Knowledge and Belief

Is there a difference between knowing something and believing it? I mean, when it comes to the price of gas, I know it is $3.60 a gallon, but I can’t hardly believe it. I know that a giant redwood tree grows from a seed about the same size as that of a tomato seed, but I have a hard tyme believing that is possible. I know that I was made special and I am loved, but do I believe it? Well…

It’s probable that 95% of what we “know” is because someone told us. 4% we figure out by experimentation and that lingering one percent, well, that is reserved for the stuff we find out by sheer dumb stupidity. Dumb stupidity might sound a bit redundant, but really, is a classification reserved for those things you just didn’t think through, but made perfect sense after you suffered the consequences of them. Come to think of it, that one percent might be a little low for some of us, but I digress.

The truth is, a lot of what we know are things we accept as fact. We don’t question it because people we trust told us it is true. Parents, teachers, family, preachers and all those trusted sources we have as kids are the ones we count on to tell us the truth. Parents tell us that sleep is good for us, we trust that, even though we don’t want to believe them and tend to test the theory throughout the years. Teachers tell us that Shakespeare really does make a lot of sense, okay, we believe them even though we don’t understand it and complain about having to learn it. Family members tell us we’re important, preachers tell us that God loves us and we take it as fact. We know things to be true because a trusted source told us they are, but what happens when our trusted sources tell us lies and disguise them as truth?

What happens when our parents tell us we aren’t good enough and that we will never amount to anything? What happens when a teacher teaches opinion instead of fact? Or when our family tells us we are unwanted? Or a preacher tells us we are bad because we don’t wear the right clothes and we are a disappointment to God? As untrue as all of those things are, hearing them as a child, from a trusted source, makes those falsehoods the things we know … the things we believe to be true about ourselves. It becomes our damaging reality and a constant contradiction to what God is showing and telling us every day through His creation, through the truth-speakers in our lives and through His Word. What happens is, we become burdened by the “factual” lies told to us and confused by the actual truth around us.

So as we grow up, believing the “factual lies”, we struggle to even begin to think the actual truth could in fact be true. When friends tell us they love us and they are glad we are here, it sounds like a lie to us, because the truth is that we are unwanted. When a pastor preaches that God loves us just as we are, that doesn’t sound like it could possibly be true, because we’re still wearing the same wrong clothes and still disappointing Him. When a teacher tells us we have great aptitude and potential, we think that can’t be right, because we are not good enough and will never amount to anything. Over tyme, these upside down and backwards ways of thinking about ourselves really takes a toll on our self image and eventually, it becomes impossible for us to see the truth about who we are. No, it’s not our fault, it’s just our damaged reality.

So what is the solution to dispelling the “factual lies” and replacing them with actual truths? Well, it comes back to the difference between knowledge and belief. The definition of knowledge is, “facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education.” The definition of belief is “the acceptance of a statement as true.” So, the factual lies of not being good enough and being unwanted and the like are ‘facts and information we acquired through our childhood experience and somewhere along the way, we accepted them as true and now we believe them. Ah, there’s both the rub and the redemption, the rub being that we accepted the factual lies as truth and the redemption being that our acceptance of those lies is our choice. 

There is a passage in Proverbs 22 that reads, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Now, considering we are discussing the ways we were trained in our minds as a child, you might think this is an odd verse to reference here, but it is actually quite fitting. All children need to be taught how to grow up, sadly, some of us, for whatever reason, don’t get the best training. This verse however says to train a child in the way that he or she SHOULD go and when the child is old, he or she will not depart from it. Well I am certain that being told “factual lies” is not proper training and is certainly not the way we should go. So if proper training is something we won’t depart from, would it not stand to reason that improper training is something from which we are allowed to depart? Something from which we are called to depart? I think so.

There comes a point in everyone’s life, even the life of a child who receives the best possible training, when that person has to decide if they believe what they’ve been taught. If we are still believing the “factual lies” about ourselves, then we have not yet reached that point, because there’s no way that we would want to accept those lies as truth. We are still just blindly accepting what someone else trained us to believe, but the beauty of that is, we don’t have to accept it. 

Now I am not saying that it will be easy to change our way of thinking or to let go of what we’ve always thought was true, in fact I will say the opposite. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be tough, mentally and physically exhausting to dispel the lies and replace them with truth, with God’s truth, because that is the key to our success. You see, God’s truth is the only truth that is infallible, that does not and cannot change. When we decide to accept God’s truth, it becomes our belief and we see things in a whole new way. 

So, if you’ve been struggling with self doubt, insecurities, a poor self image or any other negative self-thoughts or self-talk, remember that knowledge and belief look a lot alike, but they are truly different. You can “know something” but that doesn’t make it true to you. What makes it true to you is whether or not you choose to believe it. There are certain things like 2 + 2 equaling 4 and Jesus Christ being the only Way to eternal life that are facts, but unless you accept them as true to you, you cannot be affected by them. It’s the same with factual lies, you do not have to accept them as true and if you daily choose to refute them and focus on real truths like Jesus and His love for you, well you will soon find out that with God’s help, you have all the power you need to see who you really are in Him and eventually you will see all those factual lies for what they really are…just something someone once told you that you simply do not believe.