Knowing more about God can make you colder when the knowledge is aimed at other people before it has done anything to you. This guide offers one weekly discipline for reversing that order. Each week, choose one truth about God you already know well. Before you explain it, defend it, or correct anyone with it, let it change one specific thing you do toward one specific person. You can work through the guide alone in a single sitting and then live with the practice for a week. A group can use it across two meetings: the first to read and plan, the second to report back.
The image behind the practice comes from a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Dharius Daniels. Daniels hopes “truth would not be a weapon that you use to beat up others, but that truth for you would be wood that you use to kinda ignite a fire and a passion for God and for God’s purposes in your own heart.” The rest of this guide tests that image against Scripture and turns it into something you can do on an ordinary Tuesday.
Start with an honest inventory
Before reading anything else, take five minutes with a sheet of paper. Write down three things you know about God that you could explain to a friend without notes. Keep them simple. God is patient. God forgives. God is present in suffering. Whatever is true for you.
Next to each one, write the last time that truth changed what you did, not what you thought or said. Be as specific as you can: a name, a day, an action. Some lines may stay blank. That is useful information, not a verdict on your faith. Keep the sheet. You will come back to it at the end of the week.
If you are in a group, do this silently and individually. No one needs to read their sheet aloud. The point is to give each person a private starting line.
Read three passages slowly
These passages are short, and the temptation is to nod at them because they are familiar. Resist that. Read each one twice and answer the observation prompts before moving on.
1 Corinthians 8:1-3
Paul writes, “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth” (1 Corinthians 8:1). In the KJV, the word charity means love, and the word edifieth means builds up. Some believers in Corinth knew correctly that idols are nothing. Paul does not dispute their facts. His concern is what their correct knowledge was doing to weaker believers around them.
Then read the next two verses: “And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know. But if any man love God, the same is known of him” (1 Corinthians 8:2-3).
- What does knowledge do to the person who holds it, according to verse 1? What does love do, and to whom?
- Verse 2 does not say the person knows nothing. It says they do not yet know “as he ought to know.” What do you think the right way of knowing looks like?
- Verse 3 shifts from knowing to being known. Why might Paul end there instead of with a better kind of knowing?
Matthew 7:24-27
Daniels points to this parable when he argues that doctrine shapes a life. The wise man is the one who “heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them” (Matthew 7:24). The foolish man is the one “that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not” (Matthew 7:26).
- Put the two verses side by side. What do the two builders have in common?
- What exactly separates them? Where in the passage does that difference become visible?
This is a parable, so read it as a picture with one main point, not a manual on construction. The point is plain: hearing alone does not hold a house up.
1 Peter 3:15
Peter tells believers to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). Many modern translations render “meekness and fear” as gentleness and respect, which is how Daniels cites the verse in the conversation.
- Who starts the conversation in this verse, the believer or the person asking?
- Is the manner of the answer part of the command, or an optional add-on? What in the sentence tells you?
Taken together, the three passages give the practice its order. Truth is meant to be done before it is displayed. When it is displayed, it is meant to be offered, with meekness, to someone who asked.
What the conversation adds
Lisa Fields describes a stretch of her own life that explains why information and transformation can sit so far apart. After a college course challenged her faith, she grew angry that church had not taught her more, swung into a rigid theological phase, and concluded the Black church needed to get it together. Then years passed before seminary, and life happened in that gap. The people she had wanted to correct became the people she leaned on. “I needed them to pray me through some stuff,” she says.
From that experience she draws a distinction that this whole practice depends on: “But sometimes the people that have the information don’t have the practice. And the people that have the practice might not necessarily be able to articulate it, but they know it in their hearts and they walk it out in their lives.”
Notice what that does to the inventory you just made. Lisa Fields is saying knowledge can live in two places. One place is your vocabulary. The other is your conduct. Your blank lines are not a lack of knowledge. They mark truths that have only one address so far. She names the test that reveals the difference: “You can articulate that God is good, but what does that mean when life happens?”
Daniels supplies the warning on the other side. When believers gain some theological training, he says, “sometimes we can unintentionally become like anointed elitist.” He adds, “We can become subconsciously condescending.” He gives an example from his own life. A friend praised Daniels’s preaching for centering on Christ and wanted Black pastors he knew to learn that approach. Daniels told him he was making assumptions, because the Baptist preachers he grew up under always landed on the cross and on Jesus. The friend had learned something true. He had not yet seen it at work in people who did not use his vocabulary.
The word “unintentionally” matters for your practice. Nobody decides to become condescending. That is why the discipline below works on what you do before you speak, rather than relying on good intentions while you speak.
Daniels also shows what it looks like when study goes inward first. Preparing a sermon series, he read the Bible’s stories of trouble without rushing to spiritualize them. Reading Job that way, he noticed that Job received new children at the end, but “he ain’t get his old kids back.” As a father of two, Daniels saw that new children would not replace lost ones, and that Job had real grief to wrestle with. The same text that could have become a tidy argument made him more tender toward people in loss. That is wood going into the fire.
A test before you start: does this make truth soft?
Someone could hear all this and conclude that the safest believer is the one who never says anything hard. Daniels rejects that. He insists “you can’t live a good life with bad doctrine,” and he warns pastors who react against harsh apologetics not to become “so tactful that we aren’t always truthful.”
Lisa Fields gives an example of hard truth that did not break a friendship. A coworker asked her directly whether she believed that rejecting Jesus leads to hell. She answered honestly that she did. They remained friends and still go out to eat. She describes truth and love as “being committed to your process,” staying present with someone even where you disagree.
So this practice is not a vow of silence. It is a matter of order. The truth reaches you first, then your conduct, and only then your conversation, ideally when someone asks. Daniels makes a related point about why some churches grew suspicious of learning. He doubts arguments will change that suspicion. He thinks the fruit of educated believers whose truth reshapes how they treat people “is probably going to be one of the most effective ways” to change it.
The weekly practice: one truth, one action
Work through these steps over seven days. Each one takes only a few minutes, but they need to happen in this sequence.
- Choose one truth. Pick a line from your inventory, preferably one with a blank beside it. State it in a single plain sentence, such as “God is patient with me.”
- Find it in the text. Locate one passage that teaches it and read the surrounding chapter. Write down what the passage actually says about this truth, in your own words. This keeps the practice tied to Scripture rather than to a slogan.
- Turn it into one action. Ask what this truth would change in how you treat one person you will see this week. Make the action small and concrete. If God is patient with you, the action might be letting a coworker finish a slow explanation without interrupting. If God forgives, it might be dropping a grievance you have been rehearsing. Write the person’s initials and the action.
- Hold your tongue on it. Until you have done the action at least once, do not teach, post, or argue this truth. If someone asks you about it directly, answer honestly. The restraint applies to volunteering it, not to concealing it.
- Do it, and notice what happened. After the action, write two sentences: what you did, and what it cost or required. Leave out how you hoped it would look.
- Return to the inventory. At the end of the week, fill in the blank line if you can. Then ask whether the truth itself looks any different to you now that you have lived it once.
Then choose again next week. Some weeks the action will go poorly or not happen at all. Write that down too. The practice is building a habit of direction, not a record of success.
For groups
In the first meeting, read the Scripture section aloud together and plan individually. In the second meeting, invite people to report on the practice, but make reporting optional. Some actions will involve people others in the room know, and some will touch private struggles. A participant can always say only “I tried it” or pass entirely.
Watch for one drift. A conversation about elitism easily becomes a conversation about other people’s elitism. If that happens, steer back to the practice itself: what each person did with their own truth this week. A leader who reports first, briefly and honestly, sets the tone better than any instruction.
Questions for discussion or reflection
- Paul says knowledge “puffeth up” (1 Corinthians 8:1). Where do you notice that inflation in yourself, if at all: in conversations, online, in how you listen to sermons?
- Lisa Fields says some people “know it in their hearts” without being able to articulate it. Who has shown you that kind of knowledge? What did you learn from watching them that you could not have learned from reading?
- Daniels describes condescension as something that happens subconsciously. What signs might tell you it is happening before someone else points it out?
- Is there a truth you hold that you have mostly used as a weapon? What would it look like to put that same truth into the fire instead?
- Daniels reads Job and notices the children who were not returned. What familiar passage might read differently if you stopped hurrying to its tidy conclusion?
- When is it right to speak a hard truth before you have fully lived it? How would you tell the difference between faithful speech and the weapon Daniels warns about?
What lasts
Near the end of the conversation, Daniels admits, “I don’t even remember what I preached this time last year, and I preached it.” What shapes people, he says, “it’s gonna come from who you are and how you love them.”
That is a sobering standard for anyone who loves to learn. It does not make study pointless. It tells you where study is supposed to end up. At the end of your first week, look at your inventory sheet one more time. The question worth carrying into the next week is not how much more you could explain. It is which line you are ready to fill in next.