Knowledge

The Germans have two words for the verb “to know.” One word is “kennen” which means to know with your mind. The other word is “wissen” (pronounce vissen) which means to know at the deepest level of your being. The problem is that many of you know the Good News of the Gospel in a “kennen” kind of way. You know it intellectually. You accept it! “I accept; I believe,” you say. And you wonder (sometimes out loud) why we preachers keep gong on this way about God’s love for us. The answer is — and the problem is — that so few of us know this in a “wissen” kind of way, down at the deepest level of our being. The proof of this is in the way we live. We don’t translate this into our daily lives because we haven’t allowed it to take hold of our full beings. We know but we don’t “understand.”