Truth and counterfeit

I can't take credit for this one, but it's one of my favorite illustrations, so I'm passing it along.

There are people whose entire job is to identify counterfeit money. They examine bills under a special light and determine whether they are legitimate or false. They may see hundreds or thousands of bills in a day, but they are able to tell immediately which are counterfeit.

How do they do it? There are an unlimited number of permutations in the false bills. A person could spend a lifetime studying all of the different varieties of counterfeit money, and they still would not exhaust all of the possibilities. There is no way to know all of them. So they invest their time instead in studying the legitimate bills. They scrutinize and memorize the genuine bills until they know them backwards and forwards. They do not have to know all of the different varieties of counterfeits; they only have to know the real thing. Knowing this, they are able to tell immediately when something is wrong.

There are any number of lies, any number of untruths and half-truths and almost-truths that it would be easy to chase after. If we spend our energy obsessing over them, striving to know all of them, our energy is wasted in a futile endeavor. But if we spend that energy instead focusing on the truth, we know the truth and are therefore able to instinctively identify what is not truth. We must know our God, know ourselves, know our calling, know them inside and out. When we do, everything that is not true stands out on sight.