To Know Is to Live
It is all for Christ, says Paul. In the end it is about knowing Him and doing for him. I have nothing. Nada!

Philippians 3:7-11 But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. (NIV)

In order to know Jesus we have to meet him. Doh! It sounds so simple when put that way. Or does it? It is real easy to get mixed up in all of this and confuse knowing with knowing "about." This is nothing new. Preachers have been talking about that for years.

But in my study of Spanish I have recently been looking at the difference between two Spanish verbs that are both translated into English as "to know." Saber and conocer. Saber is all about knowledge. Knowing about something or knowing some fact. I know English or I know my city well. That's saber. But conocer is about people and closeness. It can have a feel of relationship about it. I know my friends. I know Jesus.

Just to make sure I wasn't missing something I went and checked the Spanish versions, and yep, there it was: a fin de conocerle- to know Him! All the knowledge in the world won't do it. It has to do with that personal meeting and encounter with Him.

How do we do that? Well, if we know when and how to look, it isn't all that hard. We can meet him in the Bible of course. But that feels like that heady stuff again. It does, however, tell us something about where and how we can actually meet him.

One of those is prayer.

And the other is in other people... usually the least and lost who remind us of Him, or at least should. With all that has been going on with assistance and help needed in the Gulf Coast as well as others, this is one place where there should be no loss of opportunity to meet Him.

Here, from a Tony Campolo sermon at 30 Good Minutes:

Where do you meet Jesus? Well, first of all I contend you meet Jesus in suffering people. If you look deeply into the eyes of suffering people, you will have this eerie awareness that the same Jesus that died on the cross is staring back at you. Mother Teresa learned that, and I’m learning that.

I was walking down the street in Philadelphia and a bum came towards me. I mean a dirty, filthy guy. He was covered with soot from head to toe. You couldn’t believe how messed up he was. He had this huge beard and there was rotted food stuck in the beard. As he approached me, he held out a cup of McDonald’s coffee and said, "Hey mister, want some of my coffee?"

I looked at his dirty, filthy personhood and said, "Thanks, but that’s okay," and I walked by him. The minute I passed him, I knew I was doing the wrong thing, so I turned around and said, "Excuse me. I would like some of your coffee." I took some of the coffee and sipped it and gave it back to him. I said, "You’re being generous. How come you’re being so generous today?"

And this bum looked at me and he said, "Because the coffee was especially delicious today and I think that when God gives you something good, you ought to share it with people."

I didn’t know how to handle that, so I said, "Can I give you anything?" I thought that he would hit me for five dollars.

He said, "No." Then he said, "Yeah, yeah. I’ve changed my mind, there is something you can give me. You can give me a hug."

As I looked at him, I was hoping for the five dollars! He put his arms around me and I put my arms around him. And as I in my establishment dress and he in his filthy garb hugged each other on the street, I had the strange awareness that I wasn’t hugging a bum, I was hugging Jesus. I found Jesus in that suffering man.