What Does Knowledge Actually Change?

What do you expect from someone who has spent years studying religion?

Perhaps honesty when the truth is inconvenient. Fairness in a disagreement. The humility to hear another person out. I realised that, alongside knowledge, I was expecting to meet the person that knowledge had helped to form.

Then I encountered behaviour I struggled to reconcile with what people knew and taught. They seemed to me ordinary, fallible people, like you and me. That made the question harder to set aside.

If a teaching can be understood well enough to be passed on, what still stands between that understanding and the way a person lives?

Perhaps I have been treating knowing a teaching, believing it and being changed by it as though they were the same thing. The distance between them is where my question begins.

So what turns something we know into something we live?