When Devotion to God Doesn’t Guarantee We Understand Him Correctly

Most Christians would agree that faithfulness to God matters. We want to know His Word, understand His will, and live in a way that honors Him. We pray for wisdom, study Scripture, and develop convictions about what we believe God has revealed. Over time, some of those convictions become so deeply rooted that we rarely think to question them. After all, if we’ve arrived at our beliefs through a genuine desire to know God and obey Him, shouldn’t that count for something?

It certainly does. But does it mean we’re right?

That’s a more uncomfortable question. We tend to associate strong conviction with spiritual maturity and unwavering certainty with faithfulness. Yet Scripture gives us numerous examples of people who were devoted to God, knowledgeable about His Word, and genuinely committed to doing what they believed was right, only to discover that their understanding was incomplete or their actions misguided. Their devotion was real, but their conclusions weren’t always correct.

This raises an important distinction that is easy to overlook: We can be sincere in our devotion to God without being accurate in everything we believe about Him. Our commitment to the truth and our understanding of the truth are not necessarily the same thing.

When Understanding Is Incomplete

Consider Apollos in Acts 18. Luke describes him as an eloquent man, mighty in the Scriptures, instructed in the way of the Lord, and fervent in spirit. He spoke and taught accurately the things of the Lord, yet he knew only the baptism of John. When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained the way of God to him more accurately.

What’s remarkable about this account is what Scripture doesn’t say. It doesn’t portray Apollos as dishonest, careless, or rebellious. Nor does it suggest that everything he had previously taught was false. He knew much that was true, but there was more he needed to understand. His knowledge was incomplete, and that incompleteness needed to be addressed through further instruction.

Apollos reminds us that spiritual sincerity and biblical knowledge are not guarantees of complete understanding. Even someone described as mighty in the Scriptures can have something left to learn. And perhaps just as importantly, the need for further instruction does not diminish the sincerity of someone’s faith.

But what happens when the problem isn’t incomplete knowledge? What happens when we already know the truth, yet something else influences how we respond to it?

When We Know the Truth but Fail to Follow It

Peter gives us a particularly sobering example. By the time we reach Galatians 2, Peter was no inexperienced disciple. He had walked with Jesus, witnessed His resurrection, received the Holy Spirit, and played a prominent role in the early church. He had also received a remarkable lesson about the inclusion of Gentiles when God directed him to the household of Cornelius in Acts 10. Peter understood that God was not showing partiality between Jews and Gentiles, and he had defended that truth before other believers.

Yet in Galatians 2:11–14, Paul recounts an occasion when Peter withdrew from eating with Gentile believers after certain men associated with James arrived. Before their arrival, Peter had been eating with the Gentiles. But fearing those of the circumcision, he separated himself, and his behavior influenced other Jewish believers, including Barnabas, to do the same.

Paul confronted Peter because his conduct was not consistent with the truth of the gospel.

Think about that for a moment. Peter wasn’t being corrected because he had never learned the truth. He already knew it. The problem was that fear had influenced his behavior, causing him to act contrary to what he understood. His actions communicated a distinction between Jewish and Gentile believers that the gospel did not support.

This is an important difference from what we saw with Apollos. Apollos needed a fuller understanding of the truth. Peter needed to bring his conduct back into alignment with the truth he already possessed. Both required correction, but for different reasons.

And that distinction matters for us. Sometimes we are wrong because we genuinely don’t know something. Other times, we know what Scripture teaches, but our fears, loyalties, habits, or desire for acceptance influence how we apply it. We may not consciously reject the truth, yet our actions can contradict it.

Peter’s example also reminds us that spiritual experience and maturity do not place anyone beyond correction. If an apostle who had walked with Christ could act inconsistently with the gospel, we should be cautious about assuming that our own years of faith, biblical knowledge, or spiritual experiences make our judgments infallible.

But Scripture takes us even further. It shows us that religious devotion itself can become dangerously misdirected when it is separated from the truth.

When Zeal Is Mistaken for Truth

Before his conversion, Paul was not indifferent toward God. Quite the opposite. He was deeply committed to the religious traditions he had inherited and zealous in defending what he believed to be right. In Philippians 3, he describes his former confidence in his Jewish heritage, his standing as a Pharisee, and his zeal in persecuting the church. In Acts 26:9, he explains that he had thought it necessary to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth.

Paul wasn’t persecuting Christians because he believed he was opposing God. He believed he was defending the truth. Yet the very zeal he considered evidence of his religious devotion had placed him in opposition to the Messiah he failed to recognize.

We need to be careful here. Paul’s persecution of the church was not an example of Christian faithfulness accompanied by an innocent misunderstanding. He was opposing Christ, and his actions were sinful. But his experience demonstrates something we cannot afford to overlook: a person can be profoundly convinced of the righteousness of a cause and still be profoundly wrong about it.

In Romans 10:2, Paul makes a similar observation about his fellow Israelites, acknowledging that they had a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. Their religious enthusiasm was real, but it did not mean they had rightly understood God’s righteousness or His provision of salvation in Christ.

These examples confront a tendency we may not even realize we have. We often evaluate the strength of a belief by the sincerity with which it is held. We admire people who stand firmly on their convictions, and rightly so when those convictions are grounded in truth. But conviction, by itself, tells us how strongly someone believes something. It does not tell us whether what they believe is correct.

When Scripture Challenges Our Convictions

Most of us have theological convictions that have developed over years, perhaps even decades. Some were formed through careful study of Scripture. Others were inherited from parents, pastors, churches, or traditions we trusted. Still others may have been shaped by personal experiences that seemed to confirm what we already believed. None of those influences necessarily makes a belief wrong, but neither does any of them establish that it is right.

And the longer we’ve held a particular belief, the easier it can become to confuse our familiarity with it for biblical certainty. We may know how to defend a position, recall the verses commonly used to support it, and recognize the arguments against it without ever having seriously examined whether those passages actually teach what we’ve been told they teach.

This is where faithfulness requires something more than sincerity or determination. It requires a willingness to allow Scripture to examine our convictions, even the ones we hold most dearly.

The Bereans provide a beautiful example of this in Acts 17:10–12. When Paul and Silas brought the message of Christ to Berea, the people received the word with readiness and searched the Scriptures daily to determine whether what they were hearing was true. Luke commends them for this response.

Notice the balance. The Bereans received Paul’s message with readiness, but they also examined the Scriptures to determine whether his teaching was true. Their willingness to listen did not replace discernment, and their careful examination did not prevent them from receiving the truth. What’s particularly meaningful is that the message they were evaluating was true, yet Luke still commends their diligence in testing it against Scripture. Their examination wasn’t an expression of unbelief, but a demonstration of their desire to know whether what they were hearing was genuinely from God.

If our ultimate loyalty is to God and His Word, then discovering that we’ve misunderstood something should not be viewed as a threat to our faith. It may be uncomfortable. It may require us to reconsider beliefs we’ve defended for years. It may even mean acknowledging that someone we disagreed with understood a particular passage more accurately than we did.

But if Scripture corrects us, what have we actually lost? An error, perhaps. An assumption we had mistaken for certainty. A conclusion that could no longer withstand careful examination. What we’ve gained is a more accurate understanding of the truth we claim to love.

But there’s an important distinction we need to make. Recognizing that we can be wrong does not mean we must remain uncertain about everything we believe. Scripture does not call us to endless hesitation or suggest that every interpretation is equally valid. There are truths God has clearly revealed, and we are expected to know them, believe them, and stand firmly upon them.

Paul instructed Timothy to rightly divide the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15). He urged Titus to hold fast the faithful word as he had been taught, so that he could both encourage others through sound doctrine and correct those who contradicted it (Titus 1:9). These instructions would make little sense if biblical truth were so uncertain that no one could confidently understand or defend it.

There is a difference between being confident in God’s Word and being confident that our understanding of God’s Word is always correct. The first rests on the trustworthiness of divine revelation, while the second can quietly place more confidence in our own reasoning than it deserves. Humility, then, is not the absence of conviction, but the recognition that our convictions must remain subject to Scripture. Sometimes faithfulness requires standing firm when others challenge what Scripture plainly teaches. But our confidence should come from what the text actually says, not simply from how long we’ve believed something, who taught it to us, or how strongly we feel about it.

Apollos needed someone to explain the way of God more accurately. Peter needed someone to confront conduct that contradicted the gospel he already knew. Paul needed an encounter with the risen Christ to expose how tragically mistaken his religious zeal had been. Their circumstances were different, and the seriousness of their errors was not the same. Yet each account reminds us that sincerity, knowledge, experience, and conviction are not substitutes for truth.

So, can we be faithful and still be wrong?

Yes, in the sense that a genuine believer can sincerely seek to honor God while misunderstanding something He has revealed. But we need to distinguish between a person’s faithfulness to Christ and the faithfulness of a particular belief or action. Peter, for example, was a genuine follower of Christ, yet his conduct in Galatians 2 was not faithful to the truth of the gospel. His relationship with Christ did not make his behavior right. Faithfulness does not require perfect knowledge, and spiritual maturity does not eliminate our capacity for error. But neither does genuine devotion excuse disobedience. Scripture calls us to grow in knowledge, exercise discernment, and respond obediently to the truth we receive.

Perhaps the more revealing question is not simply whether we can be faithful and still be wrong, but what happens when we discover that we are.

Do we defend our position because we’ve invested too much in it to reconsider? Do we dismiss correction because it comes from someone we don’t particularly respect? Do we search for ways to preserve our conclusions, or are we willing to return to Scripture and examine them honestly?

Being teachable does not mean being easily persuaded. It means being willing to be persuaded by the truth.

Ultimately, our faithfulness is not measured by how successfully we defend every belief we’ve ever held. It is measured by our allegiance to the God who has spoken. And if our desire is truly to know Him as He has revealed Himself, then we must be willing to let His Word correct us, even when that correction challenges something we were certain we already understood.

Because the goal was never to prove ourselves right. It was to know God rightly.

---

If you’d like to explore more topics related to trusting God, following Christ, and living in light of biblical truth, visit the Christian Living section of Bible Threads® and continue following the thread.