Latest / Believe & Become | Ministry, Biblical Encouragement, God's Will, How to Change, Holy Spirit / 33. Knowing the Truth Isn’t Enough for Freedom

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33. Knowing the Truth Isn’t Enough for Freedom · Believe & Become | Ministry, Biblical Encouragement, God's Will, How to Change, Holy Spirit

• 0:00
  Speaker A: We're all familiar with John 8:32 that says you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. But what does that really mean? Have you ever felt like I know the truth but I'm still stuck? It's not working. We've been there too. So today we're talking about what this verse really means and how you can make the truth work in your life for lasting freedom. If you're tired of leading others while secretly battling doubt, discouragement and mental warfare.
• 0:30
  Speaker B: And you want practical tools to renew your mind and walk boldly in your.
• 0:34
  Speaker A: Calling as a leader, you're in the right place. Welcome to Believe and Become.
• 0:38
  Speaker B: We're Josh and Karina, your spirit filled coaches, here to help you overcome those limiting beliefs and lead others confidently.
• 0:45
  Speaker A: If you're ready to hear God's voice more clearly, to step into your purpose and find joy and strength in the.
• 0:50
  Speaker B: Everyday silence, those Bible app reminders judging you from your lock screen and let's jump in.
• 0:59
  Speaker A: Foreign hey friend, here's a quick invitation before we dive in. If you're a spirit filled Christian in leadership, whether you're a pastor, business owner or a stay at home mom and you're feeling stretched thin, stuck and overthinking or unsure how to break through what's holding your back, you're not alone. We'd love to invite you to our brand new Facebook group, Overcome Limiting Beliefs for Christians in Leadership. It's a space for faith filled leaders like you to be refreshed, encouraged and equipped to to renew your mind and lead from God's presence, not pressure. Inside you'll find community, practical guidance and uplifting conversations that help you step into greater clarity, peace and purpose. Come join us. Follow the link in the show notes. We'll meet you there.
• 1:44
  Speaker B: Well, welcome to the podcast. We're so glad you're here with us today. I love talking about freedom. I love the freedom that God has for us. And I'm so excited to share with you a little bit of our story and to help you find freedom in your life. Because I truly believe that is why Jesus came to set us free.
• 2:04
  Speaker A: Absolutely.
• 2:06
  Speaker B: So I grew up in church from the time I can remember. I was in a church service with my tambourine singing in the top of my lungs and I grew up knowing in my mind that I was loved. I sang the song Jesus loves me this I know Jesus loves the little children. I knew all of the songs. I knew the scriptures, but I had this tendency towards perfectionism and I grew up in a church culture that was Fairly legalistic. So it was most often about what you're doing and whether or not you're doing it right. So even even though I knew that I was love, I really didn't know how to receive the love that God had for me. And I wasn't able to experience his love fully because I just didn't know how. My mind knew the truth, but my heart was resistant to it. And so because of that, I went looking for love in all the wrong places, as the song goes. And it never filled the void. I never could fill up that space because it was intended to be filled with love.
• 2:59
  Speaker A: God's love.
• 3:00
  Speaker B: I knew that I was loved, but it didn't change my behavior. And I could have very easily agreed with you that I know the truth, but it is not working and I don't know why. It wasn't until I fully experienced God's love, in spite of my shortcomings, when I allowed him to meet me in the place of my brokenness and didn't have any choice but to let him fill me with his love because I was so broken. It wasn't until I experienced. Experienced his love for me that I could truly believe that he loved me. It was able to go from my head into my heart. And then I was able to change. I didn't change first and get cleaned up. And then he came and was like, now I love you. Because I would have just reinforced my wrong theology. But what happened was he met me in the middle of my brokenness and my sin and continued to love me as I walked out of it and walked into becoming the person that he made me to be. And so getting that knowledge of his love from my head, my heart was. It took a while and it felt like it was probably a longer process than it needed to be. But eventually I was able to come out of that brokenness and that cycle of sin and step into the freedom that God had for me.
• 4:13
  Speaker A: We all need to experience God's love on a deeper level. And his love changes us. Anytime that we meet with God in His presence, we are changed by him. But it's that. It's that encounter with Him. It's that experience, that intimacy that really changes us. If we can have a thought or we think we know something, that won't change us until it gets all the way down to our heart. I love the way that you said that. You know, John 8:32 is what we started with. It says, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. And we got real curious and said, what does that word know mean in the Greek?
• 4:49
  Speaker B: Well, because I think that if you go knowing the truth isn't enough for freedom.
• 4:53
  Speaker A: That's a little, little controversial.
• 4:55
  Speaker B: It's a little controversial because the Bible says you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. But I think that we've all experienced areas in our lives where we know the truth, but we are not free. We don't feel free. And so, yeah, we definitely wanted to dig into this word. The word in the Greek is ginosko or ginosko maybe. Thank you for that.
• 5:14
  Speaker A: Very good.
• 5:15
  Speaker B: And what it means is a knowledge grounded on personal experience, experience. So to learn to know, to come to an understanding, and it actually is the same kind of know that would indicate intimacy that where, you know, Adam knew Eve or Abraham knew Sarah. It's an intimate, personal experience of the truth. So when you put that in there, you will intimately know, you will have a personal experience, you will come to a deep understanding of the truth. And that truth shall make you free. It has a different meaning here than just a mental ascent. Right. I know the truth in my head, so it should change my heart. That doesn't, it doesn't work that way.
• 5:55
  Speaker A: Yeah. I think that in our Western culture we're very logical oriented and we have to remember that the culture that Jesus was speaking to is very different from ours. And they, they were far less into. What is the logic? What do I think about this? It all has to make sense. A plus B equals C. It. We're just. That's the way that we've been trained. It's just the way our culture is. And we don't even realize that. But they would understand that this knowing is. It's an experience. I'm experiencing the truth, and that sets me free.
• 6:31
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's an experiential knowledge. And I think if you've ever experienced a miracle, if you've ever come into God's presence and felt something or encountered him in a way where, you know, I'll never be the same. That's what we're talking about. That's the kind of knowledge that sets you free, the kind that expands experiences him. And it doesn't matter what anybody else says because you know that, you know what he did for you or what, how he changed you or what happened in your life or the life of that person that you loved. And so there's this experience that changes what you know. And, and it's more than that. I know it, I understand it in my brain. And you Begin to respond differently in situations because you know something deep in your heart.
• 7:15
  Speaker A: And it's important to know the Bible, to know what it says. We're not saying that we just throw that out and just go all with. We need to know the truth of what God's Word says in our minds. But we can't just leave it there.
• 7:29
  Speaker B: Right.
• 7:30
  Speaker A: We have to pick that up and say, God, I need to know this in my soul, in my spirit, deep within me, so that it's a part of me. It's not just knowledge for the sake of knowing something. It's knowledge that transforms my life. I'm a different person because of what I know from the Bible, what I know from my relationship with God. And that's. That's what he wants for us, is for us to be changed by his presence. Changed by His Word.
• 7:56
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 7:56
  Speaker A: And.
• 7:57
  Speaker B: And you, you see this in the scripture because 1 Corinthians 8:1 tells us that knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. And you can see it in the Pharisees with the religious mindset of they knew the Scripture, they knew, Jesus says, down to the. The very letter, the tittle of the law. Right. They knew every single thing that was in there, every period, every dash, every exclamation point. But they didn't love. And because of that, there was. They were powerless to experience the change that Jesus was bringing. And, and I don't want to be a Pharisee. I don't want to just know the Bible. I want to experience God in His Word through His Word, through encounter with Him. And I think that when you approach the Bible as I want to understand him, you know, like Moses, show me your ways, Lord. I want to know you. And then you actually invite him into that so that you can experience him through His Word. That changes everything.
• 8:51
  Speaker A: I love that. One of our pastors says the Bible is the only book where when you read it, the author shows up. I love that. That's so cool. God, when we read His Word, he shows up. And he's the one that helps us read it correctly, to interpret it properly, and to encounter him through those words on the page. That's what he wants for us. And so in order for the truth to make us free, we must experience the truth, hear it directly from God. Every believer should have had at least one encounter with God when we first put our trust in Jesus, when we accept him as our Lord and our Savior. You think back to that moment where maybe your heart was beating fast, where you could sense his presence and you Knew I have to do this. This is what my life was made for. And you make that commitment to Him. I hope that everyone listening to this has had that experience. If you haven't, we release over you just that encounter with God's presence, that he loves you deeply, he wants to know you, and he wants you to know him even better than you ever thought possible. He is a God of intimacy. He's a God of encounter. Let's talk a little bit about encounter. Encountering God is. There's actually, we look it up in the Bible, Hub, topical Bible, because I got real curious. We did some research on this one. And it says in the biblical context, the term encounter often refers to a significant meeting or experience with God, angels, or other divine manifestation. These encounters are pivotal moments that can lead to transformation, revelation, or deeper understanding of God's will and purpose. Boy, whoever wrote that, they did a good job.
• 10:31
  Speaker B: Good job, you.
• 10:33
  Speaker A: But that's what God wants. He doesn't want to just fill our heads with knowledge or good doctrine. He wants us to be changed. But in order to do that, we have to encounter the God that spoke those words. Yeah.
• 10:46
  Speaker B: And I think that most of us can relate to this idea that I know the right thing to do, but I chose to do the wrong thing. Like, I think everybody on the planet can go. At one point in my life, I made a decision that I knew was not the right thing. I took the candy or the lipstick or I lied to my parents or, you know, whatever it might be. I did the thing that I knew I wasn't supposed to do. And many of us have found ourselves in a place where we feel stuck in a cycle of sin, even though we know the truth and we don't know how to get out of it. And so what we're saying today is that when you encounter God in this way, when you have a significant meeting with him, with God, with Jesus, with Holy Spirit, that creates a pivotal moment for you where. Where the revelation of the truth transforms your understanding and the way that you begin to live your life. And. And that is my story. That's the story I told you at the beginning. I had encounters with him where he loved me, where he met me, and he revealed Himself to me in a way that brought about transformation. Because that's what he does. That's what encountering God does. The encountering the truth, encountering him in this way, where he speaks the truth over you. It's no longer just words on a page. It's now truth to your heart. That is what's gonna change you.
• 12:09
  Speaker A: And this is what we do with our clients. We uncover lies that we've been believing that have been holding us back. And we encounter God with the truth. We ask the Holy Spirit to speak to us, and he always shows up, reveals the truth. And it's one thing to read the truth or just to know it from a page or know what you're supposed to do, but when God speaks it to you, it carries his grace, his supernatural power to change. So we. We go to God, we get the truth, we attach scriptures to it, we create declarations, and we give you a process to rehearse that, to renew your mind, as Romans 12:2. Romans 12:2 says, Be transformed by the renewing of your mind. New our minds with the truth, and then that changes us from the inside out. Yeah, because there's this process of you might encounter the truth from God, but our brains still haven't caught up to the truth. And so we have to reprogram our brain so that we automatically think and act out of that truth. If you're struggling with what's wrong with me, I know the truth, but I can't change. I'm just. I'm stuck in a pattern of behavior that I know is wrong or a pattern of thinking that is destructive to me. If you're struggling with that, go to our website and book a session with us. We want to see you set free by the truth. And God is so good at that. So go to joshandkarina.com coaching don't wait to book that session, because every day that we spend stuck is just. I mean, we've experienced it. It's like, why didn't I just go after this and get the truth in me sooner so that I could actually experience that abundant life? I could experience the freedom that Jesus promised us. It's J-O-S-H-A-N-C-O-R-I-N a.com coaching the link will be in the show notes for you, so you can just click right there. It's worth it. It is so, so worth it. And we just love seeing the way that God shows up so powerfully in each one of these sessions with our clients. It's incredible. We just love it. We love the way that he moves.
• 14:14
  Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And Josh said something really important that we encounter the truth, but our brains haven't caught up. And I think it's kind of like the reverse process. Right? Your brain has this way of doing things, and so your heart doesn't Change, right? Because you're not encountering the truth. You're just knowing the truth, but then you encounter the truth. And now you have to go back and tell your brain this is the new truth. And so renewing our minds with the truth is a really important way that we move forward and move out of the sin patterns and move out of the stuckness, if you will.
• 14:47
  Speaker A: And.
• 14:48
  Speaker B: And that was important for us, too. I think that we've both had moments where we've encountered God, where he's spoken deeply over us or into us, and we've been changed forever. And maybe there have been some struggles after, but it's. It's. We can always go back to that moment. But then we've also had those times where we've had breakthrough. We've encountered him in a worship service or in a. An inner healing session or something like that, and he speaks to us, and then we. We feel the change for a little while, but then we go back to the way that we used to think, because we don't. We didn't know how to renew our minds. And so if you've. If you grew up in church, maybe you didn't. That's okay. But if you grew up in church, you probably went to youth camp, summer camp, winter camp, right? And we have this. This term that. This name that we call. You went up on the mountain to meet with the Lord, right? This Moses experience. But then you have to come down from the mountain and you go back to regular life, and.
• 15:40
  Speaker A: And.
• 15:40
  Speaker B: And things start to slowly but surely go back to the way that they used to be, right?
• 15:45
  Speaker A: From.
• 15:46
  Speaker B: From a retreat, maybe as an adult, maybe you got saved as an adult, and you went to a women's retreat or a men's retreat, and you're so fired up, and you're like, I'm never gonna be the same, and I'm gonna read my Bible and I'm gonna spend time with Jesus, and I'm not gonna say those words anymore, and I'm not gonna hang out with those people. And little by little, we come back from the mountain, and sometimes it's a few days, sometimes it's a week or a month, but then we find ourself back in that place. It's because you haven't renewed your mind with the truth that you. You received on the mountain. And so we have to take that truth. And like Josh said, we pair it with the Word and we begin to declare it over ourselves day after day. Morning, afternoon, evening. We say, this is the truth of. This is who God says, I am. This is what he did in me. And we rehearse the new revelation that God has given to us. And we rewire our minds to think the truth that he has spoken over us instead of the lies that we used to think.
• 16:38
  Speaker A: Oh, I love that story so much. How many times we've all. I think if. Yeah, if you were a Christian and went to church, you know, when you were a teenager, you went to summer camp, you went to youth camp. You had this crazy encounter with the Lord where you got really excited and fired up. And then it would. You're like, okay, I'm never the same. You come home, and then it's so disappointing. After a month, you're like, I'm back to where I was, what happened and how. Boy, I really, really wish I would have known. Just to live in that encounter, to rehearse it, to relive it in your mind. God has made our mind so powerful that when we go back and relive a moment like that, it's like we're there. It has the same effect on our minds and our bodies. Our brains actually create structures based on what we're thinking. That's what science has told us. God, you know, God speaks and he creates with his words. We can do the same thing. We actually create physical structures in our brains based on what we think and say. If we tap into that power that he's given us to create with our words, with our thoughts, we can create new patterns of thinking. And once we do that, that changes us. It changes our behavior because we're always so. Externally, we're like, oh, I have this sin issue, or I wish I didn't do that, or I'm stuck in this pattern of thinking. Yeah, we. We struggle with those things. It's like, how do I get out of that? Well, actually, I just need to change the way that I think. I need a new belief system. Yeah. And then we get transformed from the inside out. Behavior modification doesn't work. If you want a new behavior, you want a new outcome, you want a new emotion, you need a new belief system first. So that's what we focus on with our coaching clients, is what are the things that I'm believing that aren't true? What's the new truth? Okay, now I have to reprogram myself. So that is my automatic. That's my default. And let me tell you, having personally experienced it, it is amazing. It's crazy when something will come out of your mouth. That's the new you. Yeah. It's not the old you, you're like, where did that come from? In this situation before, I would always react negatively and say, well, that's just the way life is always going to go bad. Instead, I reacted and said, no, God's going to work it out. I have hope for this situation. In fact, it's going to be good. And when that happens, it's just so good. It's so powerful. It's working. You're like, it's working. God's changing me. His truth is setting me free.
• 19:11
  Speaker B: It's such a beautiful process to walk others through, but also to have experienced for ourself and to continue to experience because we all need the continual renewal of our minds. And even if you've. Maybe you've been a Christian for a few months or a few years, and you have that one big experience with the Lord where He saved you and he brought you in to the glorious light of salvation, it's okay if you didn't turn around and immediately become a different person. It's okay. Because we're not going to ever get there on our own merit, on our own strength. And we have to continue to go back to that encounter. And the reason that this works is because when we encounter God, when we have a significant meeting or experience with him and he reveals truth to us and he goes deeper into our hearts with the truth, there are feelings that you're feeling, and there is an experience that you're experiencing. So maybe you're. You see a picture. Maybe you have an emotional feeling or a physical feeling. Maybe you're hearing his voice, and then you're. You're feeling what that feels like to feel loved or to feel his presence. And so we have an experience, but then we also have an emotion. And when you combine those with the truth that he's speaking over you, that brings about change more quickly than if you're just. It's not just repeating a mantra. It's not just positive affirmations. That's not what we're doing. No, we're rehearsing. Like Josh said. I love that word. We're rehearsing that encounter. We're remembering, I met with God, and this is what it felt like, and this is what he said to me. And then we're speaking that truth over ourself. And so we're really taking that truth much deeper than it could go otherwise. If I was just standing in front of the mirror every morning saying the verse over and over, right? It's not just scripture memory. It is encounter. And it's Rehearsing that encounter, that really rewires our brain.
• 21:01
  Speaker A: One of our mentors says, practice makes permanent. And so if you want to be different, like, to be truly transformed, to make that permanent in your life, you have to practice it. You have to practice thinking a new way. You have to practice God's truth. You have to practice those scriptures, get them inside of you, so that when something happens, it's like, oh, actually, I memorized the scripture. Guess what? The Holy Spirit's really good at bringing those up at the right time. But if it's not in your brain, it's a lot harder for him to remind you of. And so these are the steps that we lead our clients through when we do coaching. It's to identify areas where we lack hope. Then we're going to ask the Holy Spirit to tell us, what is the lie that I'm believing. We're going to renounce that lie and break agreement with it. Then we're going to ask the Holy Spirit, what is the truth that you want to speak in this situation? And we're going to make sure that that aligns with Scripture. We're going to make sure that that's something that God is truly saying to us. All our clients encounter the Lord in such a special way when we lead them through this process. And then we're going to actually take that truth, change it into declarations. They're based on Scripture. These are things that we can rehearse morning, noon, and night, multiple times per day. Stick them on sticky notes all around your house. Have it on your phone. Whenever you encounter that thought pattern or that thing that you're trying to change, bring those declarations back up, bring those scriptures back up and say, no, actually, I'm not going to think that anymore. This is the truth that I encountered, that I heard from the Lord when I encountered Him. And then the last step is we're going to actually laugh at the lies because that breaks the power that the enemy had over us, because we gave him an area where we believed something he was telling us. But God laughs at his enemies and that that breaks the power of those lies over us.
• 22:50
  Speaker B: And we will give you tools to walk this out if you feel like, I don't know how to do declarations or I want freedom in this area, but I don't know how to get out of it. We give you other tools as well. So we walk you through this process of overcoming lies. But then we also have our breakthrough journal. We have habit tracker. We have other things to keep you accountable but also to help you on your journey to freedom. We love to walk people through this process. We know what it feels like to be stuck. We know what it feels like to think, I'm never going to get out of this. I just want freedom. I just want to be different. I just want to be who God made me to be and walk in my true identity. We get it. And we would love to walk with you out of the darkness and into the light. So go to our website, joshandkarina.com coaching and sign up for that coaching session because we want you to walk in the freedom, fullness of the freedom that comes from experiential knowledge of the truth.
• 23:47
  Speaker A: And we're going to actually give you the five steps to mind renewal. We're going to give those to you for free. We have a PDF, there's going to be a link in the show notes, you can click on that, type in your email, we'll send you the PDF. You can start working through those steps on your own. And we have a couple podcast episodes where we actually talk you through this as well and then try it out, see how it works, experiment with it. And then if you need some more help, somebody to walk you through that process, that's what we're here for, so you can get started even on your own. We so desperately want everybody to get free and to experience the power of this process that we're willing to give it away to you for free. We want you to experience, start to experience that breakthrough and then get some momentum going and go further than with God than you ever thought possible.
• 24:33
  Speaker B: So this is why knowing the truth isn't enough for freedom. It's not just about head knowledge, it is about heart knowledge, about acceptance, experiencing the Lord, experiencing the truth in a way that no one can ever take it away from you. In order to get really free, you got to encounter Him. And so we just pray that this week will be a week of encounter. That as you read your Bible, as you go for a walk, as you go about your day, that you would begin to encounter him in ways that change your life and that take the truth deep into your heart so that you can be truly changed because God desires freedom for you. Jesus came to set the captives free. So we don't want to be captives any longer. We want to walk in that freedom. And we just bless you this week with the freedom that God has for you, with the encounters that he has prepared for you. And we pray that this week will be a week that at the end you can say I'll never be the same. Hey, friend. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. If so, would you take 30 seconds to share this podcast with someone who may need encouragement or practical tools for fighting their battle?
• 25:41
  Speaker A: Then rate and review this podcast. Help us spread the message of transformation far and wide.
• 25:46
  Speaker B: All right, time to walk back into the noise with peace, purpose, and maybe a tiny bit of guffing.
• 25:52
  Speaker A: We'll meet you back next Thursday for another episode. Bye, Sam.