What’s the difference between knowing and believing?

I knew the Goliath roller coaster at Six Flags was fast and thrilling. I’d seen pictures and talked with friends who rode it.
Then I rode it.
It was everything my friends said it was. It screamed up and down and around those rails faster than I drive my car. I had to admit the ride ignited thrills and excitement for me.  Once I experienced the ride I could testify that I believed it was fast and thrilling. I didn’t just know it was.

My experience riding Goliath is similar to knowing and understanding and believing and living out of our true identity in Christ. (See my mission statement.) We can know the lingo and the commands and the promises and the characters and the books and the stories and the Scriptures. (Even Satan and the Pharisees know the Scriptures.)

But it’s a big leap from knowing to believing our true identity in Christ. Believing arrives when we experience a personal and intimate relationship with God.

We get to know God through prayer, consistent daily Bible reading, nature, the Holy Spirit, the Church and our experience.¹

As we learn and study and pray and read God’s word and listen to the Holy Spirit and fellowship with other believers and experience God’s amazing grace, God will reveal our true identity in Christ. It will come in God’s timing, when He wants us to know it and as we obey and trust Him.

¹From Henry Blackaby’s Experiencing God.