrines final. God wants us to know him, and to know him is to trust him. As I reflect on the difficult experiences that I have gone through, knowing that God is sovereign helped, but it was the experience of God’s sovereignty that really helped me through the trial. Verse 8 tells us that trusting God is something with which we are to always be occupied. Verses 9-10 remind us that our attempts to trust anything, even in addition to God is only vanity. As the verses clearly point out, no man, no matter how powerful, and no amount of money, no matter how it’s gained does anything to strengthen our trust in God. In fact, these things tend to hinder our trust in God alone. David then closes the Psalm with a word about how this Psalm should be continually on our hearts. For the singular word of God should echo over and over again in our soul. What God speaks we should always be hearing; it should be like a recording that plays over and over again (v. 11-12).
I know that this was a great lesson for me, and I know that I will be returning to it time after time. There is never a day or a season that will pass that does not require my soul to wait wholly and completely on God alone. It is coming to this understanding that brings me to the next point in this blog post.
As we “celebrated” our first year in Louisville, Jessica and I spent a lot of time talking about the direction of our life (what have we learned, where are we going, etc.). As you can see from the previous portion of this post, we have spent the greater part of a year learning that we need to learn to trust God more. However, it is the simplicity and singularness of this lesson that has been most profound to us. We have been writing blog posts on this blog for over 3 1/2 years on a wide variety of subjects. Yet, over the past year we have been blessed to see over and over again the faithfulness of God. We came from a difficult circumstance, and other than finding a great church to be a part of almost right away, things didn’t go too easily at the start. Through it all, God has been faithful, He has been our rock, our salvation, our refuge. As we have seen God’s providential hand provide for us time after time, a place to live, a Christ-centered church, jobs, great neighbors, and the list goes on and on; we have come to rest in him more, and to joy in him more.
It is in learning this lesson that has led us to decide to change our blog completely. We are going to be leaving Cogitavi behind. We enjoyed blogging here, but we want to do something new, something to mark our life in Louisville. We are going to be starting a new blog called “A Hill to Die On” (we will announce the opening on this blog and provide a link for you as soon as it is up and running). “A Hill to Die On” is going to be a blog focused on Christ and the hill he died on. We can think of nothing greater, nor more beneficial for us to spend our time meditating on and writing about. This helps us to narrow our focus on what is of most importance; that being that Jesus is the son of God, God made flesh to dwell among us to die for our sins. Of whom John the Baptist said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29 ESV) This is just what we want to occupy our mind with, we have a great deal more to learn about Christ and we are eager to look deeply into the Word made flesh and share what we learn, even if we are the only ones who read it. We will still write about some other things as well, but the glory of Christ and the exaltation of his faithfulness will be the driving theme of the blog.
We thank you for reading and we invite you to continue to grow with us as we begin camping out on the hill on which we would die if it came to it.
John
Jess
