Pundits often quote the famous saying by Will Rogers, “It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble. It’s the things we know that ain’t so.”

Only sometimes, the person using the quotation attributes it to Kin Hubbard, a humorist who was a contemporary of Rogers. Or to America’s most noted humor writer, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Or to 19th-century sage Henry Wheeler Shaw, who used the pen name Josh Billings.

The irony for those who “know” Rogers or Hubbard or Twain or Billings first penned this classic comment is: what they know ain’t so. The oldest citation of the saying does not appear in the works of any of the esteemed gentlemen already named, but in the writings of newspaper scribe and editor Charles Farrar Browne, who wrote satire columns under the pseudonym Artemus Ward. Browne died in 1867, seven years before the “ain’t so” maxim appeared in Billings’ writings, and before Hubbard (1868) and Rogers (1879) were born. (I think it’s safe to say Browne didn’t borrow it from any of them.)

A lot of notions in religion, though widely “known,” simply “ain’t so.” Some of these concepts have become so entrenched in modern thought that people assume they must be true — after all, if they weren’t true, why would so many believe them? But as Artemus Ward observed, “the things we know that ain’t so” can cause us a world of trouble.

Take, for example, the so-called “experience of grace” often promoted as the precursor to salvation — that moment when God in the Spirit speaks directly to the individual and calls him or her to be one of His children. Many people spend their entire lives waiting for that “calling,” only to be heartbroken when it never arrives.

Nowhere in the New Testament do we find any example of, or reference to, this kind of direct, personal summons to election. The book of Acts recounts numerous instances of conversion, and all were accomplished in the same way: some person or persons taught the word of God to other people who, having heard, believed and obeyed unto salvation.

Even Saul of Tarsus, who was called to apostleship in person by the resurrected Christ, was sent by the Lord to a disciple in Damascus named Ananias, who would tell him “all things which are appointed for you to do” (Acts 22:10; cf. 9:6). Ananias would tell Saul, “Arise and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on the name of the Lord” (Acts 22:16). If the man who would become the great apostle had to be told by another man what to do to be saved — just like the multitudes on Pentecost (Acts 2:37-41) and in Samaria (Acts 8:12), the treasurer of Ethiopia (Acts 8:35-39), Cornelius (Acts 10:30-33, 47-48), Lydia (Acts 16:13-15), and the Philippian jailer (Acts 16:30-34) — why should we expect anything different?

Paul affirmed that the gospel is “the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16). The holy Scriptures are able to make any individual “wise for salvation through faith” (2 Timothy 3:15) and can make a person “complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16). Further, “all things that pertain to life and godliness” have given to us been by God through Christ in His word (2 Peter 1:3), so any kind of direct revelation or personal calling is unnecessary. We are called to salvation through the gospel (2 Thessalonians 2:13-14), and by it we are set apart through our belief in and adherence to the truth.

If you “know” you can’t be a child of God until you hear some mysterious whisper or see some miraculous flash of light, know this: it ain’t so! You will be saved when you believe in Jesus on the basis of His word, and obey His command to repent of sin and be baptized (Mark 16:16; Acts 2:38; 22:16).